by Maajid Nawaz
Whereas before I would have either quietly scoffed at kuffar suffering as not my affair, or toed the HT line that such acts were simply a distraction from our real goal, this time I actually felt the human cost involved. Compassion now moved me where once only anger had. I turned to Omar and asked him: Do you know where the biggest demonstrations against the Iraq War took place? From news clippings in old newspapers, I showed him pictures of the million-strong march of February 15, 2003, in London. The fact that the largest demonstration against the Iraq War was not in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, but in the UK, touched me. These were human beings in London, campaigning for other human beings in Iraq. Rehumanization. Where the heart leads, the mind can follow.
I explained to Omar that just because a government goes to war doesn’t mean that everyone supports it. Democracy is not the same as a referendum, and there was no referendum on Iraq. And even if there had been, it would not have endorsed willingly killing Iraqi civilians. “By your argument,” I continued, “you should blow up Turkey before you detonate a bomb in London. Turkey’s a member of NATO, which supported the war as well. Turkey’s a democracy, too, and the protests there were nothing on the scale of those in London, so surely by your logic the Turks must have been more supportive of the war than the British.”
Omar shook his head: “But the Turkish people are Muslims; we can’t be killing our own people.”
And I continued to push: “So whom you kill is less about principle and more about expediency? Human life for you is about political point-scoring? Then how is what you’re fighting for any better than what you are fighting against? How can you feign disgust at Bush’s war games when this is just a game to you, too? Don’t you see, if the Turkish people aren’t a legitimate target for attack, then neither are the British people. Look,” I pointed to the placards being waved on the march, “here are Christian groups, Muslim groups, political groups, students, old-age pensioners, just people. Ittaqillah, akhi, fear Allah’s judgment.”
And we went on like this for an entire day, discussing theology, politics, and war, until eventually Omar began to rummage his hand through his hair and appear extremely uncomfortable. So I stopped pushing. For a moment, I thought he might turn on me. I’d seen him wrestle in the prison yard with bear-like Ahmed, and if he wanted to, he could settle this in an instant. But Omar was no fool, certainly not unintelligent, and he had grown very fond of me. A couple of days later, there was a knock on my cell door. Omar was back: “Maajid, I’ve been thinking about what you said. I’ve decided you’re right. I agree. British civilians are not a legitimate target.”
On that day I felt that I had saved many future lives from the hands of this bomb-maker friend of mine (who after Egypt’s uprising is also likely roaming free). And I was proud for myself that I had achieved something small but worthy, proud for him that he was humble enough to change his mind, and proud for the British people, who despite not being able to “Stop the War,” did not fail. Their campaigns, energies, and lobbying did not fall on deaf ears here, not in Mazrah Tora and not with Omar. For here the price was worth it.
The rehumanization process that Amnesty had helped kick-start within me was furthered by others in prison, too. Ayman Nour was one of the inmates in Mazrah Tora whose views were furthest away from my own at the time. He was a remarkably interesting figure to spend time with in jail. He was both ambitious and audacious. Nour had been prepared to put his head above the parapet and actually challenge Mubarak for the presidency when to do so was still a cardinal sin. That alone, regardless of any political disagreements, was worthy of respect.
Nour and I would spend time going for walks around the prison yard, and I would interrogate him about his thoughts, motives, and dreams. I wanted to understand what motivated people to sacrifice for a cause other than Islamism. That intrigued me. For me, it was Islamism that allowed us to finally stand up to Mickey, allowed me to challenge the African students at Newham, and allowed me to face my torturers with absolute conviction. But Nour and Sa’ad el-Din Ibrahim were prepared to face jail for liberalism, a Godless cause and the bane of religion.
But there was something of himself that Nour recognized in me. Nour, it turned out, had not always espoused such liberal views. To my shock, and to his delight, Nour explained how in his younger days he too had been a supporter of HT. Our paths had even crossed back in London, when he attended the same Wembley Arena Khilafah conference that shook the country with thunderous roars of Allahu akbar!
