Radical

by Maajid Nawaz

  I listened to Nasim’s advice and initially agreed to stay on my course. But then a second communiqué from the qiyadah came through, more insistent than the first. It implored members to drop everything and move to Pakistan immediately. That second letter decided the matter for me. This time Nasim didn’t try to stop me.

  As I was preparing to leave, I came across Reza Pankhurst again, one of the students who had led the recruitment drive with me at Cambridge University. By this time he had relocated to Egypt and was back in London tying up some loose ends. I told him what I was doing, and he became fascinated with the idea of moving to Pakistan as well.

  Rabia and I packed our things. Rabia, as a member of HT, could understand why I wanted to go and offered me encouragement. My father was true to his word. Dismayed by what his son had become and very critical of HT, he refused to offer me any financial help. He told me not to tell Abi what I was really up to. So I didn’t, and because I enrolled in Punjab University for a year, Abi was happy to let me study and experience Pakistan. I also told her that I wanted Rabia to meet our family. Because of this, Abi sent out money behind my father’s back and keenly kept in touch. This help from a desperate mother trying to heal her son turned out to be invaluable, as there was no money coming from HT. They paid for our flights to Pakistan, but after that we were on our own.

  I remember Osman dropping me off at the airport and how he cried as he hugged me goodbye. He knew the truth about why I was going. Please look after yourself, he said.

  In 1999, twenty-two years old and full of Islamist zeal, I arrived in Lahore determined to help foment a military coup in Pakistan. Although I had visited the country before, it had been when I was a small child, and it took me awhile to adjust to our new surroundings. A Westerner could actually live extremely comfortably for not too much money. You can have—and people do have—huge mansions, with swimming pools, Jacuzzis, and the works. Outside, however, there would probably be a half-built road, unless you were willing to pay for it. There may well not be regular electricity, and you would have to fund your own electricity generator. These were all typical indications of state failure and bad governance. Pakistan was ripe for rebellion.

  Contrary to crude stereotypes, Pakistan is a truly diverse, rich, and cultured country. There is no single ethnicity called “Pakistani”; rather the country is made up of various languages and ethnicities, among them Punjabis, Baloch, Sindhis, Pashtuns, and Kashmiris. Many of these ethnicities and languages span neighboring states too, accounting for a rather stunted Pakistani identity. Rather than describing Pakistan, the political entity you see on a map, it is more accurate to describe Pakistans in the plural. The country not only has deep ethnic and linguistic diversity but also vast political, class, cultural, and delightful culinary differences. One legacy of the postcolonial partition is that entire provinces are split down the middle, half in Pakistan and the other half in India. Many older Pakistanis still have first cousins across the border, and in Karachi a powerful political bloc has emerged seeking to represent the muhajir, or those who moved across from India after the Partition.

  Therefore what held this country together by its artificial seams—more than any shared heritage—was the dream of its ailing founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, along with a collective fear of what could have happened had Muslims remained a minority in India. Jinnah had wanted to create a safe haven for a Muslim minority in a Hindu-dominated subcontinent. In turn, he had envisioned a country that would safeguard other minorities, too.

  In 1947 Jinnah succeeded in outmaneuvering almost everybody to gain independence for East and West Pakistan, but died shortly after achieving his dream. Having lost its founder so early on, Pakistan has been locked in unrelenting ethnic, intra-religious, and linguistic sectarianism ever since. Troubles came to a head when the Bengalis of East Pakistan succeeded in gaining a majority of seats in the national parliament and wished to form a government. The Punjabi-dominated West refused to accept the results. Disaster struck in the form of civil war, and the Bengalis seceded from West Pakistan in 1971 to form modern-day Bangladesh.

  After this war, the founding idea that Muslims could look after each other better than Hindus seemed under threat. The army of West Pakistan encouraged the Islamisation of Pakistan, attempting to glue the country together using politicized religion as the national identity. In 1977 General Zia took over in a coup and did exactly this. Pakistan has never been the same since.

