Radical Read online

  RADICAL

  RADICAL

  My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

  MAAJID NAWAZ

  WITH TOM BROMLEY

  Copyright © 2013 by Maajid Nawaz

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout artist: Melissa Evarts

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nawaz, Maajid.

  Radical : my journey out of Islamist extremism / Maajid Nawaz ; with Tom Bromley.

  pages cm

  E- ISBN 978-0-7627-9551-2

  1. Nawaz, Maajid. 2. Muslims—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Extremists—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Islamic fundamentalism—Great Britain. I. Title.

  BP166.14.F85N38 2013

  297.092—dc23

  [B]

  2013017848

  For my family, my son, and for all my friends.

  And for those with whom I started a movement.

  The moving finger writes, and having written moves on.

  Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

  —OMAR KHAYYAM, RUBA’IYAT

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface to the US Edition

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Part One: B-Boy

  One: Memories of the Ghost Train

  Two: This Game’s Not for Pakis

  Three: The Doctor Who Said “Fuck tha Police”

  Four: The Stranger Stabbed for Me

  Five: The Green Backpack with No Bomb

  Six: When Babri Mosque Fell in India

  Seven: A Land Where Fetuses Are Cut from Wombs

  Part Two: Islamist

  Eight: An Islamist Takeover

  Nine: 12,000 Muslims Screaming “Khilafah”

  Ten: Servant of the Compeller

  Eleven: The Womb That Bore Me

  Twelve: A Show of Hands to Harden the Heart

  Thirteen: The Romanticism of Struggle

  Fourteen: Dreams of a Nuclear Caliphate

  Fifteen: Caliphs in Copenhagen

  Sixteen: The Polemic

  Seventeen: Welcome to Egypt: We Do As We Please

  Eighteen: The Ghimamah Has No Rules

  Nineteen: Number Forty-two

  Twenty: Assalaamu Alaykum, You’ve Just Come out of Hell

  Twenty-One: The Luxury of an Audience

  Twenty-Two: The Penguin Is Hit by Slippers

  Twenty-Three: “Monocracy”

  Part Three: Radical

  Twenty-Four: Where the Heart Leads, the Mind Can Follow

  Twenty-Five: No Right to Silence

  Twenty-Six: How Many Years Did You Fail?

  Twenty-Seven: Civil-Democratic Intimidation

  Twenty-Eight: The Decade-Late Apology

  Twenty-Nine: Monkeys in a Zoo

  Thirty: Visiting No. 10

  Thirty-One: Khudi Pakistan

  Thirty-Two: I Will See Your Day When It Comes

  Postscript

  Epilogue: Ideas Are Bulletproof

  Glossary of Arabic Terms

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  PREFACE TO THE US EDITION

  Being American

  If there is one identity today that is as misunderstood as being Muslim, let that be the American identity. And just as few religions are as mischaracterized by Americans today as Islam, few other groups mischaracterize America today as much as the world’s Muslims. Matters, to put it quite simply, have come to a head. Radical, as well as being a factual and candid account of my life thus far, is an act of diplomacy dressed in the disguise of storytelling.

  The story in this book is one of a Western-born Muslim who first found his voice of rebellion through a heady diet of American hip-hop, graffiti, and dance. The first part of Radical tracks my conversion from B-boy to Islamist—the gradual yet complete ideological transformation of a disillusioned young British teenager to a hardened Islamist recruiter. I came to live—and was prepared to die—to counter what I saw as American hegemony on a global scale.

  In righteous indignation I traveled to four different countries to seed my divisive Islamist message, casting America as the enemy of “my people.” Fusing faith with fury, I dedicated my entire youth to awakening what we called “the sleeping giant”—rousing the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims against the USA. My charge was halted only upon my 2002 incarceration in Egypt for inciting Egyptians against Hosni Mubarak’s US-allied dictatorial regime. I’d never wanted vengeance more than during those first few days following our arrest. I’d never felt more violent than those few days immediately after our torture. But mine was exactly the sort of mind, or more accurately the sort of heart, that America needs to hear from now. Radical addresses the reader in the voice of that young man, bringing the reader as close to his heart—across time and distance—as is possible through the medium of prose.

  Despite my aggressively “anti-West” stance, it was, ironically, American subculture (through hip-hop) that first lent me a voice, first taught me to rebel, and first inspired in me a sense of self-worth. While this was totally lost on me at the time, I owe my very political awakening to America. It was American subculture that laid the foundations for me to reject “the West” entirely—and this too was done through an entirely Western discourse.