“What? But . . . subhan Allah! So why did you leave the cause?” I asked, genuinely interested.
And as we walked across the desert sand of Mazrah Tora’s prison yard, Nour looked at me and simply said, “I grew up.”
The way he said it caught me completely off guard. I grew up. The phrase made me pause. I had been expecting a long pseudo-theological justification for why he had left, but Nour never tried that. Knowing my training would tear his arguments to shreds, he knew he’d lose. He was too smart to get into that. Instead, he just left that phrase hanging there, and me to think about it. Which I did.
While my heart led the way, through bonds with people like John Cornwall of Amnesty, Ayman Nour, and Sa’ad el-Din Ibrahim, I also decided to nourish my mind. I used my time in prison to study everything I could about Islam, the faith that I believed formed the basis of my Islamist ideology. And, as a nod to Abi’s encouragement during my childhood, I decided to read as many English literature books as I could.
I became good friends with a brother called Mahmood. Mahmood was sentenced to fifteen years for being in the Cairo leadership of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, though he had since recanted his beliefs. Mahmood was a graduate in Arabic from Dar ul-Uloom, Egypt’s most prestigious Arabic college. On top of brutal torture, Aman al-Dawlah used psychological warfare as well, intimidating Mahmood’s wife into divorcing him. I spent many days perfecting my Arabic grammar, morphology, and vocabulary in Mahmood’s cell. In return, I would try to help him learn some English.
One of the difficulties that Arabs have in speaking English is that Arabic doesn’t contain the letter “p,” and for some reason they manage to shorten the double-vowel sound “ee” to a single “i.” A word like “please,” therefore, typically comes out as “bliss.” One day I was trying to teach Mahmood the difference in pronunciation between “peach,” “beach,” and “pitch.” I said the words slowly and pronounced them heavily: “Peach . . . beach . . . pitch.” Mahmood listened carefully, and then with all the sincerity a former jihadist could muster, proudly spoke my words back at the top of his voice: “Bitch, bitch, bitch!” He looked at me in bewilderment as I burst into fits of laughter.
I found other teachers for my studies, too. I befriended a reformed member of Islamic Jihad, Momin, and Abdul Hameed, arbitrarily interned for five years, who was a graduate of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious theological university, al-Azhar, as well as Sheikh Nidal, an exceptionally bright theologian also arbitrarily interned for around three years. All three instructed me well in ancient Islamic jurisprudence. It might sound strange, given how committed I was to the Islamist ideology, but I had never properly studied Islam or the Qur’an. Islamism was a political movement before it was a religious one, and many of its followers came from irreligious backgrounds. This was something that the Salafists have always taken us to task for. Sure, I’d read excerpts over the years, discussed specific passages in HT halaqahs where scripture was deemed to back up our arguments. But I had never attempted to study the Qur’an properly for myself.
So in Mazrah Tora, I committed half of the Qur’an to memory at the hands of another reformed member of Islamic Jihad, Ali Fiqih—sentenced to twelve years—who had an ijazah, a qualification in the art of qira’ah recitation at the hands of a master. To fully appreciate the ancient text of the Qur’an, one needed an exegesis, and understanding the dense theological jargon of these exegetes is a Herculean task in itself. This
is what my various teachers helped me with. I began to develop a deeper, fuller appreciation of Islam than I had ever experienced before. That dark period of solitary confinement, when I had vowed to become a suicide bomber, now seemed like the thoughts of a distant madman.
During my incarceration, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, formerly Egypt’s largest terrorist group, had also been busy publishing their muraja’aat of jihadist thought. These muraja’aat deconstructed the violent ideology of Jihadism using traditional theology. Crucially, they were written and published by the leadership of Gama’a themselves. Here was, for the first time, an entire jihadist organization admitting that it had got it so very wrong. Book by book, I devoured these muraja’aat. Though I had never been a jihadist, it wasn’t hard for me to start seeing how the basic arguments used here could be extended to the very ideology of Islamism itself. And my mind started joining dots that even Gama’a hadn’t dared to connect.