  Of course, confusing as it is for most outsiders, there are as many Muslims in India as there are in Pakistan, so what exactly should form Pakistan’s national identity is a question that vexes the nation to this day. And for all my teenage idealism back at Newham of Muslims bonding exclusively on nothing but Islam, things began to look a great deal more complicated on the ground.

  Arriving into this quagmire in 1999, we believed we had all the answers. I knew that I would have to quickly learn Urdu, the one language that can be understood by most Pakistanis. I heard it a great deal growing up, and so was familiar with its basics. We were met by Rabia’s uncle at Lahore Airport. A genteel man named Dr. Abdul Qayyum, he had traveled far and was excited to receive us. Uncle Qayyum was a well-established and respected dentist in a town called Raheem Yar Khan, which sits almost directly halfway between Karachi and Lahore. He wasn’t a member of HT at this stage but was a deeply religious Salafist, sporting a huge gray beard and a warm smile. After the conversion of his seven nieces to HT, Uncle Qayyum began to explore the Islamist cause more closely.

  I had been stationed in Lahore because that was where Imtiaz Malik, the leader of HT in Pakistan, was based. He had failed to get the movement off the ground, and the leadership felt that he needed help. I immediately went to meet him. He was older than me—in his late thirties—but it didn’t take long for my respect for his seniority to dissipate. He was a thoroughly unimpressive character, and I could immediately understand why he had failed to recruit people to the cause.

  Imtiaz suggested that the best plan was for me to recruit people in the Islamic department of nearby Punjab University. There was a certain logic to this: back in the UK one of the best ways of attracting recruits was to start with the students. Punjab University was the biggest higher education facility in Pakistan, and the fact that I was a student myself would make it easy for me. There was just one flaw to the plan, which Imtiaz should really have known. The university was already a Jamaat-e-Islami stronghold. These were students who knew about Islam, who were studying Islam, and who were going to be difficult to convert. Any of the departments at the university would have been better to enroll in than that one.

  The best place to have started was the medical college; the atmosphere was different. I discovered that Arab medical students had been coming to study here for a year, some of whom were already members of HT. When I arrived, I overlapped with a Palestinian HT member who had been running a few study sessions there. He was leaving, and I couldn’t help thinking that this non-Pakistani had achieved more in a short time than Imtiaz had done in five years.

  Within a few weeks more reinforcements were flown in from the UK. There was Irfan Wahid, who had been my supervisor back in London. Shortly after Irfan arrived, Dr. Abdul Wajid also turned up. Abdul Wajid was one of the HT members who had been behind the original recruitment drive in British universities. He was an experienced speaker and a seasoned recruiter. Irfan didn’t have Abdul Wajid’s oratory skills, but he was a decent enough organizer and administrator. I was excited about their arrival, and felt that together we could really do things.

  I sat down with Irfan and briefed him on my views about Imtiaz—he listened carefully to what I said. But then, to my horror, he went straight to Imtiaz and apparently repeated all my accusations! I couldn’t believe it: I’d tried to paint an accurate picture for Irfan because I wanted to help the cause. All Irfan appeared to have done was to use the information to curry favor with Imtiaz, sidelining me in
the process.

  I’d given up a lot to move to Pakistan—I hadn’t told SOAS that I had essentially given up on my degree. I’d put my future career on the line and was now faced with the position of having nothing to show for that sacrifice. That stung. But what really got me was something more fundamental. I was an activist absolutely committed to HT, believing so passionately in the group that I would do anything the leadership told me would further our work. I had left my studies behind, only months after my marriage, because of how blindly committed I was.

  Irfan’s actions, however, opened my eyes. I saw that rather than everyone in the organization doing things for the good of the cause, it seemed to me there were baser instincts at work too. From now on, whenever I looked at Irfan, whereas previously I had seen a brother, now all I saw was someone who apparently liked to maneuver for position. For an idealist like myself that was a painful thing to recognize. Looking back, it was the end of my political innocence.

