Radical

by Maajid Nawaz

  Cameron was warm and engaging. His people skills were unexceptionally exceptional. By which I mean: you don’t get to be in a position of power like that without an exceptional level of people skills. I have met enough political leaders—George Bush, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown—to know that this is the norm. It would have been more of a surprise, in a way, if he didn’t have these attributes. He was bright and well briefed. He didn’t come across as someone who was “winging” his way through the meeting.

  I felt the policy that the government was pursuing was heading in the right direction. They were flipping Bush-era neo-conservatism on its head and restoring lost ground on civil liberties, while increasing the pressure on the civic challenge against extremism. Some time after this meeting, Parliament looked into many of these reforms, and they asked me to testify. In this hearing I directly challenged Congressman King and reaffirmed my stance that the excesses of the US neo-conservative era must be reined in. Cameron’s government had the same idea. They weren’t interested in pursuing ID cards, for example, and had begun to curtail the process of detention without trial.

  Cameron then asked what I thought should be done about Hizb al-Tahrir. When he had been leader of the opposition, he had asked Gordon Brown why he had not banned my old organization as Tony Blair had promised after 7/7. Brown’s response had been to quote me from my first Newsnight interview, arguing that rather than banning HT, a civic challenge should be presented instead. Cameron now asked me directly whether the group should be banned. Again, I explained my reasoning. Banning was not only illiberal, it wasn’t the solution. It was far better to create a scenario where joining the group became a social taboo. An actual ban would only give the organization the publicity they were seeking.

  Cameron was also interested in an idea that I had been espousing about the comparison between extremism and racism. I had argued that the two should be analogous in terms of public response. Why should extremist views, which went against basic liberties, be any more acceptable than racist or homophobic ones? I told Cameron that he shouldn’t be afraid to criticize Muslims who were putting forward extremist views in the name of faith. Those views were not the same as religious piety. Finally, we spoke about the Arab world. I stressed that the old dichotomy pitting dictatorships against Islamism had to be abandoned or else extremism would be the inevitable outcome.

  David Cameron seemed genuinely impressed by what I had to say. When he eventually gave his Munich speech, it included almost all of my suggestions. I then got another call from Cabinet Secretary Heywood, sounding me out about taking a government job as a special adviser to the prime minister on extremism matters. I went back in for another meeting, and we discussed the idea at some length. In a typically civil-servant way, they wanted to first hear whether I was interested in the job before making me a formal offer. Their condition was that I leave Quilliam, but that’s something I wouldn’t even do for Rabia.

  Sure enough, when our funding came up for renewal, it was withdrawn. We lobbied hard to have it reinstated. Tony Blair stepped in, personally encouraging people to help us; we even got supportive MPs to force an emergency debate in the Parliament on the subject. They agreed to give us the outstanding money we were still due, but not any more than this. The government was battling with bringing down the deficit, and this was a bad time to get on the wrong side of the civil service.

  The week before Christmas 2010, I had to make seven painful redundancies at Quilliam. At our lowest point we were reduced from a staff of twenty-five to just four. Ed had to leave, too; he took an opportunity to work for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Being left alone at Quilliam as co-founding chairman, with four staff members and a revival to orchestrate, I set to work to shape the organization more in my own personal mold.

  It was an extremely difficult task, but “we don’t do fail.” Peaks and troughs in life have made me who I am. Losing our government funding came with a silver lining; we were able to reassert our independence. Cutting costs made us a leaner, more viable organization. We know now that we have the strength to survive, even in the most difficult financial climate. We’ve come out of the worst of that, and for the first time we found reliable donors who don’t demand favors or want punches pulled.

  The peculiarity of the situation wasn’t lost on me. It seemed that here was a government that had cut the funding for my organization, primarily caused by our disagreement with the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, while they also appeared to want to hire me to give them essentially the same advice. It was a position of real influence, where my ideas could be put into practice and make a serious difference. But the advantage didn’t outweigh losing my independence and my ability to speak out. Also, if I left, then the organization would most likely fold without me.

  I didn’t want to see that happen. I felt the work Quilliam was set up to do, despite all our success on the media and policy front, hadn’t really begun. Lyndon Johnson once famously quipped, “It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” But in Muslim-majority countries there was no tent, and that’s what I needed to help build.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Khudi Pakistan

  Quilliam had paved the way for a global counternarrative and had captured the imagination and attention of the world, from heads of state to artists and technology leaders. But I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to show how it was possible to turn our ideas into practice on a grassroots level.

  I wanted to create a counter-extremism social movement for Muslim youth that would actually carry our ideas, brand our ideas, popularize our ideas, just as we had done with HT. Ideas, narratives, symbols, and leaders: grassroots democratic culture needed what Islamism had. I wanted to create a radical civic force in society that would intimidate politicians into democratizing society, just as Islamism had intimidated them into Islamisizing society. And I wanted to seed this work in a country that by 2010 everyone had given up on: Pakistan.

