Radical

by Maajid Nawaz

  As all of this unfolded, I was still officially married to—albeit separated from—Rabia. Any chance we had of reconciling matters was destroyed with the founding of Quilliam. I had left her home as an emotionally vulnerable ex-prisoner going through a second identity crisis. I wanted to rediscover who I was and needed the clarity of thought that seclusion could bring. Once I started the painful journey of my mental and emotional realignment, I felt that I was ready to begin working with Rabia to fix our marriage.

  Rabia had married an ardent, fiery, passionate Islamist, but she was now getting a liberal Muslim, intent on standing up to challenge everything he had once held sacrosanct. Despite our best efforts, and much heartache both ways, there was no putting the relationship back together again.

  Rabia’s reaction to my work was not atypical. We hadn’t just made enemies of HT but of most Islamist organizations from all branches of Islamism. Ed and I were accused of apostasy, of heresy, and far worse. Nowadays, a few years after founding Quilliam, such a reaction is harder to imagine. With the rise and spread of counter-extremism initiatives globally, with the debate being so much better informed, and with increased visibility for the liberal Arab youth behind many of the Arab uprisings, challenging Islamism is becoming increasingly common. But back then death threats and bomb warnings at our office were a frequent occurrence, even directly from al-Qaeda sources. We had to install blast shields in the office, and went to great lengths not to advertise our location. Even now, we keep the office address off our literature and website; even now I continue to be cautious about my movements.

  A month or so after the launch of Quilliam, Ed and I were in Denmark. Many years earlier, I had been a regular visitor to Copenhagen, actively recruiting to build an HT chapter there. Now I was back, giving a speech in the town hall about the very organization I had helped to set up. The raw recruits I had persuaded to join had been different from the typical HT supporters in the UK: many of them hailed from the criminal fringe—drug dealers and gang members. After my speech Ed and I went to Friday prayers at a nearby mosque. As prayers concluded, Fathi, our host, approached me inside the mosque looking very worried.

  “Brother Maajid, there is a very dangerous man outside the mosque asking for you, please do not leave.” Naturally, being me, I went out to talk to him.

  “Are you Maajid Nawaz?” he asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “Yes, you are Maajid Nawaz,” he said, nodding, and cycled off.

  The man was a well-known local drug dealer. As soon as he’d seen me, he put a call through. The next thing we knew, there were three cars full of young Islamist sympathizers, parked at the end of the road, waiting to attack us.

  “Fathi, let me talk to them,” I argued.

  “No, brother Maajid, I’m afraid you don’t understand. These men, I know them, they have guns. You must leave immediately.”

  Ed and I had to take shelter in the back room of an Islamic bookshop, and there we hid until a car came to collect us and evacuate us. This was Copenhagen in 2008, not Kabul in 2000.

  Things got worse. While we were hiding from the Danish thugs, Ed’s phone rang. It was our contact from the Babtain Foundation, telling us that they had decided to withdraw our funding. I felt they were unhappy with some of the public statements we had made. At a stroke all our financial support had vanished—we had a huge bill to pay the British Museum for hosting our launch, and now we had no way of paying for it. Assuming we got out of Denmark alive, Quilliam was in danger of being closed down before it had even started.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Monkeys in a Zoo

  Ed and I coined a phrase in that hideout in Copenhagen: “We don’t do fail.” That became our mantra, our unofficial slogan. We weren’t going to be intimidated from speaking by violent threats, nor financial ones. Ours would not be the sort of organization that tailored its message to suit its sponsors. If that was the sort of influence people thought their money would buy, then we were better off without their support.

  We hit the same problem again with the next person to fund us, an Egyptian businessman who wanted to use Quilliam to promote a socially conservative version of Islam. We were a nonreligiously aligned organization with its focus on political rights; our backer wanted to become the public face of a conservative form of Sufi Islam. There were elements of our message he wanted adjusting, for example over civil rights for minorities and homosexuals. We accepted a goodwill donation from him, which cleared our debts, but we did not take the relationship forward. Again, the funding ceased.

  The other source of potential funding was through the government. This, in its own way, brought as many potential problems as private donors: it can make people suspicious of your message and lead to accusations that you are little more than government agents. However, we had maintained good relations with the British government after our initial meeting; we had briefed them where requested, and they had continued to support us. If the various Islamist groups in the UK, the Salafists all over the world, and the “Afghan Jihad” could receive funding from the British, Saudi, and Pakistani governments respectively, why couldn’t our cause benefit from this sort of boost?

  It did not seem unreasonable to try to formalize the relationship a little and see if any funding was available. We went back to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism and spoke to their head, Charles Farr. Farr kindly agreed to support us via the government’s Preventing Extremism program. We met various ministers and were granted government funding, until such a time as we could find alternative sources of financial support. Farr deserves credit for helping to get Quilliam onto its feet during these early days.

