UK Islamists heading to Beirut to rally for Bakri

[Originally posted at NOW]

NOW speaks to Anjem Choudary, British protégé of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, who plans to protest the “satans” of the Lebanese army this Friday.

Within the coming 36 hours, a group of European Islamists, including two Britons formerly jailed for solicitation to murder, plan to arrive in Beirut to hold a protest Friday afternoon against the Lebanese authorities’ attempt Tuesday to arrest Tripoli-based cleric, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad.

The group, comprising at least six Britons and one Swedish national, is headed by Anjem Choudary, a former leader of several now-banned British Islamist organizations. Choudary was a protégé of Bakri’s during the latter’s residence in the UK in the 1990s and early 2000s, when he led Hizb ut-Tahrir, among other parties. The other members of the delegation are also followers of Bakri – two, indeed, are his sons, Muhammad Fustuq and Abd al-Rahman Fustuq.

Their plan, according to statements posted by Choudary on his Twitter account, is to rally this Friday at 2pm, either outside the Lebanese Armed Forces headquarters at Yarzeh, or outside the Beirut office of the United Nations in Riad al-Solh Square (the details have yet to be finalized). When NOW spoke to Choudary via telephone Wednesday morning, he said the aims of the “peaceful” protest were four-fold.

“Our main message is, hands off the Muslims in north Lebanon,” Choudary told NOW. “Number two, hands off Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad and his family.”

“Thirdly, we will be condemning the conspiracy of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the Lebanese regime, who have a long history of cooperation,” said Choudary, adding, “I think there’s a man called [Maj. Gen. Abbas] Ibrahim, I forget his name now […] the one in charge of security, this one, I think he’s the one now just arresting people and sending them [to Syria].”

Finally, Choudary told NOW, “Our message will be to call for the sharia [Islamic law] and the khilafa [caliphate]. The only solution for this region, the only time we ever had peace, was when we had the khilafa system. As soon as the British and the French started to support their respective parties, the Druze and the Maronites, a couple of hundred years ago, we never had anything but sectarian strife. So I think it’s about time we went back to the law of God, and implemented it, and I think that is the solution for the whole region, not just Lebanon, but obviously Iraq, and Syria, and other countries in the Middle East.”

It’s unclear how warm a reception the group will get from Lebanese officials upon their arrival either Thursday or Friday morning, particularly at a time when authorities are cracking down on hardline Sunni Islamist movements across the country. While Lebanese law requires the interior ministry’s permission for all public demonstrations, Choudary told NOW his delegation had not obtained such permission and did not plan to seek it.

“We don’t need permission. We don’t recognize the Lebanese government […] so why should we ask permission from people who we don’t believe are legitimate in the first place?” he said.

NOW was unable to get an official reaction from the ministry to the planned demonstration, though an advisor to Interior Minister Nuhad al-Mashnouq, who spoke on condition of anonymity, reiterated that any protest carried out without ministerial approval would be in violation of the law.

Also uncertain is how significant the turnout will be on Friday, assuming the protest does go ahead. Several prominent clerics in Tripoli, including Sheikh Dai al-Islam al-Shahhal and Sheikh Nabil Rahim, told NOW they had not even heard of it. Sheikh Bilal Duqmaq, head of the Read Association, told NOW he doubted the protest would go ahead at all, saying it was merely a media stunt intended to exaggerate Bakri’s limited influence on the ground.

In any case, by Choudary’s own admission, the demonstration is not being coordinated with any established Lebanese parties or movements, being instead initiated “by the extended family of Sheikh [Bakri] and others who we are in contact with,” whom he declined to “put in jeopardy” by naming. When NOW called a Lebanese number provided in one of Choudary’s press releases, a man confirmed there would be no official parties taking part in what was “an independent call by [Bakri’s] supporters.” As soon as NOW asked the man his name, he hung up and subsequently switched off his phone.

Thus, we may not know until Friday afternoon itself what exactly will transpire. Choudary, however, continues to make preparations in the meantime. On Wednesday afternoon, he posted a link on Twitter to readymade placard templates that prospective attendees can print at home. It’s safe to say the slogans, if used, may raise a few eyebrows: “Khilafah For Bilad Ash-Sham [“The Levant”]! Lebanese Army Shiateen [“Satans”]! Shia Raafidah [Rejecters] You Will Pay! Ahlus Sunnah [The Sunnis] On Their Way!”

Nadine Elali contributed reporting.

British liberals should learn from their Arab counterparts

[Originally posted at Left Foot Forward]

Catching up last week on yet another milestone in the sorry emaciation of free expression in Britain, documented in this case by Nick Cohen (who has after all written the book on this), I took to Twitter to quote his elegant synopsis of the problem with far too many of London’s self-styled radicals and insubordinates: “We only challenge religions that won’t hurt us, and governments that won’t arrest us.”

Within seconds, a prominent Lebanese atheist blogger, Gino Raidy, had replied, pointing out the curious and conspicuous fact that the same could not be said of the average disbelieving scribbler in the Arab world.

