Radical

by Maajid Nawaz

  By this time Nasim had gone off to set up HT in Bangladesh, and the new UK leader was a British-Indian called Jalaluddin Patel. Unlike Nasim, Jalaluddin hadn’t known me; he hadn’t witnessed that passionate sixteen-year-old B-boy transform into a global Islamist recruiter. Jalaluddin had been raised under Abdul Wajid and was shaped in that mold. I was given a local university role and had one of my former dariseen, Amir, placed in charge over me with strict instructions not to trust me. I didn’t envy Amir; by now my da’wah antics were known throughout HT, and here was one of my former students in the embarrassing position of having to pretend to lead me. No problem, I thought, I managed this in Pakistan, and I can manage it here. Amir, to his credit, was an intelligent brother, and he dealt with me sensibly. It didn’t take him long to be expelled from HT for his independence.

  The most significant change in my life was the birth of my son, Ammar, which means “the one who will build great things.” We named him after the famous companion of the Prophet, loved by the Sunni and Shia—a son to the first martyrs of Islam, Yasir and Sumayyah, who were tortured to death by their slave master. Our son was similarly born to parents who were going to sacrifice everything for the cause, and in turn, that is what I envisioned him doing as well. The original Ammar, a general to the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, may Allah honor his countenance, was eventually killed in Islam’s first civil war against the rebel forces of Mu’awaiya. Things always return to the romanticism of struggle.

  Back in the UK, as Rabia and I settled into our new life, the first cracks in our relationship began to show. As any new parent knows, the experience of looking after a newborn baby is an exhausting one. The endless sleepless nights can take their toll on the best of relationships. It was a period when Rabia really needed me to dig deep and support her. Yet she now perceived how there were three of us in the relationship: me, her, and our ideology. I was so committed to the cause that stepping back to help her cope with bringing up our son would have felt like a dereliction of duty. If anything, to ward off the temptation of staying at home in the comforting embrace of my wife and newly born son, I increased my campaign work during this period.

  These were cruel, selfish things easy to do under the delusion of self-righteousness; I crushed that woman’s dreams pursuing an elusive “Khilafah.” Having denied her a honeymoon, I was now denying her my support during her most difficult time. But we were both incredibly young, only just into our twenties, and still full of this heady mixture of self-confidence and ideological certainty. She wanted to settle more into married life, but she knew who I was when I married her. “If I become the person you are asking me to become, then you would not have loved me in the first place,” I argued. And with those words I’d leave the house, questioning whether an ideological bond alone was sufficient for a lasting marriage.

  My work felt more crucial than ever. Though Salafi-Jihadism tipped over into international prominence in 2001 because of 9/11, the peak of the movement’s support and momentum was the year before. I did my best to take advantage of this surge of interest in Islamism. Back at SOAS I found another brother to tag-team on the da’wah with: Ashraf ul-Haque. Ashraf told me he had turned down an offer from Oxford to attend SOAS so he could follow in my footsteps. Together we re-created the glory of those early days right there in SOAS, recruiting another three halaqahs of followers. As I guided and protected him through HT’s machinery, we became inseparable, bonding in our shared disdain for incompetent HT administrators. Although we didn’t advocate Jihadism in any of our teachings, we set a number of students on this path through our politics. One of my recruits that year was Zeeshan Siddiqui, who was later arrested and detained in Afghanistan by US forces, having gone there to join the “Jihad.”

  I was also given the opportunity to help recruit Pakistani soldiers. There was a group of army officers who had been sent over on a scholarship to train at Sandhurst. This was a goldmine for HT: as I said, their method of taking a country was to infiltrate the military and instigate a coup. It turned out that one of these soldiers had links to HT through his relatives. Someone in his family ran the garage I used to take my car to. The garage owner’s son, Aftab, was an HT daris, and although not a natural recruiter, had managed to raise the interest of this soldier. The officers were about to return to Pakistan, and so I was brought in for an introduction. My task was to give them a final send-off, with encouragement about how they should recruit within Pakistan’s army.

  I talked to them about HT and explained how they could be central to our plans of taking control there. Rather than them becoming HT members openly, I said their responsibility was to go back to Pakistan and support the group clandestinely and begin building cells inside the army. They should then wait, and prepare to take part in a military coup.

  This was a high-stakes plan, with severe consequences if it wasn’t successful. In 2003, journalist Ahmed Rashid reported that General Musharraf had led a purge inside Pakistan’s army, rooting out what he described as al-Qaeda–sympathizing cells. He was right about the cells, but wrong about the affiliation: these were the same HT supporters I had met in that dingy London flat and incited to rise up. When I heard the news, I felt stricken: the “War on Terror” was in full swing and I knew that these soldiers were tortured in interrogation.*

  * A few years later I met their British-Pakistani cell-instructor, Omar Khan. He had been the secret military contact between HT and these soldiers, and had been arrested with them. He’d been beaten and had a gun put to his head during his interrogation before being deported back to the UK. The soldiers who’d remained in Pakistan were not so fortunate.

