by Maajid Nawaz
I walked over to the man in the corner. His name was Tayyab Muqeem, a British Pakistani who, like me all those years ago, had come to Pakistan to help recruit for HT. His inroad into Pakistan was through teaching English via the British Council—a common HT technique that Nasim used to set up HT in Bangladesh. Muqeem had managed to get himself appointed as head of English at a private university called Superior College.
I held out my hand to him. He refused to take it, saying instead, “If you don’t get the fuck out of here right now, I am going to knock you out.”
Startled, I persisted, “I’m just trying to shake your hand. I only came over to tell you that I’m not here to cause any trouble.”
I heard a scraping of chairs behind me, and looked around to see those same three men get up and walk over. Everything happened so fast. Before I could work out what was going on, Muqeem took advantage of the fact that I had turned away. He stood up and hit me on the side of the face. Caught completely off guard, I found myself falling to the floor. As I went over, I caught a glass, which shattered in shards all around me. Ever the stubborn one, I stood up again immediately to face Muqeem, extending my hand a second time. “I’m not here to fight,” I said. At that point, before it could go any further, the cafe owner stepped in and ushered Muqeem out.
Since that incident, I have been far more careful in Pakistan. So far no similar attacks have occurred. But the fact that the menace is there shows how threatened the Islamists feel about our campaign. It is still early days in the country, but we now have an organization that boasts two permanent offices, chapters in every major city, and a network of volunteers across the country. In the short time Khudi has been up and running, we have already taken some great strides. Changing a culture is not an overnight process.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I Will See Your Day When It Comes
In London we had founded Quilliam as a hub to inspire the counternarrative globally. In Pakistan we had founded Khudi as a practical example of what can be done; but ever restless, I wasn’t satisfied. If the inspiration for Khudi was the franchise model of the Muslim Brotherhood, then I would need to franchise it to other countries. Just as Islamism had spread across the Arab world and throughout Muslim-majority societies, we needed the democratic culture to be oblivious to borders. As word began to spread, emails requesting guidance from young democratic activists in war-torn countries who had seen my TED talk began to arrive. Youth began to reach out to us from Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia; I traveled to Nigeria, India, and Bangladesh, where our advice was needed to prevent further HT infiltration of their military.
It felt odd, even surreal, to be going to Bangladesh—the country where I knew Nasim had founded HT—and to be working directly against the fruits of his labor. I was now using everything I had learned from Nasim against him. Even Europe, after England’s youth riots of 2011 and widespread unrest in Greece, looked as if it could do with such a movement. But I knew we couldn’t expand too fast. We had to take it slowly, carefully, and strategically. What mattered most was to instill clarity in the idea and set up a strong, experienced team. Our answer to how and where to set up next was looking clearer, as with Pakistan, due to another childhood association in my mind, my father’s work in Libya.
One of the senior activists and analysts at Quilliam is Noman Benotman. Noman is a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), and back in the 1980s he fought alongside Osama bin Laden against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviets withdrew, bin Laden called a meeting of his Arab generals to discuss what to do next. It was at this meeting that bin Laden declared his wishes to turn the war against the West. Most of the generals agreed to follow him. The exception was Noman; he told bin Laden that this was crazy. He said that he’d come to fight the Russians, not to kill civilians. He felt they should be focusing on rebuilding the country they’d fought for, not attacking the West.
Noman and his troops returned to Libya. He then entered a process of demilitarizing the group and acted as the conduit between the LIFG and the Gaddafi government. He struck a deal with Saif Gaddafi whereby the group would renounce violence in return for their members being released en masse from Libya’s prisons. He worked to guide his former group through their own process of de-radicalization, eventually encouraging them to write books recanting their old jihadist philosophy. In many ways, Noman was a kindred spirit.
When the Arab Spring swept into Libya, Noman was in Tripoli and in a difficult position. Here was someone who had been working to disarm the LIFG and had made promises to Saif Gaddafi to do so; now, however, there was an urgent need for the same people to re-arm. Would they return to their old jihadist ways, or would they fall into place under a popular leadership? Noman knew that the right place to be was on the people’s side, and Quilliam lent our weight to the people’s campaign in Libya.
As Gaddafi’s forces were marching to crush Benghazi, Noman rushed back to London and opened Quilliam’s front against Gaddafi’s regime. In back-to-back media interviews we exposed Gaddafi’s crimes and urged Western support for the Libyan people. We used the contacts we had made through Quilliam’s work with the government to put Noman in touch with the air campaign. Noman had access to information on the ground in Libya, which he was able to pass on, and senior members of the RAF would call upon us for advice and analysis as the campaign progressed. Noman was one of the key figures behind encouraging the former head of Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, to defect, and was the first to break the news.
Understandably, our activities attracted the wrath of Gaddafi’s regime; they even hacked our computer system in an effort to stop us. Following the fall of Gaddafi, Noman has been working with Libyans to help them shape their new government. He is close to his former comrades in the Islamist militia and is crucial as a stabilizing force between these competing factions. Keen to continue his post-conflict work, Noman maintains ties with Libyan jihadists globally, even those currently held in Iraq’s jails, in an effort to convince as many as he can about the need to democratize Libya.