He’s exactly right. The truth is it seems to be more taboo to criticise Islamism in Britain these days than it is here in Beirut, where it’s taken for granted in liberal circles that theocracy is the enemy (and where, incidentally, the religious bigots are Christians as often as they are Muslims). The takfiris whose “legitimate grievances” right-thinking Britons are so anxious to locate and placate are treated with open contempt by liberal and leftist Arabs, and for very good reason.

It’s not just the proximity to the daily sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq, or the residue of the heady Arab nationalist days when the titanic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser urged Saudi Arabians to revolt against their “reactionary” Wahhabi-Salafist rulers and openly ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is, crucially, that Arabs – who naturally know their own language, culture, and history best – have the least difficulty seeing the Bin Ladenists for the crackpot criminals they are, and consequently have the least inclination to respect them.

Take the recent murder in Woolwich of Private Lee Rigby by two unapologetic Islamists. British jihadism’s savviest self-promoter, the former head of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK franchise and founder of the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri, quickly made headlines by defending one of Rigby’s killers and claiming that, “To people around here [in the Middle East] he is a hero for what he has done.”

One pictures it all too easily: the furious throngs of bearded young men, burning Union Jacks, and bellowing for the infidels to be put to the sword. But there’s a reason Bakri didn’t repeat that claim when I interviewed him for a local publication: none of it happened. There were no demonstrations, no posters plastered on the walls, no festive sweets jubilantly doled out in city squares. Even the fringe militant Islamists, who successfully torched a KFC during the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ furore, made nothing of the occasion.

There was, quite simply, no evidence to suggest anyone in Lebanon felt anything but ordinary shock and disgust.

Yet the impressionable British mujahid-in-the-making two thousand miles away wouldn’t and couldn’t know that (and, incidentally, would have been little enlightened by the BBC’s invitation of Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudary, on to Newsnight to explain that the real victim in Woolwich was the killer, who had only acted in self-defense).

Maajid Nawaz, the former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned liberal democracy activist, writes in his memoir, Radical, of how easily enthralled he and his fellow east Londoners in the 1990s were by the mere fact of Bakri’s being an actual Arab:

“Everyone wanted to see him and hear what he had to say […] Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied shari’ah (Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University.”

Western liberals have for decades permitted themselves to be fooled by these charlatans, even while secular Arabs have consistently and vocally opposed them (some, like the Egyptian Farag Foda and the Algerian Tahar Djaout, paying with their lives for doing so).

Recall that when Salman Rushdie was being vilified by John le Carré and Germaine Greer for the malicious “insult” his novel had been to a “great religion”, no fewer than one hundred Arab literary heavyweights, from Edward Said to Mahmoud Darwish to Adonis to Amin Maalouf, jointly published a book unambiguously rejecting the pro-censorship arguments (let alone the pro-murder ones) and explicitly identifying Rushdie’s cause as their own.

Indeed, in this, they were only following a Middle Eastern tradition identifiable since at least the irreverent poetry of Omar Khayyam, and much revitalized by the intellectual nahda (“awakening”) that flourished in the 19th century, of combating clerical and faith-based stupidity and asserting the superiority of reason and free inquiry. (My favourite example is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, when university students in Beirut boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing by a Christian missionary administration of a Darwinist professor.)

The day can’t come soon enough that Britain’s liberals realize that, so far from extending a hand of “solidarity” to their Arab counterparts by making excuses for religious fundamentalists, they are on the contrary sharpening the daggers of those who are, and have ever been, their great adversaries.

Omar Bakri: Woolwich killer was my student

[Originally posted at NOW]

Tripoli-based Salafist cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri alleged in an interview with NOW on Friday that one of the suspected murderers of a British soldier in Woolwich, London, on Wednesday was a student of his during his time as leader of the now-banned British Islamist party, Al-Muhajiroun.

“I came across [28-year-old Michael Adebolajo] between 2003 and 2004. He used to come and study in [Al-Muhajiroun’s] open circles and seminars, and participate in demonstrations. He was not a member of Al-Muhajiroun but he used to come to our public events,” Bakri told NOW.

Bakri described the British-born convert from Christianity to Islam as a mild-mannered person who did not appear inclined to violence.

“He used to be very quiet, very shy. He used to ask about Islam, about how to pray, how to fast, and he used to ask about the Muslim umma in general. He was not really coming for the sake of carrying out operations, I was shocked when I saw that footage.”

Despite Adebolajo’s affiliation with Al-Muhajiroun – banned by the British government in 2010 for alleged involvement in terrorism – Bakri believes he was acting in an individual capacity, rather than under orders from the group’s members.

“Al-Muhajiroun had schools, colleges, a shari’a court, it was an association, not really a school to train people to fight. And I dissolved it in March 2004. If [violence] is really what I teach people, I have 2,000 Muslims there, so are you saying 2,000 students around the UK are all going to become like Michael? It seems to me he believed in an individual form of Jihad, he was responsible for his own actions and in that footage he stated clearly why he carried out that attack. It was in response to the British foreign policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he made it clear, he was so firm, so courageous.”