  In this way, I have come to believe that a strange fetish exists between the hater and the hated. It is a relationship that the hater will do everything in vain to deny, yet one he cannot quite shed. It is also a relationship that the object of hate will act incredulous to, yet cannot quite help but to douse with fuel on occasion. And what was lost upon us all was that by defining ourselves against something, we were in fact defining ourselves by it.

  The ideology of Islamism could have benefited greatly from this insight—that it was born, and flourished, in this hatred of “the other.” During my time in Cairo’s Mazrah Tora prison, I happened to share a cell block with the current global leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Muhammad Badee’. In a poetic twist of fate reminiscent of Joseph’s rise to power after his own imprisonment in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood now rules Egypt while the former dictator Hosni Mubarak is held in that very same prison.

  During our prison years Dr. Badee’ and I struck up a friendship. He told me that it was he who had originally smuggled Sayyid Qutb’s Islamist manifesto—Milestones—out from that very prison to the wider public in the early 1960s. Qutb was the founding father of modern-day, militant Islamism, otherwise known as Jihadism. Qutb was eventually executed by Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser in 1966, but the Islamist ideology of Milestones outlasted the legacy of Nasser’s Pan-Arabism, going on to inspire hundreds of thousands of Islamists the world over. It directly inspired bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who used Milestones to form the philosophical foundations of al-Qaeda.

  Qutb’s journey toward a more aggressive, anti-Ame
rican dogma in fact began after his two-year sabbatical to 1940s America. How ironic, the history of Islamist vitriol was inextricably linked to the object of our hate—the USA. Some of the most influential figures in our ideological journey had defined themselves against America. It was as if she were a fraternal twin, one whom we hated yet had no choice but to acknowledge. In this way, America has a curious history with Muslim extremism. From the reverse racism of Malcolm X’s early days in the Nation of Islam (a movement that—through Public Enemy—inspired me during my teenage years) to Qutb and Islamism, America had inadvertently bred her own worst enemies, her strongest codependents.

  Qutb was so disillusioned by his own inability to integrate with 1940s America, and presumably hurt by the common assumption that he was African American, that it seems to have inspired within him deep shame and embarrassment, provoking in him the crudest of prejudice. After this trip, which included time at Stanford University, Qutb returned to Egypt and published The America that I Saw, an exercise in blind bigotry the likes of which would make even today’s most committed Islamists cringe:

  The American appears to be so primitive in his outlook on life and its humanitarian aspects that it is puzzling to the observer . . . a primitiveness that reminds one of the days when man lived in jungles and caves.

  It’s astonishing to read this from someone with an otherwise keen mind. Qutb vented against the racism he experienced in 1940s America without it occurring to him once that he was playing into this very same, and rather ignoble, racial stereotyping:

  The American is primitive in his artistic taste, both in what he enjoys as art and in his own artistic works. “Jazz” music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. The American’s intoxication by “jazz” music does not reach its full completion until the music is accompanied by singing that is just as coarse and obnoxious as the music itself.

  The book was a bigoted tour de force on everything from American men’s hairstyles and their proclivity for developing “oxen” arm muscles, to the nature of American women:

  [T]he American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.

  Inspired by the prejudice he felt, Qutb’s remedy was only more prejudice. This would be laughable, if it were not so consequential and so dangerous: his observations went on to directly inspire modern-day jihadist terrorism. And here is the ugly truth of the matter: al-Qaeda’s quest to fell the Twin Towers had its intellectual genesis in this man’s two-year sabbatical at Stanford University in the 1940s.

  I feel for American Muslims who are often stuck between a rock and a hard place: “America or Islam,” “the West or the Muslim World.” The fact is that the opposite of America is simply not Islam, nor is it the so-called Muslim World.

  Even in geographical terms, in this age of citizenship and freedom of religion it is no longer relevant—if indeed it ever was—to perpetuate this simplistic binary. It’s steeped in a medieval legacy that the “Christian West” and the “Islamic East” are irrevocably opposed. In the “East” there are many Christians—20 percent of Egypt’s population, in fact—as well as other religions. It follows that Egypt is not a “Muslim Country” but a republic, a country for all Egyptians. Likewise, there are more Muslims in China, Russia, India, and Europe than there are in a number of Middle-Eastern countries. In contemporary times there is more freedom of worship and economic opportunity for Muslims born and raised as Western citizens than there exists for their counterparts in many Muslim-majority countries.

  The “Islamic World” is not some geographic bloc “over there.” Like all other religions, Islam is now as at home in the globalized West as anywhere else. There is no homogenous “Islamic World.” There is only, if we must use a religious descriptor at all, Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. In introducing themselves, Muslims would not lead with the fact that they are Muslim. Just as being Christian—or Jewish, or any religious marker—is not what others would lead with. There is no monolithic “Muslim culture.” Despite this, and for ideological reasons, extremists on both sides seek to perpetuate an illusionary dichotomy; they falsely juxtapose a highly charged and politicized Muslim religious identity with an incomparable Western one. What better way to create an Islamist superstate than to exclusively define Muslims against everyone else?