  In 2000 HT would regularly hold rallies, and I quickly became one of the key speakers at these events. We held events outside the US Embassy and in Trafalgar Square, led marches and ran speaker events in Hyde Park. The rallies would regularly attract audiences of around three thousand people. This was a different skill from the careful analysis of leading a halaqah, but I loved it. I enjoyed pumping up a crowd, and relished the chance to get our message across to so many people. The size of these gatherings only reinforced our perception that the movement was on the cusp of a major breakthrough.

  I also answered the call to kick-start the branch of HT in Denmark. This was like the jet-setting version of my work in Pakistan. I would spend the week in London, doing my studies at SOAS during the day and the halaqahs in the evening, and then on a Friday evening, I would fly out to Copenhagen and spend the weekend in Denmark. This made my work for HT a seven-day-a-week affair and created a schedule that put even further strain on my marriage.

  The qiyadah were desperate to develop Denmark in order to help establish HT’s roots on the European continent. For various reasons, the European chapters had not developed as they should have. The original HT chapter in Denmark had come under the authority of the European leadership in Germany and had followed their recruitment strategy of targeting first-generation immigrants, who had gone to the country for economic reasons. The result was that the European branches were almost entirely formed of North African and Turkish people. In the UK, by contrast, the focus had always been on those born and raised there, the angry younger generation: students at the universities and disaffected youth. The German strategy had never included these people, who were considered “slackers.” Our brothers in Denmark had now decided to follow the UK model, and HT was fast expanding there. But they were yet to see penetration of the young Danish-Pakistani community, which could have offered the organization another bridge into Pakistan, as we had done from the UK.

  Given my background and experience in both universities and abroad, HT felt I was the ideal person to turn this situation around. I quickly made inroads into the community, setting up study circles and even meeting some Pakistani army recruits willing to support the cause.

  What was striking about Denmark was how markedly worse it was from the UK in terms of racism. It felt
as if I’d stepped back in time to my teenage years in Essex. In Britain, the issue had to some extent died down and society had moved on, whereas everywhere I went in Denmark people complained about racism. The lines on the continent were drawn differently. Third-generation Turks born and raised in Germany were still only classed as guest workers, seriously affecting how they saw themselves.

  The response of the minority communities in Denmark to racism had been exactly the same as mine had been in Southend: violence. The potential recruits I met all had stories of serious criminal activity: these were former gangsters, former drug dealers. While Southend had been all about knife culture, here everyone had grown up around guns. I was told many tales of shoot-outs with police, attempted armed robberies, and on more than one occasion a shirt was lifted up and I was proudly shown a bullet wound or two.

  Because of my background I was able to relate to these recruits in a way that the other recruiters couldn’t. The potential recruits were interested in my journey, and how I’d gone from spewing anger to teaching revolutionary Islamism. I was in Denmark at the height of the Islamist fervor, which certainly made recruiting easier. I succeeded in seeding the growth of the Danish-Pakistani branch; it’s sad, but the HT branch in Denmark is known as one of the organization’s more extreme chapters to this day. Eventually, the German government would impose a ban on HT activities, and in 2006 the Danish chapter’s spokesman, Fadi Abdul Latif, was convicted for hate speech and inciting violence.

  Given all this commitment to HT, it is perhaps not surprising that my studies suffered as a result. When the results came in for my exams, I had passed the sections on law but failed my Arabic grammar, which is actually much harder. Without passing Arabic, I couldn’t go on to the next part of my course: a year studying Arabic in Egypt’s beautiful city of Alexandria.

  I re-took the Arabic class at the beginning of September 2001 and passed. I could take up my place at the University of Alexandria, at their College of Literature’s Centre for the Study of Arabic Language for Foreigners. Once again, Rabia and I packed our family belongings, by this time quite disillusioned with our relationship; she was again following me to another country.

  As our flight left, I watched London disappear beneath our plane, Ammar in my arms, and thought: Twelve months and I’m back here, I really need to work on my marriage, for little Ammar’s sake. Little did I know that it would be many years before I would set foot on British soil again, and then, as an irreversibly changed man. Or that by the time I arrived in Alexandria, events on the other side of the Atlantic, on four different US passenger flights, were about to irrevocably change the world.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Polemic

  You drop bombs on my people while knowing full well that the level of “collateral” damage—we call them innocent Muslims—will far exceed the damage to any “legitimate target.” For you, killing our children en masse—and you still call it collateral damage—is an unavoidable consequence of pursuing your policies in our lands. To us, they are simply children. Don’t you think we’ve been crying too, like you are now, for years? Do you think we felt no pain as you raped and plundered our lands and bombed our cities? What lands, what cities, you ask? Your arrogance is only compounded by your ignorance. Look to Iraq. In order to remove Saddam Hussein, after the Kuwait war, you killed over half a million children because you could. Because you could! And because my people were too lost, too defeated, to be able to stop you. These are our children. We cry for them even as you feel absolutely nothing. What of Lesley Stahl’s question on 60 Minutes posed to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

  “We have heard that half a million children have died—I mean that is more children than died at Hiroshima and, you know, is the price worth it?”