  From these touch-and-go beginnings, Quilliam started to gain real momentum. We were able to start speaking publicly, debating, commissioning reports, lobbying politicians, traveling to conferences, working the media, offering policy advice and consultancy. But very early on, we saw that it was not just Islamism we would need to tackle. Away from Muslim circles, the two dominant trends we would most often come up against were polar opposites, either that of the patronizing “Orientalism” or an anti-Muslim form of conservatism.

  Both sets of people attempted to use Ed or myself to grind their own ideological axes. In their own way, neither group was happy with half of our message. When we were critical of Islamism, the “Orientalists” got upset. When we raised the grievances in society that acted to fuel the Islamist narrative, the conservatives objected. Both sides wanted to keep us as their pet monkeys in a zoo: to come to us for entertainment and benefit when it suited them, and ignore us when our ideas went against their established ideological bent.

  On many occasions after my talks, people—usually white liberals—would stand up and declare that I had no idea what it was like to suffer as a victim of society. They would assert that there was no way someone like me, an educated, articulate English-speaker in a suit and tie, could ever understand people who felt so desperate that suicide bombing was their “only” option. I was told that terrorists’ reactions cannot be separated from their social causes and the blame lies squarely on society. I had invariably just spent half an hour telling my entire story, of violent racism and police harassment in Essex, and of torture and solitary confinement in Egypt, but because my conclusions didn’t align with the angry “monkey” they were expecting to see, it was as if they hadn’t heard any of it.

  “I am a pure product of these grievances you keep harping on about,” I would declare, “now deal with my conclusions.”

  Our aim would be to criticize Islamophobia and Islamist extremism as openly as possible. We would defend the right of Muslims to practice their faith, even those who were conservative, while vehemently challenging the idea that any one version of Islam—even a “moderate” one—should ever be imposed in any society as law. This position placed me on interesting sides of various motions. I argued on a panel that �
�Political Islam”—the desire to impose a version of Islam as law—was a threat, while I defended the religion of Islam itself as essentially one of peace, against Islamic-critic and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

  Word soon spread, and from my appearances on Larry King Live to being interviewed on al-Jazeera, Quilliam was fast becoming the recognized authority on challenging both anti-Islam and Islamist extremism globally. Our work now started to attract a critical mass of support across society. Among the media, 60 Minutes profiled our work and my story.(Link) In the arts, people like Jane Rosenthal, founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, helped to introduce our work at the Festival and to her friend Robert De Niro (or Bob, as she calls him). On the technology side, when learning how best to use social media in order to galvanize support, my work on Facebook benefited from the early advice of people like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz. My use of Twitter to spread our message was a task personally assigned to me by its founder, Jack Dorsey.

  The corridors of political power were also beginning to show immense interest. Soon after setting up Quilliam, I received an invitation to address the US Senate about our work. The invitation came from Senator Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security. I would become the first former Islamist ever to testify in the US Senate.

  Being a senior former Islamist, however, is not without its problems. The State Department had sorted out all my travel arrangements, but a week before I was due to go, my visa had still not come through. At this point, I received a worried phone call from the Department of Homeland Security. There are problems with your visa, I was told. We’re not sure we’ll be able to get you one because of your conviction in Egypt. My conviction in Egypt, I replied, is exactly why the Senate has invited me to come over and talk! Back and forth we went, between Homeland Security and the State Department, with nobody sure exactly where the visa was stuck. Eventually, word got back to Senator Lieberman, who rang up the US Embassy in London, shouting as he instructed them not to embarrass him.

  The night before I was due to fly, my visa still hadn’t come through, and by now I was resigned to the fact that it wouldn’t happen. Suddenly, I received a call.

  “Mr. Nawaz? I’m calling from the US Embassy. I have your visa here.”

  “Great. I’ve got to be at Heathrow early in the morning: should I get a cab and pick it up on the way?” I replied with relief.

  “Actually,” the man said, “I’m not at the US Embassy.”

  I was confused. “But I thought you said you were.”

  “I’m with the US Embassy, but I’m based somewhere else.”

  “OK, where are you based? I’ll come to you,” I asked in bewilderment.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “I’ll meet you myself at Heathrow tomorrow morning. I’ll be waiting for you at the information desk of your terminal.”

  “How will I know what you look like?”

  “I’ll be wearing a blue raincoat.” And with that, he hung up.

  The following morning, I went to the information desk as arranged. There, sure enough, was a man in a blue raincoat.

  “Good morning, Mr. Nawaz,” he said, and handed me three brown envelopes.

  “Is this my visa?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” Blue Raincoat replied. “We couldn’t get you a normal visa, I’m afraid, but we are very keen for you to come and speak. Do you know about the Mafia?”

  “What about them?”

  “Sometimes we have court cases where we need to bring people over to testify. But these people are convicted criminals and technically aren’t allowed into the country. So what we do is to arrange for a parole visa. This allows them into the US under the aegis of federal agents. From a legal point of view, they’re under arrest for the duration of their stay.”