But for any new government to succeed, what is eventually needed in Libya is an injection of civic ideals and democratic culture. Libya has been under a dictatorship for so long that it is completely lacking in any experience of democracy. It is tough for civic values to flower in such arid conditions, and the danger of sliding back toward the familiarity of a more autocratic regime is a real one. True to the Islamist model that inspired me, I began dreaming of franchising our Khudi-style movement to Arab nations. Pakistan was once again beginning to export positive political ideas. The months and years ahead will tell how far we can push this model globally, but the romanticism of struggle remains ever alive in our hearts.
And then there was Egypt. Out of all the countries where the Arab uprisings occurred in 2011, it is Egypt, perhaps unsurprisingly, that I took closest interest in. From my time in prison I have kept my unusual mix of contacts. My lawyer during the trial, Ahmed Saif, had been a founding member of Kifayah. He was there at the beginning, when you could count the number of protesters on one hand, and their protests were seen as a laughingstock. In my work for Quilliam, I had come across the leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that first sparked Egypt’s anti-Mubarak protests. Again, no one had taken them seriously when they announced at a 2010 Alliance of Youth Movements conference in New York that they would lead a revolution against Mubarak.
So when everything began to come together on January 25, 2011, and the protests started to spiral, I was on the edge of my seat in anticipation. I was quick to do what I could to help the revolution. A crucial factor in how things developed was going to be the reaction of the West. President Mubarak had always enjoyed support from being a close ally of the United States and its allies. If Mubarak received their support now, it would be that much more difficult to dislodge him. If the West stood back however, then his position would become untenable.
We helped get the protesters’ message out and into the Western media. I wanted people to know that this was a movement led by liberal, young Egyptians. They were not instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was important that Mubarak wasn’t portrayed as the lesser of two evils: for too long the argument had been that yes, he was autocratic and unpleasant, but rather that than the extremist alternative. What the Egyptian protests showed was something new and exciting—a third way of genuine people power: radical democracy. It’s what we’d been arguing was possible for a long time. That was why it was so important that they succeeded: at a stroke it undermined the old dichotomy of secular dictatorship or Islamist rule.
I was quick to reconnect with the likes of Ayman Nour, the liberal leader who had told me to “grow up” in Mazrah Tora prison. I arranged for him to appear live with me on al-Jazeera to make the protesters’ case.
I coordinated with the April 6 revolutionaries with their message for Western media. Quilliam sent out a number of press releases, endorsing the protesters’ demands, and reminding the media of my own story, and how despotic the Mubarak regime could be. Mubarak, beware the prayer of the oppressed! For the first time I really understood the potential of Twitter. Every time I tweeted a link or a comment, I got calls from journalists who were following me, wanting an interview.
I then got in touch with Mona el-Tewahy, a US-based Egyptian American, a former journalist turned activist. Both of us were in contact with protesters in Tahrir Square, and I felt a consistent voice in the Western media was needed to put forward their cause; we began trying to coordinate our response. What followed was a nonstop cycle of media appearances and newspaper interviews, phone conversations and articles. I was delivering body blow after body blow to Mubarak through the press, the corridors of government, and in the court of public opinion. I became a regular face on CNN, Bloomberg, Sky News, and the BBC; I wrote opinion pieces for The Times and the Wall Street Journal. And I tweeted, of course, relentlessly.
The success of our campaign had not gone amiss; former President Bush eventually invited me to his home in Texas to share my thoughts on the future of Egypt. We had that delicate conversation about the definition of torture that opens this book. My green backpack moment had finally come for Hosni Mubarak, and this time it was through our democratic advocacy that we were bringing down the bully.
I wasn’t naive enough to believe that a liberal regime would take power when the post-Mubarak elections were held. It was always clear that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to capitalize on the uprising. It takes time for new political ideas to filter through, and in the meantime democracy means respecting the choice of the people. It would be wrong to see this as an endorsement of Islamism. The Muslim Brotherhood’s success is a bit like how many analysts see the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—not so much a reasserting of US power but an overstretch; and in Egypt, it’s the beginning of the end of its fascination with Islamism. In the long term, now with room to breathe, the younger generation who began this uprising will move on to create other movements and inspire new trends, beyond Islamism. Already, reform wings and breakaway youth factions from the larger Islamist groups are emerging. Islamism is not the future. In time, people will realize how it is part of the past, the old order.
My prayers, our prayers, in Mazrah Tora that Mubarak see justice were finally answered. Ya Mubarak hashoof feeka yawm, “I will see your day when it comes,” was a regularly invoked phrase by many of those oppressed prisoners. It was a dream that kept us alive in the desert heat. For Mubarak to be swept from power was one thing; for him to be arrested was another. But for him to be put on trial, wearing those same white clothes, sitting in the same cage we were held in, and sent to the same prison that we were jailed in: that was something else. Mubarak, his two sons Alaa’ and Gemal, and his interior minister Habib al-Adly, all ended up in Mazrah Tora prison. Divine intervention, call it what you will. But my Lord is just. He never fails me.