  Albright’s callous response is etched in our memories, staining our innocence with her venom:

  “I think it is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”

  And you wonder why we are so angry? You wonder even now why, after all these years, as we speak these words, we are consumed with rage? The price of killing half a million children with your depleted uranium bombs is worth pursuing, but woe to us if we ever strike back! In your world, Albright’s interview was barely mentioned: a Dow Jones search of mainstream news sources after the attack turned up only one reference to the interview in an Orange County newspaper. But in our world, in the hell we live in, this was major news. We will not forget our dead just because you have no feelings.

  Is killing civilians justified only for your own foreign policy interests? You claim that, unlike us, you don’t target civilians, that your intentions are noble, that you seek only humane concerns. How many deaths of “untargeted” civilians by your hands entitle us to respond? Five, ten, a hundred, half a million? Are three thousand deaths enough to make you feel the pain of each and every mother you “untargeted” with depleted uranium? If not, then know that our intentions in bringing you death can also be noble, we too shroud destruction in humane concerns. You do not have a monopoly on reaping devastation off the back of good intentions, and don’t you dare claim such a thing, you arrogant monsters. You can support, fund, and train dictators in our lands who have been torturing our brothers and raping our sisters in their prisons for decades, and yet you invade our countries, claiming to bring democracy? And you cite international law at us, while you willfully ignore Israel’s occupation of Palestine, as defined by the UN? We will never forget your friendship with Mubarak and Assad, your unconditional support for an occupying Israel, the way you used us as Mujahideen in Afghanistan only to turn on us once you’d got what you wanted. You chose your side and we have chosen ours.

  We have come to know that no amount of civilized pleading, no amount of appealing to your humanity, for your mercy, no amount of playing by your rules in your game, will move you. You are stupefied in ignorant bliss while we bleed and secrete pus from every orifice. There is only one thing you people value and cherish, and that is your own lives, your own happiness, and your own selfish oblivion. If inflicting upon you even an atom’s weight of the pain we suffer at your hands wakes you from your stupor and forces you to listen to our cries as we drown, then I’m afraid we have finally decided that though it is “a very hard choice, we think the price is worth it.”

  This was powerful stuff, and it worked, but my polemic—a reflection of my instinctive response immediately after 9/11—was only half the truth. How easy it is for a victim to construct a narrative out of half-truths and inspire thousands in the name of righteous indignation.

  But the other side only saw half the truth too, and that was the problem.

  Understanding how I reached such a detached position is the key to grasping the mind-set of an Islamist, living his life on the verge of violence. I was an ideologue—that was the prism through which I saw the world. It was difficult for non-Muslim audiences to really understand where Muslim indignation had come from, but it was a tangible, palpable thing. The American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 only served to cement these attitudes further. If America could bomb and invade in response to being bombed, why couldn’t jihadists do the same? And if the deciding factor was that one party was a state while the other was a loose grouping, surely the state should be the more responsible one?

  And while we in Hizb al-Tahrir disagreed with the tactics that al-Qaeda employed, most of us shared their sense of vengeance. Curiously, my position wasn’t entirely detached from humane concerns. Rather, it was too attached to, indeed motivated by, humane concerns—but for Muslims alone, and at the expense of “the other.”

  My above polemic may have been uncomfortable reading, especially for my friends who survived the 9/11 attacks, and for that I am sorry. The reality is, and it will help us not to pretend otherwise, there are still many people out there who think this way, whether we like it or not. These days I work to build an understanding o
f the mind-set that can make people so angry that they lose all empathy for others. I work to humanize even those who dehumanize others, so that the process of healing may begin.*

  * I have since visited Ground Zero on a number of occasions and have been honored to speak there upon invitation by the board of the 9/11 Memorial Trust. It was a humbling experience, and I would be a strange person indeed if I had not been deeply moved by visiting the site.

  Stalin once infamously said that a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. That’s what my initial response to 9/11 was. It wasn’t about individual people; it was about the overall picture, and by this time I was so consumed by the suffering of “my own people” that I had no empathy left for the suffering of those I accused of causing it. There is a lesson there for the more hawkish elements among Western societies too.

  In Egypt, as I digested the events of 9/11, my overriding concern was very narrow and cold: this was going to play badly for HT and for Islamism. I wasn’t convinced of the necessity of the attacks, though my objections had little to do with the human cost involved. Back when I was at Newham College, the global HT leadership had been critical of Omar Bakri’s aggressive policies, which were bringing heat on the group. That was the fallout of one murder—this was the killing of several thousand in the heart of New York and Washington, not to mention the destruction of iconic American landmarks. The heat on Islamism was going to be turned up for years to come, not just on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but on all of us.

  We had specific concerns too about how the Western response would affect long-cherished HT projects. As it became clear that Afghanistan was going to bear the brunt of the US reaction, HT was about to lose what was considered a key link in the chain to developing “the Khilafah.” When I had started a few years earlier, HT had begun to put down serious roots in Pakistan. The same was true in Uzbekistan, where our organization formed the country’s largest opposition group, with hundreds of thousands of followers. HT was considered such a threat that the Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, had resorted to extreme torture to halt its spread.