Reading classic English literature did for me what studying Islamic theology couldn’t; it forced my mind to grapple with moral dilemmas. Upon our request, the British Consul would regularly send us books from the embassy library. I devoured the classics but, in addition, focused on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, reading it twice over. I couldn’t shake the moral paradox that Gollum-Sméagol came to embody. Gollum was an evil creature prepared to do anything to get his One Ring back. Yet, as the story climaxed, it wasn’t the hero Frodo who destroyed the ring. As “evil” Gollum had done before him, Frodo eventually succumbed to the lure of the ring, making a last-ditch attempt to keep it. It was in fact Gollum who pounced at the ring, biting it off Frodo’s finger, before accidentally falling to his death in the lava of Mount Doom, destroying the ring with him. An evil character had thus inadvertently achieved the good that the story’s hero failed at, and saved the world. This moral complexity began to fascinate me.
I also read and re-read Orwell’s Animal Farm and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Animal Farm made me ponder on life under “the Khilafah” ruled by the likes of Imtiaz, Irfan, Abdul Wajid, Jalaluddin, and their ilk. Lord of the Flies served as a stark warning about the tyranny that could arise from the most innocent of souls with the best of intentions. Even the innocence of children was insufficient to guarantee against injustice, yet here we were working to set up a system that would install a ruler for life, run by people like Abdul Wajid, or Jalaluddin, and claiming to rule in God’s name.
Over the years, I began to reexamine everything I knew and had been prepared to die for. Though we had placed establishing an “Islamic State” and “implementing” shari’ah as law above even the most religious of rituals, I couldn’t help noticing that not once were the words “law,” “state,” or “constitution” mentioned in the Qur’an. When I thought about this further, it made historic sense. The Qur’an was an ancient text, while political ideas such as a “unitary legal system,” “codified law,” “statehood,” and “constitution” were modern political concepts: they did not exist at the time the Qur’an was written.
I went back to look at what Islamists held as the last true example of legitimate government: the Turkish Caliphate or Ottoman Empire. Again, history was telling me a rather different story than HT had. This Caliphate never had the sort of unitary codified legal system that HT was proposing to “implement,” with the shari’ah as law. Instead, justice was run under what was called the “Millet” system—a pluralistic legal structure where the interpretation of shari’ah was left to local community tribunals. These would hear evidence and interpret shari’ah as they saw fit. There was not even any law obliging people to go to these tribunals—it was a voluntary decision. The Ottomans offered general edicts on administrative matters, but these were different from any sort of legal system.
The idea of a unified, codified legal system, and of having a judiciary subservient to that legal system, and of having a constitution that frames this legal system, and a state that protects that constitution by monopolizing the use of force, all of these concepts emerged with the birth of the European nation state. These were modern, Western constructs. The Ottoman Caliphate, struggling to adjust, even initiated a reform process, known as the Tanzimat reforms, in an attempt to study how best to incorporate these new European ideas into their empire.
Throughout almost all of Islam’s history, a single interpretation of shari’ah was never adopted and enforced over society as a codified system of law. In fact, unlike in its English rendition “Sharia Law,” where we use shari’ah as an adjective describing the noun “law,” in original Arabic shari’ah is simply a noun. The specific “adoption” of an interpretation of shari’ah as law by a ruler was not religiously mandatory, and it didn’t happen in history. Unitary legal systems were a European idea, and worse, the desire to merge law with religious canons was specifically a Catholic pre-Reformation idea. This realization had profound implications for my beliefs. Rather than justice—legal consistency—being derived from Islamism, Islamism relied on Western concepts of justice to get off the ground. I buried my head in my hands as I slowly realized: we Islamists were the bastard children of colonialism.
I now thought about people like my trial lawyer, Ahmed Saif. He wasn’t an Islamist; he was a communist. Yet there he was, fearlessly campaigning as a founding member of Kifayah—Egypt’s first openly anti-Mubarak platform organized along non-Islamist lines. Ayman Nour and Sa’ad el-Din Ibrahim were liberals, from the opposite end of the spectrum, yet they too were passionate that Mubarak should go.
