by Maajid Nawaz
What these videos showed me were two things in particular. First of all, it reinforced the narrative that Nasim had taught me in the “Born to be Brown” discussion. These were individuals whose death had nothing to do with the color of their skin. The fact that they were Muslims was the salient issue, as shown by the fact that all the individuals were white. Second, Britain and other Western governments were doing nothing about it, which reinforced their “blind eye” approach to world politics. When it was Muslims who were under attack, and there was no oil to defend, the West wasn’t interested in getting involved. And why should they? These were our people, not theirs. This is why we needed “the Khilafah.”
These unfolding terrible events served as the perfect recruitment ground for Islamism. These people were being killed simply for being Muslims. Worse, because they were not Muslims with the “proper” understanding, they didn’t even understand why it was happening to them. But Islamism offered a powerful explanation—this shift in identity politics began to occur both in Bosnia and across Europe. In some ways, you could argue that just as Pakistan’s troubles with violent Islamism—Jihadism—were born through Afghanistan, European Jihadism was born through Bosnia.
The first time I saw the videos, it was a shocking, traumatic experience. My immediate response was a desire to go fight in Bosnia myself. I remember Nasim having to take me aside to give me a long talk to calm me down. He told me to stop being emotional, to think about the rational point here instead. No matter what you do, no matter how many people go out there, it’s not going to change the long-term game. This is not just happening in Bosnia, it’s everywhere. There are fires being lit all over the place. You can get a bucket and try to put one out, or you can step back and look at the root cause of all this. If we had “the Khilafah,” our armies could stop such atrocities happening. This was the Hizb al-Tahrir message: what we needed was to work efficiently to control the mind-set of the military top brass in Muslim-majority countries in order to eventually establish a state. Simply joining the fight would mean one more soldier lost for the cause. It may save one or two people there but wouldn’t change anything in the long run.
Those videos were a powerful recruiting weapon for HT. We would organize viewings for people, and while they sat there stunned by what they saw, we would tell them they were wasting their lives while all this mayhem unfolded. “What are you doing with your life?” we asked. How can you be happy with yourselves, going out for a laugh and a kebab on a Friday or Saturday night when all this is happening on your doorstep? The video and the speech would always have the same, radicalizing effect. Half would want to join HT there and then: but there were others like me who would want to go fight.
The challenge for us, like Nasim had done with me, was to talk these people down. It didn’t always work. Omar Sheikh, for example, was a student at the London School of Economics who attended a HT-backed conference at his university about the situation in Bosnia. The leader of HT at the time, Omar Bakri Fostok—who used Mohammad as his surname—was a keynote speaker at this conference. Omar Sheikh’s diaries tell of how the conference galvanized him, but that it didn’t go far enough. HT offered him a coruscating analysis of the situation but didn’t provide any solution. The answer for him was Jihadism. Sheikh went abroad, and is still imprisoned in Pakistan, accused of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The war in Bosnia was crucial to Islamism’s spread across Europe. From there it spread in the Middle East and Asia: European Muslims were radicalized by events in Bosnia, Egyptians were radicalized by events in Palestine, Pakistanis were radicalized by events in Afghanistan. It was a similar theme all over: grievances, identity crises, charismatic recruiters, and compelling narratives.
For me, the procrastination of Western governments over Bosnia resonated strongly with my own experiences in Essex and the inaction I saw from the police. This was how it was, I reasoned. It was up to Muslims to defend their own community. These days, looking back from a post-9/11 world where Western intervention has been so frequent, we forget that in the early 1990s the world was a different place. The international landscape was still adjusting to the end of the Cold War, where every decision was worked out with regard to what the Soviet response might be. The early 1990s asked new questions about whether interventions within a state for humanitarian reasons were justifiable—Rwanda and Somalia were two other cases.
The consequence of all this was that the Western response to Bosnia was paralysis. Bill Clinton did not want to get the United States involved, seeing it as a European issue. The British response was vacillation. If the West had been more proactive, if they had intervened earlier and harder as when Tony Blair and NATO did so over Kosovo, the situation would have been different, not just for Bosnia, but perhaps also for the spread of Islamism and for HT.
In Bosnia itself, it was left to the new government to sort out the rising Islamist penetration. The Bosnian government began to root out the jihadists who had come to fight there. They recognized the threat from within and the potential for another Afghanistan situation if they did not act. But while Bosnia was successful in doing this, the influence of its fight lingered on for far longer.
Hizb al-Tahrir saw “the Khilafah,” a Muslim superstate, as the answer to all the injustice meted out to the Muslim populations of the world. It would sweep across all national boundaries; HT’s version of Islam would be the ruling philosophy. Apostates, adulterers, and minorities considered abhorrent, like homosexuals, would suffer the death sentence. Criminality would be met with tough justice; thieves would have their hands cut off. Rights such as free speech would be curtailed, because “God’s law” must trump all.