  “Right,” I said, taking the envelopes. “So I’m on a parole visa, like a Mafia boss? I’m under arrest?”

  “Technically,” Blue Raincoat was keen to assure me. “Please don’t be offended by that. We’re not implying anything, it’s just the only way that we could get you into the country to speak at the Senate.”

  “Are there any conditions to being technically under arrest?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Blue Raincoat admitted. “You will have a twenty-four-hour federal detail following you for the duration of your stay. But please, consider them your chauffeur service, rather than your arresting officers!”

  It was one of those moments where my former and current lives slammed against each other. Phrases like “agents” and “detail” and “technically under arrest” were enough to give me a flashback or two from my time in Egypt. Heathrow was also where I’d been interrogated by Mr. Blue Raincoat’s British equivalents. But I took the envelopes and handed them over as directed. I was escorted off at the other end, fingerprinted and interviewed, before being handed over to my federal detail.

  The federal agents, from Immigration Customs Enforcement, took the hotel room next to mine. I had to inform them of my movements at all times. They were armed, and we were tailed by two more cars wherever we went. The agents were quite suspicious of me. It was only after I’d spoken at the Senate that their attitude changed.

  The speech itself was a defining moment, as it allowed us the opportunity to define Islamism, explain its causes, and present the doctrine of civic challenge to the world. It all went out live on C-SPAN and hit the news globally. “I’m sorry, sir,” the lead agent, Bryan, said as he offered me his hand. “Up until now, I had been under the impression that our job was to protect America from you. Now I realize that we are here to protect you from America!” That visit was the first time I’d been to the United States, and I was determined to make the most of it, federal detail or otherwise. Sayyid Qutb, Jihadism’s ideological godfather, had visited the United States back in the 1940s. Qutb’s trip inspired him to write a book about his experiences, The America that I Saw, in which he was heavily critical of the “licentiousness” of America. I wanted to challenge this, and created a rival version. I posted my “The America that I Saw” as a video blog on YouTube, and argued for the positives I’d seen. Without those same freedoms Qutb had been critical of, I argued, Muslims would not have been allowed to ever build mosques in this country. Having spent some years in the same prison that held Qutb before his execution, I felt somehow connected to his radicalism. The radical message for the Middle East of his time was Islamism.

  How odd it was that now the truly radical idea for the Middle East, which was straddling dictatorships and extremism, had become grassroots democratic activism.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Visiting No. 10

  As with our initial Muslim donors, it didn’t take too long for our policies to differ from our backers. The problem was a report we wrote on the UK government’s prisons policy, run by the National Offender Management Service. This detailed the problem of rising extremism in prisons and what we believed was the disorientated response from NOMS. Our critical report really didn’t go down well with the UK government, NOMS in particular reacted very badly, and a question began to circulate across certain government departments: why are we giving money to this organization for them to be critical about us?

  It wasn’t long before another flashpoint occurred. This time we had written a report reviewing the government’s entire “PREVENT” strategy toward extremism. We had broken down, department by department, where we felt the failures were, but we were very careful how we presented it. We sent a hard copy to the government as a confidential briefing, to ensure that an electronic version didn’t end up on the Internet.

  In the end, though, that’s exactly what happened. The report was leaked, scanned, and uploaded online from within a government department. That department was Farr’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, the very department giving us our funding. We had criticized some policies in the OSCT
but had praised others. We were particularly critical of the view that government partnerships with nonviolent yet otherwise extreme Islamists were the best way to fend off Jihadism. This was meant to be constructive feedback. The OSCT begged to differ. We were caught up in the political storm of a general election, with the political parties taking potshots at each other on such issues, as well as the economic downturn.

  Soon after, I received a call; the prime minister wanted to see me. David Cameron was due to give an important speech in Munich, distinguishing Islam from Islamism and extremism, and was requesting my advice. It felt strange indeed. Here I was, someone who had previously fought with all his might against everything this country stood for, and now I was called upon by the prime minister to provide expert advice on matters of critical national importance. I agreed to go.

  Inside, 10 Downing Street felt quaint: a traditional terraced townhouse, a very nice one obviously, but a house nonetheless, with creaky staircases and all those quirks. The mahogany leather waiting-room sofa was the same as the one we grew up with in our front room—my dad used to ban us from sitting on it in our jeans in case we scratched the leather. There wasn’t the sense of grandeur or pomp that you associate with places like the White House; it had an almost eccentric English charm all its own.

  The other person called in for the private meeting was Paul Goodman, a former MP and shadow Communities minister. The prime minister came in: he was taller in real life than he seemed on television. It was a relaxed setup—we were seated on sofas, rather than at a formal round-table. Alongside Cameron, Goodman, and myself, there were various aides in the room as well: Ameet Gill, then the prime minister’s speechwriter, Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and others.