by Maajid Nawaz
I thought of the white friends I’d abandoned, my companionship with Sav and Marc, with Dan, who was stabbed for us.
I thought of my crew, Chill, Ricky, Ade, and Paul, and the mad times we’d had as every other girl wanted to get in on our scene. Had I really ever been that youthful teenage B-boy bopping to those beats in Southend’s clubs?
Then I saw Abi beating her womb, pleading with me not to go, not to go, and I began to long for Abi’s smile. I remembered Osman and Yasser, and how proud they were of my activism. I thought of Ed Husain at Newham, Uncle Qayyum in Raheem Yar Khan, Ash at SOAS, how are you all?
And now I wondered if Rabia had managed to call that number and knew instinctively that I would not be back in three days. And so I prayed, I prayed and felt close to Allah in my loneliness as I begged Him to protect me from these zalimun—these tyrants: Allahumm Inni aj’aluka fi nufurihim . . .
We stopped. I assumed we were still in Alexandria, but I had no idea. It was the middle of the night. Everything was eerily quiet. I assumed, again, that we were at the Aman al-Dawlah building. But we could have easily pulled up somewhere else: a disused factory, a deserted warehouse. My mind, now defeated by the odor of my ghimamah, was ready to suggest, in despair, any number of nightmare scenarios.
I was taken out of the van and guided into a building. Up we went, stumbling up some stairs that became impossible to navigate without the aid of sight. A door opened in front of me, and the cold slap of night struck me again. A second or two, and I worked out that I must be on the roof of a building. Why had they brought me up here? Pushed along, I was eventually guided to what felt like a precipice, the wind rushing against the front of my body, my feet sensing an edge that I dared not test. And then with rather more care than I had experienced until now, I was positioned into a spot and told to stand perfectly still. Ya Allah, the thought came to me as fast as the wind rushing past my hair: They’re going to push me off the top of the building.
The shaweeshiya were laughing at me now. They’d done this before; they knew exactly what I was thinking. They could probably see my knees trembling as I struggled to stay perfectly still.
“Don’t move,” a shaweesh said, with a sneer. “You really don’t want to move.”
I could hear him retreat, his steps getting quieter as he crunched gravel behind me. I didn’t dare move a muscle. I didn’t dare feel anything. I didn’t even dare to think. Focus on keeping still. Focus on keeping still. Nothing else exists. I willed time to move fast for me, I wanted this moment to be over, regardless of what came next, and as if to say, “Who are you to ask me anything?” time stretched out and took a yawn. It seemed to me that I was standing there for fifteen or twenty minutes, but it could just as easily have been two.
Eventually, I heard the gravel crunch behind me again. I tensed up, petrified that I might be about to get a shove. Instead, though, the shaweesh grabbed me and pulled me back. I tried not to buckle as he did so, the rush of relief loosening my limbs. Not that the relief lasted for long. When there are no procedures, there’s no knowing what might happen next. They’re softening me up, I thought to myself as I was dragged back across the roof, barely able to walk from the tremor in my legs. That’s what this is all about. To make me more susceptible, more suggestible, to weaken me. Come on, Maajid! You’re not weak, you’re never weak! Ya Allah, give me strength!
I was taken up some more stairs, and back inside. Through the darkness of my ghimamah I caught the glimmer of a lamp. Positioned in front of what I assumed to be a desk, a zaabit began to address me. I assumed this was the same zaabit who’d led the raid on my flat, but he was speaking Arabic now; there was so much I was no longer sure of that it almost didn’t matter. Everything was uncertain: where I was, whom I was talking to, what was going to happen next. Reality was starting to fray at the seams.
“Maagid Nawaz,” my interrogator said.
“Yes,” I replied in English. “That’s my name.” I wondered if he could see through my attempts at trying to sound strong and confident.
My Arabic wasn’t bad. Having been in Egypt for seven months, I’d picked up the basics, but here I was struggling to understand every word of what my interrogator said.