It was surprising to some people how easy it felt to switch my mind-set to this new political viewpoint. I’d felt I’d found my connection with hip-hop culture, but it fell away with little argument, likely due to my particular set of circumstances and upbringing. The message of Islamism was almost tailor-made for someone like me: intellectually curious and brought up in a Western environment. I didn’t have the family or religious background to counterbalance what Nasim was telling me. The HT way of analyzing things was, ironically enough, a modern, European, sociopolitical interpretation of religion. That was the way I’d been educated at school, so I understood the reasoning from the start.
Secondly, there was Nasim himself, an intellectually charismatic guy. The authority and confidence with which he spoke on any number of subjects made a huge impression on me at an age when I was easily influenced. And the subjects he talked about related directly to my life, something my father or the imam had been unable to do. He knew about politics, philosophy, theology—all the issues that bands like Public Enemy had raised—and took them further. The way he tied these different issues together was intellectually intoxicating. It felt revolutionary, and that’s exactly what it was: advocating a revolution.
Thirdly, the political element of hip-hop was starting to peel away. What had originally excited me was the politics that bands like PE and N.W.A had brought to the table. PE had carried on without Professor Griff, but the whole anti-Semitic episode had dented their popularity. The vanguard of hip-hop was increasingly becoming gangsta rap: the new stars were people like Cypress Hill, and the underlying messages were less about anti-authority anthems and more to do with boasting about drugs, violence, and women.
The way hip-hop was changing reinforced what Nasim was telling me in the study circles. You related to their music, I was told, because you have been through similar experiences of racism and discrimination. “But Chuck D is not a Muslim. Flavor Flav is not a Muslim. Ice Cube is not a Muslim. They do not know the solution to the problems they rap about because the message has simply not reached them.” That is where Hizb al-Tahrir and Islamism came in. It seemed perfectly natural for hip-hop to go one way, and my thinking to go another. I stopped listening to the music and started listening to HT instead.
PART TWO
ISLAMIST
To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.
To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.
—HENRIK IBSEN, PEER GYNT
CHAPTER EIGHT
An Islamist Takeover
At sixteen, recruited to HT’s cause and now full of the zeal of the converted, I wanted to move to London to be where the action was. I told my parents that I wanted to attend Barking College in East London to do a specialist graphic design course. At this point they were unaware of the nature of my Islamist beliefs. My father, in particular, saw a son who had calmed down from the B-boy excesses of his earlier teens and appeared to be settling into the life of a traditional, hardworking Muslim. And so it was that I moved out of the family home to study.
Of course the graphic design course was just a front. HT was far bigger in the capital than in Southend, and I desperately wanted to be part of it. By this time Nasim was in charge of HT’s activities in East London, and with his help I got a room in a flat there. This was known as the da’wah—or mission—house, a flat dedicated to planning HT and occupied solely by supporters. By now I was an HT daris—student—the stage before membership. This meant that I was committed to attending HT events and partaking in official activities. My roommates, all HT dariseen, were recruited at the university. They included a student called Saleem, a former body-builder and all-around friendly guy; Sohail, a student from Milton Keynes in his second year at Guildhall University; Yaseen, an intelligent man who went on to leave HT and became a teacher; Ali, who would pop in to stay occasionally, and whom at the time we revered because he was already a member; and Nas, my Greek friend from Southend who had converted and moved to London with me.
Ours was a student house, with all the mess that entailed, but it was fantastic to be in the thick of the action, surrounded by “brothers.” I loved it. From the get-go, the house was used for HT activities. We’d put up stickers and posters, hand out pamphlets and leaflets, and advertise talks. We would spend all night cutting up boxes to create our boards, sticking posters onto the cardboard, punching holes and running the string through them, ready to be tied up. Then we’d load the cargo into someone’s car and blitz the local area, tying our posters to lampposts everywhere. People would drop in to the flat from all over London. After the typical town atmosphere of Southend, and the feeling of being part of a fractional minority, I now felt plugged into a far larger community, a thriving London network buzzing with ideas.
This setup accelerated my commitment to HT. Before, I’d been going to study groups once a week. Now I was living with other activists and talking about the cause every day. For the first time, I had a real sense of how the movement was a national and global phenomenon. All the major universities had recruitment drives: we were fast taking over. The 1990s in London was the decade of Islamism. As many women as men were joining the movement, and somewhere we were told was probably our future partner waiting to meet us. This movement would shape how my life unfolded.
There was also the fact that I was living in London for the first time. East Ham might not have been that far from Southend, but it felt like a different world. The diverse community of East Ham made racism less of an issue. And the rising strength of Islamism and Jihadism meant for the first time that you didn’t mess with Muslims. With that knowledge, I could walk the streets with confidence.