  Pakistan, my old country of wandering Sufi mystics, where every woman is a Sohni and every man her hero, my old country of technicolored food and beautiful literature, my old country of original folk music, qawwals, and the most majestic voice, my old country of sharp wit, industrial ambition, and intense passion. Despite all your trials and tribulations, your people soldier on though they are told by all that they will fail, they soldier on against disaster, war, corruption, and poverty, because within them is a resilient spirit, an innovative flair and a fierce desire to live, to survive, and to prove to the world that they will stand up and be counted. Forgive me. Forgive me for I once went to weaken you even more, but through all your resilience I can now help with the cure. And so I went. I went to do what I could; fighting the very virus I had helped to sow deep within your veins. Fatima had inflamed within me a desire to discover you once more.

  Since the US invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s troubles with extremism had gone from bad to worse. The Taliban had taken over vast swaths of the country in the north, suicide bombings were a daily occurrence, and the Islamist ideology was fast overtaking its rivals in gaining the attention of the country’s youth. This sad state of affairs is best exemplified by the ruthless assassination of Punjab’s governor Salmaan Taseer in 2011, followed shortly after by the killing of minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti. Thousands of people came out onto the streets in celebration of Salmaan Taseer’s murder, merely because he dared to suggest reform to the country’s colonial-era blasphemy laws. As a final crippling wound, Salmaan Taseer’s son was kidnapped by Islamist extremists seeking to exchange him for his father’s convicted assassin. The true depth of Pakistan’s problem finally began to be witnessed by all.

  Throughout this period, Hizb al-Tahrir had been busy recruiting inside Pakistan’s army. The army had made a series of HT-related arrests. In August 2011, friendly Uncle Qayyum, now a committed HT ideologue, was picked up by Pakistan’s mil
itary intelligence and was held for nine months during which, he states, he was severely beaten. Dr. Qayyum has since released a statement. Like me, he claims that regardless of the consequences he openly admitted to his interrogators that he was a member of Hizb al-Tahrir. Ammar had been visiting with Rabia when Uncle Qayyum was picked up, and I couldn’t help but blame myself for once again exposing my son to the brutal side of the “War on Terror.” Matters were getting out of control; the country desperately needed a counternarrative.

  Fatima had always tried hard to show me the other side of Pakistan, the side that I had either tried to destroy for so long or had never seen within my hard-core of Islamist circles. She reintroduced me to Pakistani music, indigenous poetry, literature, and history. As she spoke, memories of the days before it all went so horribly wrong would flicker in my mind: memories of Tai Ammi sitting by my bed reading those enigmatic stories, memories of my dad’s devotion to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s legendary qawwali music, and memories of a distressed young Abi drying her bullied child’s tears: “They’re calling you a Paki, so what? Tell them you’re proud to be a Paki.” Through Fatima’s words it finally all began to make sense: Abi had been telling me to proudly reclaim my identity.

  All those years earlier, Abi was trying to guide me to do exactly what the early American rappers had done: Yeah, we’re Niggaz With Attitude, and if you don’t like it, fuck all y’all! Is my culture British, Pakistani, Arab, Muslim? It’s all of those, and none of the above. I am what the hell I want to be, I will reclaim as mine whatever I feel like, and if you don’t like it, fuck all y’all!

  Fatima and I decided that everyday Pakistanis needed to reclaim Pakistan and Islam as their own. They needed to reintroduce a brave new Pakistan to the world, the Pakistan of survivors, the Pakistan of fighters, and we would do what we could to help the country achieve this. In doing so, our fight was with those who had hijacked both our religion and our country. As always, the romanticism of struggle.

  So it was that we founded “Khudi” Pakistan: a Muslim Brotherhood equivalent for democratic culture. I launched the idea from one of the world’s most prestigious global platforms for thought leaders, TEDGlobal in Edinburgh. The starting point for Khudi was the work I had done in Pakistan with HT. I had seen for myself, and through my own efforts, how ideas and groups could flourish and set the intellectual standard for young people. The message was wrong, I knew that now, but maybe the tactics were right. Perhaps we could use the methods of the Islamist groups to create a counter-Islamist movement, to do da’wah for the democratic culture?

  Since its inception, Pakistan has never had a social movement (outside of politics) to champion democratic culture. When I say outside of politics, I mean it’s never given voice to the values that underpin democracy on a non-partisan basis. Democracy is more than just an electoral process: it’s about the culture associated with it. Without freedom of belief one cannot set up whichever party one so chooses. Without freedom of association one cannot join that party. Without freedom of speech, one cannot campaign for that party. Without human rights one cannot run opposition parties without fear of imprisonment. Democracy must, by necessity, be more than just elections. These ideas need to be embedded within any democracy for it to function properly: there needs to be a democratic culture to tie everything together.

  Groups like HT chipped away at this culture. Among the young population in particular, there was no appetite for these democratic values. There were plenty of people out there promoting the opposite—and those extreme beliefs carried a certain caché. Being a young democrat, by contrast, wasn’t trendy. It was in danger of becoming an outdated brand that no one wanted to be associated with. If that process continued, then as these generations got older and took power, democracy in countries like Pakistan was in danger of eroding away.