  It was around this time too that Osman, back in the UK, had decided he could no longer remain a student of the group. He had never been a full member, but he finally broke his ties. HT had become too controlling for him and too inflexible with his inquiring nature. Secretly, I began to empathize with Osman and I decided that I would never give all of myself in the same way; there’d always be part of me that I’d hold back. I’d gladly give myself unconditionally to Allah, but not to HT. The thought process involved in leaving groups such as HT begins first at questioning an individual in authority, then the tactics, then the strategy, then the methodology, and then finally by questioning the ideology itself. This was probably the first, unrecognized seed that would lead to my eventual departure from the whole cause.

  Abdul Wajid, the man who had seemed such an able and committed recruiter from a distance, appeared up-close to be power-hungry. He was transparently overbearing in his desire to dominate and in his belief that he is always the most capable in the room. Just as I had lost favor with Imtiaz and Irfan, Abdul Wajid now made it clear that he considered me an intelligence operative trying to cause dissent within HT’s Pakistan operation. His stance was certainly scary to me. The certainty with which he had decided this made me ponder the dangers of a lack of accountability at the top of the organization. What if such people succeeded in taking over the country?

  The one thing I could do was recruit. Our strategy for Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan was a long-term one. We knew that since Zia’s coup in the 1970s, the process of “Islamisizing” Pakistan’s institutions had been going on long enough. Islamist groups by this time were dominant on many campuses and were attracting hundreds of thousands to their rallies. The country’s intellectual elite feared Islamist intimidation and continued to make concessions to them. Thanks to the way Islamist groups were able to hijack Jinnah’s vision, thanks to the Afghan jihad and the policies of Pakistani’s Intelligence Service (ISI) and the CIA, thanks to the rise of the Taliban, thanks to historic concessions made by the progressive governments of Pakistan, and thanks to corruption and incompetent governance, our job of injecting Islamism into Pakistan’s masses was already well under way.

  However, we knew that the two power blocs that really mattered in Pakistan, the two sectors without which change could not come, were the intelligentsia and the army. Instead of wasting our efforts trying to build a mass movement that already existed, we began targeting the upper-middle classes and the armed forces. These groups formed the bulk of people who actually ran the nation. If we could hijack them, the masses would gladly follow our lead.

  There was already a special team, coordinated by British-Pakistani HT member Omar Khan, working within the army, focused on recruiting cadets. Our job was to target the elite English colleges such as Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and other places that had previously been bastions of liberal thought. We began visiting posh cafes on Mall Road and yuppie youth clubs, speaking in our perfect English, with our college degrees, our arguments well-honed. Nobody had seen the likes of us before. We were Islamists, but we were clean-shaven, young, wealthy, and mobile. We dressed well, were Western-educated, and yet we were calling for “the Khilafah.” We swept such places clean in no time.

  I put my head down and got to work in two areas—aiming to build supporters within Punjab University and setting up the organization in Raheem Yar Khan, the town where Rabia’s relatives lived. I was traveling to Raheem Yar Khan on weekends, and in a short space of time I had set up three halaqahs. These halaqahs weren’t full of students, but of older and more influential individuals. There was even a local Salafist mosque imam who joined us. Then there was the ever-smiling Uncle Qayyum, the friendly doctor with the huge gray beard. The beard mattered in the Pakistani context: it showed he was a serious and religious man. And he was genuinely devout, in the good, pious sort of way. He would leave his house at dawn, walk to the mosque to pray, and once he’d closed his surgery in the afternoon, he’d be seen in the streets handing out food to the poor.

  “Maajid bhai—my brother, we are instructed by our Prophet, ‘alayhi salam, to be kind to our neighbors. A neighbor is defined as everyone on your street,” he once told me. “That’s why I try to distribute food to my whole road, so I can get the full sawab—the blessings.”

