Radical

by Maajid Nawaz

Dr. Ibrahim had written an article denouncing Mubarak’s plans to groom his son Gemal as his successor. In the article, Ibrahim argued that Egypt must not become a “monocracy,” a jumlukia, a hybrid phrase from the Arabic word jumhouriya, a republic, and mulkiyya, a monarchy. Ibrahim’s was a seminal piece that shifted the liberal mood in Egypt against Gemal Mubarak ever taking the reins of power after his father. This infuriated Hosni Mubarak. Ibrahim’s eventual conviction for “bringing Egypt into disrepute abroad” shocked the world, especially the Americans, and was crucial in shifting US policy toward pushing Egypt for more and faster reform.

  Together with Ayman Nour’s, the injustice Ibrahim faced went on to feed the growing liberal discontent that eventually led to Egypt’s uprising, and Sa’ad el-Din Ibrahim became recognized as one of the liberal intellectual godfathers of this uprising. Many years later, as I addressed former president George W. Bush’s conference in Dallas, I was to be reunited with Sa’ad el-Din over a video link; as the conference looked on, we conversed for the first time about our days together at Mazrah Tora prison.

  All of these figures, like me, were imprisoned on one side of Mazrah Tora. In the same way that Egypt had a parallel judicial system—the official one, and the Aman al-Dawlah one—so this prison was split down the middle. On the opposite side of us was the criminal block, separated by guards. The split personality of the prison was emphasized by the dual command of the place: besides the prison governor, there was an Aman al-Dawlah zaabit assigned to our side. The name he used, probably fake, was Mohammed ‘Ashwawi.

  From time to time, Aman al-Dawlah would embark upon sporadic crackdowns against the Muslim Brotherhood, and because there were so many of them, the criminal blocks on the other side of the jail would have to be cleared out. We were all then stuffed, thirty or more at a time, into these group cells to make space. There’d just be row after row of beds with inches of space in between. These crackdowns would last for months, and while they went on, all the hard-fought-for privileges we’d gained would disappear.

  The more people they shoved into those cells, the more the tension ramped up. Two or three prisoners had recently died before us in custody; one was Hisham, my cell-neighbor for a while. Whenever that happened, we would take to banging our cell doors all night in mourning. It was a macabre and eerie spectacle: loud metal clanging would echo throughout the prison, punctured sometimes by wailing and cries of mourning, tempered other times by the murmured sounds of desperate prayer.

  Now, as the air was already thick with pent-up anger and the cells already overflowing, Aman al-Dawlah announced the arrival of yet more prisoners. Tempers boiled over. Over-crammed and frustrated, all of us swarmed out of our cells in a rage and, in a direct challenge to Aman al-Dawlah, refused to go back in. The prison sent in the riot police. The brothers, well-versed in prison rebellion, were skilled at causing a commotion, and had everyone whipped up into fervor. When they arrived, the riot police were an intimidating sight. Fully armored, they banged out a warning rhythm on their shields with their batons as they marched toward us in rows.

  Focused fully on the approaching batons and shields, determined to stand my ground, I was too enraged to turn around and look at what was unfolding behind me.

  “Enough! Kifayah! We’ve had enough! We’re not animals, you cannot stuff more people into these cells!” I was shouting at the top of my voice.

  But as I turned, to my surprise, I saw that all the Egyptian prisoners had retreated back into the cells! Their fervor had been nothing more than hot air. Or maybe it was experience: they’d been there before and didn’t want to go there again. And now, outside alone, enraged, desperate, and just plain fatigued, I turned my anger away from the approaching batons and drumming shields and began shouting at the prisoners instead.

  “Traitors, cowards! Where have you run to? Come and fight, you cowards!”

  The brothers looked upon me pitifully. They saw me for what I was: a desperate and tired young man who just wanted to go home. Some of my friends came back out then, and gently held me close to calm me down, and guided me back to my cell before I was beaten black and blue.

  “Akhi Maagid, there’s no point. It’s going to achieve nothing, we just have to exercise sabr—be patient. You cannot defeat Aman al-Dawlah like this.”

  Except for when we forced their hand, we didn’t benefit from much British government intervention in that prison. In fact, “liberating” Iraq, rather than liberating tortured British prisoners in Egypt, seemed more of a priority for British politicians. Back in the UK, our local representatives David Amess and Stephen Timms kept the issue alive in Parliament, and our lawyer Sadiq Khan did whatever he could, including visiting us once in Mazrah Tora, but polite condemnations don’t carry well across the oceans. These years marked the height of Bush’s War on Terror: the Iraq War was unfolding during my incarceration, and the West needed Mubarak’s support. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair had accepted a succession of free holidays from Mubarak at the exclusive Sharm el-Sheikh resort while we Britons were tortured in Mubarak’s jails. (Blair later stated he had made a charitable donation equal to the cost.)

  But now and then, through acts of pure desperation, we were able to influence events. On one occasion, Ian got into an altercation with a prison guard. The guard complained to the warden, and Ian was duly thrown into solitary confinement. As the main conduit between us three and the warden, I went to see him to try to mediate on Ian’s behalf.