  This was a bold new idea that no one had ever attempted before. No one had considered turning the tables on Islamist groups by using their methods for democratic ends. It sounds strange, but I looked at organizations such as Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank for inspiration. In the space of less than a decade, Hamas had managed to overtake the Palestine Liberation Organization as the main source of power in Palestine. They had put down roots in the younger population in a way that the PLO was unable to counter.

  The basis of Hamas’s rise to power was in their clear and powerful message. They also promoted this message through values-based welfare work, providing services like schooling and social relief. They were able to instill their ideas not just through sloganeering and campaigning but also through getting involved in the very fabric of society. What I wanted to achieve with Khudi in Pakistan was this, but for democratic culture. As the wise poet Rumi said: “Like Noah, my thoughts turned to starting a huge, foolish project, and it made absolutely no difference what people would think of me.”

  Khudi is an Urdu word originating from Persia. Used in the poetry of the famous South Asian poet Allama Iqbal and popularized by Pakistan’s first major celebrity rock band, Junoon, the word roughly translates as self-empowerment or self-esteem. Using Islamist tactics again, I designed Khudi, ironically like al-Qaeda, to be an umbrella organization, under which existing groups and campaigners could coalesce and pool resources. I knew we needed a powerful and committed leadership to kick-start the group. My choice was obvious; by now I was convinced it was the reason God worked to make her approach me that day: Fatima Mullick became the first national coordinator of Khudi. We now needed to identify the best youth activists, recruit them, and form our first leadership committee.

  In 2009, with a BBC camera crew in tow, and a security team watching out for attempts on my life, I embarked on a national counter-extremism tour of Pakistan, speaking at over twenty-two universities from Islamabad to Karachi, from Quetta to Kashmir. I used this tour to identify and recruit the leaders for Khudi. Across Pakistan, Fatima and I met thousands of frustrated young students, and through our interaction with them we carefully selected those who we saw could lead the way. This team manages two offices inside Pakistan, a network of thousands of volunteers, and has attracted tens of thousands of online subscribers to Khudi.

  Fatima and I began to travel as frequently as possible to Pakistan to train this core group in building a movement. We laid out the basic idea and ethos with them, gave them the vision, set up the structure, and began to organize activities: student debates, a nationwide student magazine, democratic interventions with student wings of the various political parties, clean-up initiatives, media interviews, academic and political lobbying. Soon the name of Khudi began to spread across Pakistan.

  Still focused on the need to reclaim Pakistan, we helped to set up the first International Youth Conference and Festival (IYCF) in the country. At this time, fewer and fewer people were willing to travel to Pakistan. Our aim was to try to help reintroduce Pakistan to the world, and to reintroduce the world to Pakistan. Having previously spoken at Google’s Zeitgeist annual thought-leaders conference, I called some friends at Google and we managed to persuade Google’s leadership to come to Pakistan and address our IYCF conference. This was the first time Google had ever sent an official delegation to Pakistan, including YouTube’s then head of news and politics, Steve Grove, and from Google’s philanthropy side, Jay Boren.

  We also managed to bring in speakers such as Susan Gordon from the Facebook platform “Causes” and Marc Koska. Marc had invented the non-reusable disposable syringe, saving many lives in the process. At the top of our list, and to introduce Pakistan to her, I called in my friend, the godmother to activists, Stephanie Rudat. For a while, Stephanie had been working to coordinate and train democracy movements globally. She had been involved in the founding of the Alliance of Youth Movements and now ran a similar platform called ThinkConsortium. We wanted Pakistani youth to feel part of the global picture: the more plugged in they felt to that, the less isolated and susceptible to Islamism they would be. The conference was a maj
or success.

  As was expected, some people weren’t so receptive. Islamist groups in particular didn’t take kindly to what they perceived as a traitor coming in to campaign against them. The threat that Ed and I had encountered in Denmark is just as real in Pakistan. Right from the word go, we had to be extremely careful about our security.

  The importance of this hit home, literally, during one of my trips. I was in Lahore, on the second leg of my national universities tour. After a long day of campaigning, I had slipped out on my own to a cafe for a coffee and shisha. I happened to pick one that was a meeting point for Pakistani members of HT.

  As I was drinking my coffee, an HT enthusiast came to sit down next to me, uninvited, and started talking about “the Khilafah.” I humored the guy for a while, but he didn’t take the hint and leave.

  “Look,” I said, “you’re clearly from Hizb al-Tahrir. I’m afraid I am not interested. I am just here to drink my coffee.”

  At this point, the guy started staring at me. “Hang on,” he said, “you’re Maajid Nawaz, aren’t you? You’re that guy who is going round the universities, shouting his mouth off about us.”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “I am. But I’m really not here to cause trouble. All I want to do is have a coffee.”

  By this point, two others came to sit at my table.

  “This is him,” the first one explained. “The one I was telling you about.”

  “OK,” I said. “I’m really just here to have a coffee. It’s eleven at night, and I’ve been working all day . . .”

  “Yeah,” one of the men said. “Working to spread your lies about us.”

  This wasn’t good. “Who is the person in charge here?” I asked. The trio indicated another man, on his own in a corner. “All right,” I said. “I’m going to go over and say ‘assalaamu alaykum’ to him, and then I’m going to leave. I don’t want to offend anyone here.”