  I have been both victim to, and the propagator of, the crudest of these stereotypes. And it is no longer the case that such narratives are confined to the extremes. Just as anti-Muslim hatred has risen of late across the world, anti-American prejudice has rocketed, too. Fueled by a cocktail of unfortunate policy decisions, an ill-informed use of language (such as Bush’s use of the word “crusade” to launch his war after 9/11), Hollywood and right-wing myths, and Islamist groups grinding their ideological axes, America’s reputation over Middle East policy is at an all-time low.

  Hatred of “the other” thrives on myths and stereotypes. The sad reality is that Americans and Muslims mutually spread some of the crudest of these stereotypes, about each other and among each other. And even though the America-or-Islam juxtaposition is false, the peddlers of prejudice have no chance of gaining power unless they succeed in pushing it. It only benefits them to encourage this dichotomy.

  During the course of my efforts to challenge Islamist extremism among Muslims, I have been told that Americans are Islamophobic, ignorant, arrogant, loud, lazy, wasteful, selfish, godless, fundamentalist, promiscuous, racist, isolationist, and imperialist. Muslims often overlook the fact that these very pejoratives are used to describe them, too. It is further lost on them that by excluding Islam as one element of being American, they dis-empower their fellow American Muslims whom they purport to care so much about.

  America and Islam are both so much more complex than this. Alas, these days it takes a radical to state such things openly.

  I played my part in creating and spreading such prejudice. As an antidote of sorts I present Radical, an effort to recount the disenchantment that formed my early years and to retrace the steps I took to spread the very prejudice I claimed I was fighting. By following my voice as it develops, you will feel the pain and confusion as I grew into a committed Islamist revolutionary—in some cases you will even feel the anger. I think it’s important to feel, not merely know, why young Muslims like me—and there will be many more—choose this collision path. It is the only way that we can fumble our way forward. But the third part of my story is even more important—how I pulled away from extremist thought. I hope reading Radical will help the retreat from this downward spiral of antagonism and enmity.

  Having served in the same prison that originally held Qutb, and having broken bread with the man who smuggled out his jihadist manifesto, I had come to feel a connection with Qutb and his journey to America. It was with this in mind that after my very own journey to America, having been invited to testify on extremism before the US Senate, I posted an online video in direct response to Qutb’s message.(Link)

  My message was also called “The America that I Saw,” and its aim was to highlight some of the basic inconsistencies in Qutb’s observations of American society. I noted that it was these same personal freedoms he so despised that allowed Muslims to build their own places of worship in the United States. I also noted that the disgust so often aroused in fundamentalists by what they consider “sexually permissive” practices is really disgust at what is aroused in themselves; and the fight to stamp out such behavior is, in fact, a fight against their own passions.

  Radical is a longer, fuller effort made by me to break down such generalizations on both
sides. Through the course of this story, the reader will find me on either side of this false juxtaposition. I have defended Islam as essentially a religion of peace in New York against Islam critic and women’s rights commentator Ayan Hirsi Ali,(Link) yet when asked to choose a side for an Oxford Union debate about the American dream, I decided to stand among a predictably anti-American European crowd in order to defend America.(Link)

  I did so despite having once despised America and wanting to see her brought low. I did so despite having fought against and then fallen prey to Bush’s War on Terror. I did so because I knew that no matter how far we had drifted from noble intentions and lofty principles, the abuse of principle is not sufficient to render the “dream” itself as flawed. I had no choice but to state clearly that we must not hold the American Dream hostage to neo-conservative foreign policy blunders, just as I had previously argued that terrorism by Muslims should not reflect badly on the faith of Islam itself. Standing there in the prestigious and historic Oxford chamber, I found myself once more inextricably linked to the fate of both Islam and America. I had no choice but to argue for consistency. After all, it was this very ability to distinguish practice from principle that had helped me on my own journey away from Islamist extremism.

  Amidst this protracted affair between Islamists and America, my personal life seems a curious case in point, mirroring the rest of the narrative. During those early days I had been married to—and then divorced by—a member of my former Islamist group that was bent on destroying American hegemony. Sadly, our relationship lasted as long as my belief in my ideology. It took me a good few years to overcome the trauma of the mother of my child leaving me for deeply personal and ideological reasons. I had become an enemy of the cause, a “defender of the West”—whatever that means. I was devastated, and I played my devastation out in an unflattering array of actions. I did not fully trust in relationships nor myself.