  “If I say Ian is in solitary, he’s in solitary,” the warden snarled. “And I suggest you back down immediately, Maagid. If you don’t, I’ll have you deported to another prison. I can set you up, have you killed by another prisoner, and no one will ever know. It’s as easy as that.”

  This was simply too much. You’re threatening to kill me? You’re threatening to do to me what Combat 18 never did, what Aman al-Dawlah never got round to? You, a prison warden in Mazrah Tora, are threatening to kill me?

  You obviously do not know my Lord, Creator of the universe, Master of the heavens and earth, for he has shielded me in the harshest of battles, and against the worst of all odds, and I would be grossly ungrateful to Him if I now cowered before your threat.

  So I will resist you, like I resisted all those before you who tried to force me down, and I will win. Unified, we will all stand against you bi iznillah, and we will fight you with all our might and all our bodies, and our Lord will see you fall. Mr. Warden, your time is up.

  Immediately Ian, Reza, and I launched a hunger strike. For eleven days and nights we didn’t eat, insisting that the warden be investigated and charged with threatening to murder me. As the media attention piled on, the prison was plunged into tension. By the seventh day, with extremely low blood pressure, I became bedridden and unable to stand. But unlike the riot-that-wasn’t, this time it was just the three of us involved, and we were determined not to give in. It often amazes me at how men in positions of authority so often underestimate the willpower of the desperate.

  There is an old tradition ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, ‘alayhi salam—“The prayer of the oppressed is never rejected.” Whether by divine intervention or sheer determination, in my experience, eventually, the oppressed always manage to turn the tables. On the eleventh day the authorities cracked. The British ambassador to Egypt came to the prison personally and explained that our demands had been met. (The warden was investigated and ultimately removed.) It was a rare, sweet victory in those harshest of years. But our most common prayer in prison during those years, which we shared with tens of thousands of other interned detainees, was to see Hosni Mubarak face justice during our lifetimes. My Lord does not fail me.

  PART THREE

  RADICAL

  Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah . . . it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.

  —JALALUDDIN RUMI

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

&nb
sp; Where the Heart Leads, the Mind Can Follow

  In some ways, the most interesting story from my days in Mazrah Tora was the one unfolding inside my own head. Many political prisoners, and criminals alike, harden their beliefs and skills while incarcerated, and come out more committed than ever. With its rich mix of prisoners, from the assassins of Sadat all the way through to the liberals and even homosexuals, Mazrah Tora became a political and social education par excellence for me. The studies, conversations, and experiences I gained in Mazrah Tora, over months and years, were crucial in overcoming my dogmatic allegiance to the Islamist ideology. Having entered prison as an extremely idealistic twenty-four-year-old, full of rage against society, and having nothing else to do but study over the course of four years, I came to reevaluate everything I stood for.

  My change of views wasn’t an overnight process. Ideological dogma doesn’t work like that: it’s not like a tap you can just switch off. So ingrained was HT’s cause in my very being that it would be a process of years for me to work my way out of it. First emotionally, and then intellectually, then politically, and finally socially, until piece by piece I had to reconstruct my entire personality from the inside out. This is not an easy thing to do.

  Although I’d started this process by the time I left prison, I would return to the UK still a member of HT. It would be another year before I announced my departure from the leadership of my group, and more time still before I finally dropped the remnants of my Islamist baggage. That’s five years to overturn the ideological convictions that had defined me for over a decade. This was the prism, the mind-set from within which I had viewed the world: to unpick that, in descending order, until I questioned all my fundamental convictions was nothing less than a paradigm shift, and in those days there was no one to guide me.

  The starting point of my leaving had probably occurred back in Pakistan. My treatment out there had given me pause for thought about HT: not the ideas themselves, but the people who were in charge of the organization. A similar moment occurred at the trial, with Jalaluddin’s “supreme command” that we should be more “defiant.” I had plenty of time to think about these events, lying awake in my cell.

  Each time, it had been me who had gone forward, sacrificed everything for the cause: in Pakistan, my degree and educational future, and in Egypt my body, yet each time there were idle hawks hounding me due to their own personal insecurities. This didn’t challenge my faith in Islam, or initially my belief in the Islamist ideology, but it did make me question the capability, tactics, and strategy of these figures. This, I believe, is the beginning of the process of leaving an ideological movement, for those brave enough to see their thinking through to its logical conclusion. Like an onion, you have to continue to peel back each layer and expose the next one, no matter how painful that process may be. My disillusionment with HT leaders and their tactics meant that by the time I was sentenced, I was ready for some serious thinking about my ideology.

  The behavior of HT members, though, was not the only factor that started me on this route. I believe that where the heart leads, the mind can follow. After our conviction, Amnesty International adopted us as “prisoners of conscience” and began campaigning openly and vigorously for our release. This came about through the tireless work of John Cornwall, who insisted at Amnesty that our case was worthy of the organization’s support. Having been put away solely on the basis of our beliefs, we deserved to be adopted officially as prisoners of conscience. John, a frail Christian man in his eighties, campaigned for us with a passion not seen in most twenty-year-olds, and our story together eventually became the subject of an Amnesty video aired on television.