“We know everything about you, Maagid. We know you are with Hizb al-Tahrir. We know you are attempting to revive this banned group in Egypt. We know you have tried to recruit people here, that your wish is to overthrow the Egyptian state.” He reeled off each statement like he was flicking dirt from his jacket. “We know about your work in Pakistan, Maagid. It seems you think you’re an important man.” He said the word “important” with disdain. “You know what I think, Maagid? I think you should tell me everything you know. That way, this will all be a little easier on you.”
There was a pause, as he allowed what he had just said to sink in. If it hadn’t been for Ahmed’s warning those few months earlier, I would have been terrified at the mention of Pakistan. That’s what he wanted me to feel, that stomach-churning sensation that there’s been intelligence gathered against me: Aman al-Dawlah, ISI, MI6—he’d leave me to fill in the gaps. But thanks to Ahmed, I already knew they had this information. My prior knowledge gave me that fractional advantage, just enough to steel myself and respond.
“My name is Maajid Nawaz,” I said in English, sticking to my HT training. “I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in Britain. I am here in Egypt to study.”
A fist came down on the table. The slam sounded close. “Don’t you dare play games with us, Maagid!” he snapped in Arabic. “I know you can speak Arabic.”
That flash of temper emboldened me. I felt in some small way that I had gotten under his skin. If I am to be defiant, it means I must stand ready for the consequences. Ya Rabb, my Lord, help me now for I am your humble servant.
“My name is Maajid Nawaz,” I repeated in English. “I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in the UK. I have come from Britain to Egypt to study. I have nothing more to say.”
My use of English was deliberate. It was to emphasize where I was from. I wanted to remind the interrogator at every opportunity that I was a British citizen. This was the strongest card I had to remind him that he couldn’t just treat me like he would other Egyptians. Or at least that’s what I hoped.
“Tell me about Pakistan!” he shouted in Arabic. “Tell me about your activities there.”
“I have been to Pakistan, yes,” I agreed in English. “I have family there. It is perfectly normal for British-Pakistanis to visit the country to see their relatives.”
“Family,” he spat. “What family?”
“Aunts, uncles, cousins . . .” I was careful not to mention my wife’s family. I didn’t want to give them any possible reason to arrest her as well.
“Yes, yes, yes,” the interrogator swatted my answer away. “It’s not family members I am interested in, it’s members of Hizb al-Tahrir.”
In retrospect, he was oddly interested in Pakistan, considering that it had nothing to do with Egypt. Later, when I had time to think things through, it did make me wonder about who exactly this was asking these questions, and for whom. As he snapped and shouted at me, I stuck to my line. I continued answering in English, politely and firmly, emphasizing my British citizenship.
“Tell me about Hizb al-Tahrir in Egypt,” the interrogator changed tack.
“I am in Egypt to study. I am here in Alexandria as part of my university degree to study Arabic.”
Here the interrogator snorted; it’s called a shakheer and is considered extremely rude. To Egyptians this indicates that you no longer make any pretense of social etiquette. “Whom have you recruited?” he asked. “Whom are you in contact with? Who else is involved?”
“I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in Britain,” I reiterated. “I have nothing to do with the organization in Egypt.”
“We’ll see about that, Maagid,” the interrogator said.
“We’ll see about that.” He sighed. “If that’s how you want to play it.” I heard a rustle behind me, from where another shaweesh must have been standing. “I said that you had the chance to make things easier for yourself.” I felt the shaweesh’s hand grab my arm. “But I can’t help you now,” he said as I was led away.
Taken back down several flights of metal steps outside of the building, I began wondering if I was about to be driven off somewhere else. But instead we went back inside the building, down some more steps, and into what I think was a basement. I heard the click of a key from behind me: my handcuffs were being taken off. Then the heavier clunk of a door opened and I was shoved forward, the door slamming shut behind me. Slowly, carefully, still blindfolded, I used my fingertips to take in my new surroundings. I felt cold bars on all sides and realized I was in a cell. As I finally sat down, legs aching for respite, I began to rub my wrists where the handcuffs had been.