  For his piety, he was loved by his family, friends, and neighbors alike, as he was by me. Uncle Qayyum and I were extremely close; he became the linchpin for all that I was to do for HT in Raheem Yar Khan. I’d recruited his son, his brother, and many of his friends. The people I recruited were all rooted in the local communities; they were exactly the pillars of influence that HT dreamed of bringing on board. With them you could change the culture.

  One day, I got a call from an excited Uncle Qayyum: “Maajid, listen, bhai, I’ve been approached by a man whose name is the ‘sincere one.’ This ‘sincere one’ has been going around doing tableegh—advocacy for our cause, for around twelve years now, all alone, and has finally found us again! He heard about our work through some people he tried to recruit in Raheem Yar Khan, and has just arrived at my surgery. You must come and see him, jaldi ajau, come fast; he’s a gift from Allah to our cause!” Word was surely spreading, and our cells in Raheem Yar Khan were multiplying.

  I asked Abdul Wajid to come to Raheem Yar Khan to see what I was doing and ensure the continuity for his work. He was skeptical at first, but when he finally did come, he was clearly surprised. They might not have trusted me, but Imtiaz and the others could no longer deny my success. It helped that Rabia had relatives there—it gave me credibility. HT began to subsidize my weekend flights to Raheem Yar Khan, in the hope of creating a real stronghold. For me, this was vindication.

  Yet leaving was on my mind. In the midst of all this work Rabia had become pregnant. I was overjoyed, but here was something precious that the group would have no part of. I knew that my wife wanted to have our baby back in the UK and to be near her parents for support. That set a clock ticking for our return. I continued to recruit with the knowledge that we were thinking of returning to Britain. I wrote to SOAS and to my relief, it was possible to extend your leave of absence to two years. I could return to continue my course as though nothing had happened.

  It was a remarkable time to be living in Pakistan. This was around 1999, when the democratic government of Nawaz Sharif was removed in a military coup, and General Musharraf took over. The next time I returned to Pakistan, almost a decade later, the country would be democratically ruled again, and I would be campaigning to entrench democratic culture within the country. In a strange parallel, Pakistan’s story would echo my own.

  It is difficult not to see that period now as the run-up to 9/11. Nobody could have foreseen what was coming, but we all felt the strength of the movement: the way that the ideas of Islamism and Jihadism were spreading and taking root. It definitely felt as though we were part of something big, that we were almost on the verge of taking over. The Taliban
in Afghanistan, the Sudanese government, these seemed to be just the start of something that the West was yet to pick up on. In those days the Taliban believed Pakistan was an Islamic state already and had no gripe with the country. I remember meeting a senior Taliban commander in Raheem Yar Khan, in an effort to convince him that Pakistan was an illegitimate colonial entity. It didn’t take long for the Pakistani Taliban to adopt our more revolutionary mantra.

  Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group that would commit the Mumbai attacks in 2008, was another fledgling organization that was working to garner support. Although they were Salafist in creed and jihadist in their methodology, their ideology was similar to HT’s. In fact, LeT was using HT’s own literature as part of their recruitment drive. Because all of this was so new, the authorities were slow to recognize the threat we all posed.

  In the same way that before the Newham murder, no one took the warnings seriously, so the Pakistani authorities did little to stop the spread of these organizations. For example, in those early days LeT was holding their annual conferences—their ijtima—out in the open in their stronghold town of Muridke, which I attended. I remember seeing some of Omar Bakri’s followers, from the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, in attendance there too. I think I caught a glimpse of the fiery Abdur Rahman, from the heady Newham days. (Abdur Rahman would later go on to be convicted under the terrorism law for an offense in the UK.) It said everything then that the keynote speaker at the conference was General Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Caliphs in Copenhagen

  When I returned to the UK, it was like nothing had changed. I had my place to get my degree back at college. My father was under the impression I’d come to my senses and come back to continue my studies, and so welcomed me upon my return. As for my position in Hizb al-Tahrir, my troubles with Imtiaz followed me. They sent an excoriating report to the UK leadership about the likelihood that I was “an agent” and how I was not to be trusted.