Seeing Mubarak in that cage was a cathartic moment. It brought it all back—the torture, the injustice, the wasted years of my early twenties. It was hard not to be moved. I felt a whirl of emotions: delight and sadness, victory and closure, vengeance and inner peace, all at the same time. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an element of revenge in there, but it was revenge of a righteous variety: a just one. Mubarak’s defeat had not come about through violence, not like Gaddafi. The supposed “strongman” of Egypt had not been taken down in a hail of bullets, or by a suicide bombing, or by an HT-inspired military coup. It had been achieved by peaceful, democratic means. By people pouring out onto the streets and having the courage to stand together. And I had played my part.
I remembered, too, how the Islamists reacted when I left HT: the way that the ideas I had been espousing through Quilliam and then Khudi had been criticized and ridiculed. At once, all my friends had turned on me, and I lost so much. Apostate, I was called. Hypocrite. Traitor. Sell-out. The people will rise up to prove how wrong you are, I was told. I looked at Mubarak facing justice and thought: the people did rise up, just not for Islamism. The small democratic spark that ignited our hearts all those years back in Mazrah Tora, with Ahmed Saif and the Kifayah movement, with Sa’ad el-Din Ibrahim and Ayman Nour, had finally engulfed the streets of Egypt. The radical alternative is here to stay, and whenever I think about it, a small smile flickers across my face.
POSTSCRIPT
On July 23, 2011, the day after the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik had committed his appalling massacre, I was waiting for my train home after work. On the platform, a man was racially abusing a helpless old grandmother in a hijab, walking with her young grandchildren. “Go back to your own country! This is England, we don’t want you Muslims here!” he shouted at the terrified family. England had been tense. The anti-Muslim English Defense League had been on the rise, and Breivik had just taken their reasoning a step further. Now there was this man terrifying Muslim children in front of me on the train platform. Perhaps it was the freshness of what Breivik had done, perhaps it was the visage of cowering children in headscarves and the memories of Bosnia, perhaps it was everything—my entire life—that flashed before me then. Whatever it was, I found myself instantly transported back to the Essex of my teenage years. Memories of “Paki-bashings” came flooding back, and I saw nothing but Mickey standing before me. I hurtled toward this man in a rage, my voice bellowing out expletives and my eyes a tale of fury. In an instant the racist bully was transformed into a spectacle of fear. I didn’t even need to lift a hand—he teetered away meekly in the hope that all could be forgotten. The family thanked me graciously, but as I started walking home, my hands began to tremble.
After all that’s happened, this is not over. The cycle of hatred is coming back around. Time hadn’t healed me. Somewhere deep inside me lurked a menace, and it took a trivial racist incident to bring it all back out. That scared me, and it took me awhile sitting alone at home to resume my composure. “Much remains to be done,” I thought. But the question of what was playing on my mind.
As I pondered my next move, my thoughts turned to my son Ammar. I try to teach him what basic football skills I can offer whenever I manage to get access from his mother to see him. I smile every time he cheers on Liverpool FC, just as his father had done over two decades earlier. You can be whatever you want to be, Ammar. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. Returning again to the world he would be raised in, I thought of the work that lay ahead.
“But how much more can I do before I’m too old to be running around like this?” I asked.
“Maajid, you’re only thirty-four. You have a whole life ahead of you to consider such things,” Fatima laughingly reassured me. “Right now the movement you’re building needs your support. It won’t grow just like that.”
“Yes, perhaps you’re right,” I said. “Maybe my next move can wait till I hit forty-two.”
Here I am, back in Mecca. I am still travelling, trying to broaden my mind, for I’ve seen too much of the damage narrow-mindedness can make of things, and when I return home . . . I will devote what energies I have to repairing the damage.
—MALCOLM X (1925–65)
LETTER TO JAMES FARMER
EPILOGUE
2013: IDEAS ARE BULLETPROOF
Following the release of the UK version of Radical, I wrote this letter to a former leadership member of Hizb al-Tahrir who had left the group after extensive discussions with me:
Dear _________
I wanted to tell you something: you often ask how I have time to do so much and make sure all the loose ends are met. Please know, I don’t have time. I am forced to prioritize. And I have prioritized you above other things in my life, as I did that day when you came to see me in London, and when I was meant to see my son.
I’m telling you this because I want you to know the reason I prioritize you. It’s simple. I believe. I believe in what we must do together to make Europe, and the world, a better place. I believe in redemption. I believe that change is the only possible hope for Muslims in Europe to advance, and progress, and the only way for Muslims in Muslim-majority countries to become unstuck and to advance along with the world’s nations, is to debunk this Islamist deadweight that has dragged us Muslims down to the status of the world’s problem, rather than examples for mankind.
I wanted to thank you, for having the sincerity to pursue my arguments to the end, and for having the courage to take a bold and brave step and allow yourself space to discover new thoughts. Your country, and hopefully your region, will be a far better place with you in it.