I was kept in that holding cell for hours. Again, I can’t be completely sure of timings: your perception of time melts away in such circumstances. And then I heard a shout, more like an appeal, someone in broken Arabic asking to be taken to the toilet. With pangs of rising guilt, I realized it was Hassan. Later on, another call: this time it was Hiroshi. Then I heard the voice of Yusuf el-Qadi, an Egyptian friend of ours, and a Muslim Brotherhood activist. Hearing their voices seared me in a way that the interrogator’s questions had failed to do. They have arrested my friends. They have arrested my friends because of me. None of them had anything to with any of this. I had never raised the matter of HT with any of them. I sat there, too scared to call out to them, and wondered what they would think of me if they knew the truth.
Eventually, we were given some food to eat: one slice of bread and a small round blob of white, extremely salty cheese. A bottle of water was passed around the cells, from which we were allowed a swig. After what must have been the rest of the night, the guards were suddenly all action: the cell doors clanked open and one by one I could hear the shuffling of people being marched outside. It was my turn and the guard snapped at me to hold my hands out in front of me. Back on went the cuffs, and I was dragged out into the daylight.
The coldness of the night air was now a distant memory, and the heat from the sun washed over me. I was shown into the back of a van, only this time there were no benches, just a metal floor onto which I was shoved with Hassan, Hiroshi, and Yusuf. It was a closed van with metal on all sides except for a couple of tiny square windows, covered in a metal mesh. The door slammed shut and the van pulled away.
As there were no shaweeshiya in the back of the van, we were finally able to talk to each other. We had cautiously removed our blindfolds, keeping them round our necks.
“Subhan Allah, are you all right?”
“What have they done to you?”
“What did they say?”
It was Yusuf who was doing the apologizing. He was the Egyptian and we were the foreigners, and he felt that acutely. “I can’t believe they are treating you like this,” he said as the van sped along an unknown road to an unknown destination. “I am so sorry.” Yusuf had naturally assumed that it was his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood that was to blame. I said nothing. This only made my guilt even worse. I knew from the questions that this was an HT case, and they were there because of me. But anything I told them would inevitably be used against them, forced out of them through torture. If my friends had mentioned that they knew I was with HT, it would only make matters far worse for them. The questions would keep coming: so he has spoken to you about it, then? You have joined HT, too? Maagid has recruited you to his cause, has he? Their best hope was to remain in blissful ignorance of my beliefs. The interrogators, I hoped, would soon realize that they knew nothing and just let them go. And so I suffocated my guilt and my overwhelming desire to apologize, in order to keep them safe.
The buzz of the Alexandria traffic began to disappear. It became clear that we were being taken out of the city, driven out into the desert. They shot people here, I knew. Took them out into the middle of nowhere and never brought them back. The van was getting hotter and hotter. The desert sun was baking down, turning the back of the van into an oven. Our clothes were soaked through with sweat—I could feel mine clinging to me with their wetness. Heat and sweat, heat and sweat. The saltiness of the cheese we’d had, and the fact that we were sweating so profusely, made us all desperate to urinate. The sheer pain in our bladders was reaching dangerous proportions, but where to go, and how? Soon we felt the van pull over to the side of the road. But it was for the driver to go, not us.
The van started up again. Yusuf banged on the partition wall.
“We need to go,” he said. “We need to use the loo back here.”
“Do it in the back,” the shaweesh shouted back. “We’re not stopping for you.”
The van drove on. We were in that van for maybe four or five hours, and there was no way you could hold on in that heat. There was a spare tire opposite the doors, and we decided to take turns and just do it there. The urine went everywhere: all over the steel floor, where we were sitting and standing. The van stank with the putrid smell of sweat, urine, and heat. Degraded and humiliated, there was nothing we could do.