  Not everyone within Amnesty agreed that they should be campaigning on our behalf. I later learned that the subject of whether the group should support us became quite a hot topic internally. The counterargument was that, although we had committed no crimes ourselves, the ideology that we preached advocated a gross invasion of human rights. Once our version of “the Khilafah” was formed, we advocated an aggressive policy of foreign invasion and expansion, the death penalty for apostates, “rebels,” and homosexuals, and a forced dress code for women. Thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off, and adulterous women would be stoned to death. Why should Amnesty campaign for our human rights, when given the opportunity we would deprive others of theirs?

  There’s no easy answer to this question. What if, prior to coming to power, Adolf Hitler had been detained for his not-yet-violent beliefs in national socialism? Or what if, closer to my own story, Mubarak came to be tortured as Gaddafi was? Amnesty resolved this controversy in the manner of Voltaire, best summarized using the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

  Biases aside, that’s the only possible answer for me to arrive at. Any other stance makes a mockery of the universality of human rights. Even now, as I spend my life campaigning against extremism, I would still want Amnesty to protect prisoners in a similar position to the one I was in. And I will defend people’s right to read Mein Kampf, or Qutb’s Milestones, even as I fight both far-right fascists and Islamists equally. But the devil is in the details. Where I disagree with not just Amnesty but also many human-rights groups is in their failure to highlight a clear and obvious distinction between a victim of human-rights abuses and a champion of human-rights causes.

  Any prisoner held solely for the nonviolent expression of their beliefs has an unconditional right to our support as a fellow human being. However, not every former prisoner should be automatically hailed as a champion of human rights and placed on platforms as a spokesperson for human-rights causes. I will campaign against anyone who would want to torture Mubarak, for he remains a human being, but I would never extend to any one of the Mubarak regime’s men a human-rights platform from which to address an impressionable crowd of students. He may have been mistreated after the uprising, but he is not now some great champion of human rights. A human-rights platform, by virtue of what it is, must necessarily have a stricter tolerance threshold.

  Many human-rights groups blur this distinction when it comes to propping up Islamist and jihadist speakers on their platforms. Life is more complicated than that. Islam, Islamism, and jihadists are more complicated than that. Just as the world is not a binary between Muslims against all others, it is also not a binary between America against all others. The long-term credibility of human-rights causes rests on the perception of principle, a perception damaged if populist causes are reduced to campaign binaries, whether during the War on Terror or recently during the Arab uprisings. In this, I gently agree with Gita Sahgal’s principled critique from inside Amnesty’s International Secretariat, for which she was suspended from Amnesty.

  As a former Amnesty prisoner of conscience, and as someone forever indebted to the organization, my advice comes from someone who discovered Amnesty’s principles the hard way. Amnesty’s support was a fundamental part of my political journey. I am, in part, the person I am today because of their decision to campaign for me. It’s because of this that I do not want to see anything dilute that message; their work on human rights is too important for that.

  It was the unconditional nature of Amnesty’s support that humbled me: you’re a human being, so you deserve our support. There was something very powerful and very pure about that premise. Like many ideologies, Islamism derives part of its power from its dehumanization of “the other.” It is easier to dismiss and do things to “the other” if you consider them as unworthy: the Nazis and the Jews; the jihadists and the infidels. Throughout my teenage and young adult life, I had been dehumanized by others and desensitized to violence. As I got sucked into the Islamist ideology, I in turn began to dehumanize others.

  Amnesty’s support challenged all that: instead of dehumanizing people, it rehumanized them. I thought now of Sav and Marc, of Matt and Dan—stabbed for their asso
ciation with me, of Dave Gomer and Mr. Moth, of my mother’s partner, bonds that were forged with non-Muslims who cared about my well-being. And instead of being fascinated with the afterlife and death, for the first time in many years I began to reconnect with life itself, and with humanity. This is not something you can teach; it is something you must live and feel. Where the heart leads, the mind can follow.

  I began to see the other human interventions around me in a different light, too. At 8:50 on the morning of July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded on London Underground trains in a coordinated terrorist attack. Just under an hour later, a fourth bomb was detonated on the back of a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, right by my university, SOAS. In total, fifty-two people were killed and many hundreds injured. Sa’eed Nur had become many Sa’eed Nurs. Jihadism had finally struck London. From the distant vantage point of Mazrah Tora at the time, I felt revulsion when I heard the news. In contrast to my reaction to 9/11, I immediately thought of the human cost involved. Gone were my ideological acrobatics and Machiavellian justifications. This time I saw the plain and simple death of innocents.

  That wasn’t the view of everyone in the prison. Many, including Omar Hajiyev, my Dagestani bomb-maker friend, were initially proud of the terrorists’ action. Omar was still at war, and London was a legitimate target. Britain had taken part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, where they had bombed and killed thousands of “our” civilians and occupied “our” lands. The government that led that action had been voted in by popular vote. Politically and theologically, Omar was convinced that “an eye for an eye” was the appropriate deterrent for these infidel kuffar. It was his job, after all, to train young jihadists in the fine arts of doing exactly that. Omar felt satisfaction that we Muslims were finally prepared and able to strike back. Here was a man fully and operationally capable of preparing such attacks himself.