I also thought about Amnesty International, and their campaigns for prisoners of conscience like myself. In each of these instances, they were driven by the same principles as I was when I had joined HT: to fight for justice. Yet their causes and beliefs had nothing to do with Islamism.
I had always been taught—and had passionately believed—that the presence of Islamism meant justice, and the absence of it created injustice. But now I began seeing things differently. What Ahmed Saif and Ayman Nour were campaigning for—from their different viewpoints—was undeniably just. The freedoms that Amnesty International was championing were something I’d learned for myself to be manifestly just. Yet none of it was Islamism.
I came across a tradition of the Prophet, concerning Najashi, the Christian Habasha king who protected the Companions by providing them with shelter as they ran from the pagan Quraish. Malikun ‘adlun la yuzlamu ‘indahu ahad—“A just king under whom no one is oppressed,” said the Prophet, ‘alayhi salam. Justice, from a Christian king, endorsed by the Prophet himself.
I’d only joined HT because of the fire that injustice had lit inside me. And as I started to decouple justice from Islamism in my mind, it was the beginning of the end of my belief in Islamism. If justice and Islamism were separated, then not only was it possible to have one without the other, it also meant that there were situations where the two might come into conflict.
It was an uncomfortable recognition, and not one that I swallowed immediately. I shied away from its implications for a long time, retreating back into the comfort of my Islamist beliefs. But as hard as I tried to bury them, I couldn’t shift the nagging thoughts I had in my mind. And where the heart leads, the mind can follow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
No Right to Silence
Like the desert scorpion, Aman al-Dawlah still had one final sting to deliver us before we were allowed to leave Egypt. The Egyptian prison system is supposed to release prisoners after serving three-quarters of their sentence. Our release date—the marker of three years and nine months—had come and gone. Paperwork, we were told. Bureaucracy. In Egypt, one could never be sure if it was incompetence or something more sinister behind things. One only had to look at the tens of thousands of white-clothed prisoners arbitrarily detained—the mu’taqaleen—to witness the elasticity of the Egyptian justice system.
Then one day, out of the blue, a shaweesh came running into my cell:
&nbs
p; “Maagid, they’ve arrived! They’ve arrived! Start packing your things, inta murawweh—you’re going home!”
But does anyone ever leave Egypt’s jails? What of my friend Ashraf al-Nahri, who completed a ten-year sentence, only to be taken on a round-trip to al-Gihaz and interned again? I still remember the look of total sadness on his face. Have you ever seen total sadness? He left in the blue overalls of those with sentences, only to be processed and returned in the white clothes of a mu’taqal, arbitrarily imprisoned again with no respite. I went to him then to make him a cup of tea and to share words of comfort, perhaps a game of chess; al-Nahri was a master of chess, and he had always been kind to me.
Put aside cruelty, put aside violence, even put aside murder for a moment, and consider justice. Justice, if it means anything, must mean to adhere to your own confessed principles. If you claim to stand for the rule of law and democracy, then stick to what you claim and be judged by it. If you claim to stand for death, and violent revolution, and armed struggle, then stick to what you claim, and be judged by it.
These men stood by their ideology, they fought and in some cases killed for their cause, and they were judged by it. Killed, tortured, or locked away. Now they have recanted. They have not only served their time but they have also renounced their past because they trusted in your “rule of law.” So will you now be judged by your principles? Or what else is left, but a return to lawlessness and vigilante vengeance? And so I didn’t dare hope that I would be returning home. After all this was Egypt: “we do as we please.”
As word rippled through the prison that we were leaving, a succession of people came up to say their farewells. Salah Bayoumi, convicted for the assassination of President Sadat, in prison since I was four years old, gave me a farewell present—a copy of the Qur’an with a dedication from him at the front. He began to cry as he embraced me and bade me farewell. His eyes carried the burdens of a tortured soul, confused about his own past and doubtful about his own future. As much as possible, I tried to keep my emotions in check out of respect for the many who had completed their sentences only to be re-interned as mu’taqaleen.