As the journey continued, we came to the conclusion that we were being taken to Cairo. From the distance we’d traveled, it seemed the most likely destination. Yusuf kept on apologizing, which just made the situation worse. In the heat of the van, I kept quiet and tried to pray: Ya Allah, Ya Rabb al-’arsh al’-azeem, Lord of the majestic throne, grant me the strength to pass this test of yours. I remembered my lessons back in London, about how our struggle would not be achieved without shedding blood. Sacrifice was an honor bestowed on a chosen few. I am thankful to Allah for this opportunity to be tested and counted as one of His true servants, for the chance to prove the depth of my eeman, my faith. Allah will never fail me: I must not fail Him in return.
There was the noise of a city now. The van stopped and started amid the hustle and bustle of busy streets. “Cairo. We’re here,” I thought. The driver pulled the vehicle over, and as I swallowed hard I heard the door of the van being opened.
“Where are we?” Yusuf asked.
“Don’t you know?” the shaweesh laughed as he began guiding us out. “This is al-Gihaz.”
Al-Gihaz. The name sent a shudder through me. Aman al-Dawlah headquarters in Cairo—“The Apparatus.”
“My brothers, pray that Allah comes to your aid,” Yusuf struggled to speak, while his face changed to a color just off yellow. “This place is a torture center.”
A murmur. A groan. My arms were grabbed by a guard, my handcuffs roughly removed. A ghimamah was tightened over my eyes again and then, unceremoniously, my hands were pulled behind my back and tied together with another piece of rag. Another rag, another place of lawlessness. I winced as the cloth burned my wrists. Official procedures—like the handcuffs—were being left at the door. Manhandled down some steps, away from the sunshine and down into darkness, I was led into the underground cells of al-Gihaz to await my fate.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Number Forty-Two
I will never forget al-Gihaz. It is the sort of place that remains etched on your memory forever. The sort of place that still, a decade later, I can recall with disturbing clarity as it wakes me up in the night, slipping insidiously into my dreams. The piling of the bodies. The heat and cold. The begging screams from the torture room at the end of the corridor. The waiting. It’s the sort of place that when you first enter, you cannot quite believe it exists. Something from a film. But it’s real all right. If only my mind could come to believe that it wasn’t.
Itnain wa arba’een. Number forty-two. That was who—what—I’d become. My last vestige of identity and dignity was stripped from me as I was shoved down those stairs. I heard with mounting horror my fellow prisoners being called an
d taken down the corridor, the crackle of electricity. I heard the prisoners being dragged back, the “schlump” sound as their near-lifeless bodies were deposited back in line, the faintness of their whimpers and murmurs as they lay there, recovering.
I was only a number. This was the only order in that cretinous hellhole, the way the numbers called out moved up, ever closer to my own. Each individual torture session varied, but each must have been between thirty minutes and an hour. The wait for our own turn was over a drowsy, sleep-deprived day and night. I was at least sure of that, because I could hear the call to prayer, the azan, drifting in from outside the building: the morning azan is longer, with an extra line—“al-salatu khayrun min al-nawm, prayer is better than sleep.” I thanked Allah for letting me live through another night, for being with me, for preventing me from losing my mind. I’d heard that call twice since arrival, so I knew I was into my third day of imprisonment. Even in the abyss of that building, my faith was giving me answers and keeping me strong.
The crackle of electricity was getting closer. So too were the beatings. The roll calls continued day and night, and anyone who didn’t answer or forgot their number was beaten there and then. The sound of beating a helpless, crying man is sickening. Others were made to stand for hours on end for failing to answer to their number. If they didn’t stand still, or if their legs gave way, they were punished again. Some prisoners, while their hands were still tied at their backs, would have their arms pulled back and lifted from behind, hung by the edge of a door from the rope on their wrists, until their will or their body gave way and their arms dislocated from their sockets.
In a cell behind me, within earshot, I heard a guard march in and order a prisoner to sit up. There was a scuffle.
“If I tell you to do it, you do it,” the guard leered.