When I arrived, Nasim appointed one of his protégés, Ed Husain, to help me settle in. Ed, a passionate HT daris, was studying at Newham College. We quickly became very close. Before term started Ed asked me which college I was enrolled in. Barking College, I told him.
“You don’t want to be in Barking ya akhi, my brother, all the action’s at Newham College. I’m at Newham’s East Ham campus. That’s where all the Muslims are, and that’s where we could really kick things off together.”
Ed was in his final year and needed to hand over his HT drive to someone; I was the perfect replacement. Ed was a studious type: at seventeen he wore a blazer and shirt to class. He was a good public speaker and more devout than I had been, or ever would become. I liked his religious devotion, it helped to calm my wilder side, and we developed a deep, lasting friendship. I went to his house, got to know his parents, and spent Ramadan breaking my fasts with his family. It soon became apparent that Ed and I could work together as a strong team. We led a group of four core HT supporters: Sarfraz and Mustafa, two big guys who were dependable types; Shehzad, a sociable guy who knew a lot of people; and Rehan, lovingly called “Mr. Bean” by our adversaries due to his physical stature and his propensity to intellectually fall over himself.
When the opportunity to become president of the Student Union (SU) arose, Ed suggested that I run for the post, and that our HT group should stand on a single slate. Our desire was to become the dominant Muslim group in the college. When I joined, the Islamic Society (ISoc) at Newham was dominated by the Saudi-Salafists, or literalists. In those days, before the merger between some Salafists and Islamism, the Salafists hated HT and everything we stood for. In the UK, a group called JIMAS coordinated all Salafist activities. JIMAS were known rivals. They loathed us more than non-Muslims for what they saw as our twisting of the Islamic message. The Salafist philosophy was far more religious than the HT message: there was no political element to their thinking. They dismissed our views for not being religious enough, and we in turn dismissed them for providing religious cover for the Saudi king and other absolute rulers. The Salafists controlled the college ISoc and, consequently, Friday prayers. This allowed them to bring in big crowds to their events and perpetuate their control.
Before I had gone to Newham, HT had never really been in a position to challenge this hegemony. Now, we felt confident enough to give it a go. If I could become president of the Student Union, then I would be in charge of funding for organizations such as the ISoc. I could then reduce ISoc’s money, and their influence, at a stroke. I could even find a way to divert the money toward HT and our own aims.
We put up candidates for all the various posts on the Student Union. The Salafists were completely thrown off by our tactics and soon found themselves adrift in the campaign. We were more people-savvy and culturally aware. I had my B-boy background; the Salafists were wearing traditional Arab robes and strained to be pious. We would be listening to music and wearing jeans, and they did not know how to handle that. For the Salafists, the emphasis of their message was purity. Their manifesto was about sitting in the prayer room, talking about how to fast, and the benefits of leaving the world behind. Their starting point was the scriptures, whereas ours was the real world. We would talk about Afghanistan and Bosnia in a way that made our message sound relevant, whereas theirs just felt out of touch.
The female Muslim vote, in particular, came across to our side, partly because we were seen as trendy young guys, and partly because of the Salafist attitude to women. Salafists would criticize women for not wearing headscarves, to which we’d say, “Do you think the Bosnian Muslim woman was wearing a headscarf when she was raped? How does that make her any less your sister?”
On a more basic level, we were more aggressive in argument. Nasim had taught us to come back at our opponents. I’d learned the answers to their questions and would fire back a response to whatever accusations they made. That’s a powerful thing to do when you’re debating in front of a crowd. It makes you strong and your ideas coherent. The Salafists didn’t really have a response: their only resort was to their religious purity, which didn’t have the same resonance with most people’s lives. A few years later, this would change: Salafism and Islamism would fuse to form Jihadism, most famously seen in the eventual rise of al-Qaeda.
The election was a runaway success. I didn’t only become student president: all the other HT candidates won as well. Overnight we had completely outmaneuvered the Salafists. We were now the most senior students on campus, w
ith authority to override the ISoc, to represent students in front of management, and to control student funds. At the same time, we set up the Debating Society to arrange events and bring in external speakers. On the forms, we claimed to have been inspired by Gladstone and Disraeli, and by parliamentary debates. We managed to hoodwink the management into letting us set up an HT front group. Such takeovers were happening across UK campuses. Islamism was firmly on the rise.
CHAPTER NINE
12,000 Muslims Screaming “Khilafah”
The ISoc Salafists were not the only ones incapable of dealing with us. The same was true of the college authorities, who had been caught completely off guard.
The student-affairs manager, Dave Gomer, was the point of contact between the college authorities and students. A friendly, well-meaning guy, his politics were forged in an earlier era, a time when student protests were about sit-ins and strikes and occupying the Student Union. To someone of Dave’s generation, student protest was “kids being kids” and a healthy part of someone’s political education. We ran circles around him.