“He did not run away from the scene, he stood firm with the blood of that British soldier on his hands, believing he attacked a British soldier who is not a civilian, believing he did it in reaction to what that soldier is involved himself in Afghanistan and Iraq as a part of the Cobra special British forces.”

Bakri added that Adebolajo should not be prosecuted for the killing, which he sees as legitimate.

“I do not condemn what he did. I believe what he did has an Islamic justification, though I maybe [would] not carry [it out] that myself, but people have different opinions, different interpretations.”

Adebolajo was arrested along with 22-year-old Michael Adebowale on suspicion of murdering British soldier Lee Rigby in a dramatic, broad-daylight knife attack.

Bakri, of Syrian birth, was a prominent Islamist cleric in London in the 1990s and early 2000s before being banned from the United Kingdom in 2005, after which he moved to Lebanon.

From Sufism to Salafism: How Tripoli inspired the global Islamist revival

[Originally posted at NOW]

Tucked behind a wall of bushes on the banks of Tripoli’s Abu Ali river, just a hundred meters south of the Crusader fortress, sits a peculiar domed building of white stone plated with chestnut wooden window frames. The Takiyya Mawlawiyya, as it’s called, is in fact a defunct Sufi temple; a 17th-century relic of a departed era in which the mystical brand of Islam was, in many if not most Muslim cities, the predominant one.

Looking at it today, one wouldn’t think it a structure of much historical consequence. Inconvenient to access, it was entirely deserted when NOW paid a visit last Saturday. Though recently renovated with the help of the Turkish government, no street signs declare its existence. It isn’t even on Google Maps.

Yet it was at this very site that, some 130 years ago, the young man who was to become the most influential Islamic thinker of a generation had an experience that permanently shaped his ideas – and, by extension, the Muslim world today.

That man was Muhammad Rashid Rida, born in 1865 in the nearby village of al-Qalamun. After receiving what was, for the time, a fairly radically advanced education in Tripoli (that’s to say, he was taught the new European sciences and languages in addition to the traditional Islamic curriculum,) in his early adulthood he took the not-uncommon step of joining a Sufi order (the Naqshbandi one, to be exact.) Thus it was that he found himself one Friday at the same Takiyya Mawlawiyya, where, as he later recalled, his first sight of the whirling dervishes sent him into an empurpled fury of piety:

“I could not control myself, and stood up in the center of the hall and shouted something like this: ‘O people, or can I call you Muslims! These are forbidden acts, which one has no right either to look at or to pass over in silence, for to do so is to accept them’.”

Abandoning Sufism on the spot, Rida sought the “true” Islam elsewhere, and found it in the reformist movement of the renowned Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh, whom he met in the 1880s during one of the latter’s visits to Tripoli, and of whom he became an ardent disciple. Building on the path first paved by his own mentor, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Abduh argued for a reconciliation of Islam with the European Enlightenment; for an embrace of modern science and technology, of wider education, of accountable government, and of increased rights for non-Muslims, while yet preserving the theocratic institutions of the caliphate and absolute faith in the Qur’an.

Rida followed Abduh to Cairo in 1897, where he began publishing a periodical, al-Manar (the beacon in English.) Though this began as little more than a medium for propagating Abduh’s ideas, as Rida grew older he developed views of his own, and took al-Manar in a distinctly more hardline direction than Abduh would have endorsed. Crucially, whereas Abduh had understood the theological concept of the salaf (ancestors in English) – the companions of the Prophet, traditionally held as the “best” Muslims – metaphorically to mean the great Islamic thinkers across the centuries, Rida took it literally: the only Islam was that of the Prophet’s generation.

Accordingly, he started openly denouncing the “illegitimate innovations” of Shiism and intensifying criticism of Sufis (even, according to one biographer, saying he would have them beheaded if he were in power.) He wrote contemptuously of Christianity. When the Wahhabis conquered the Hejaz in 1925, it was only natural that Rida should have been thrilled, seeing in their unflinching puritanism an admirable return to first principles. The Encyclopedia of Islam describes al-Manar at this time as an “active center of Wahhabi propaganda,” and indeed he was even to make personal contact with Ibn Saud (thus earning him the distinction of being Tripoli’s first Saudi ally.)

Such ferocious reactionism was all the more conspicuous for being so plainly contrary to the spirit of the time. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were generally periods of dramatic liberalization and even secularization in the Arab world. Modernity required laws and governance based on reason, rather than religion, believed many writers (including another Tripolitan, Farah Antun, who was initially a friend of Rida’s before falling out for obvious reasons). Darwin had buried the myths of religion for good, said others. Feminism was gaining ground even among men, and in 1923 a group of Egyptian women led by Huda Shaarawi made history by discarding their veils altogether.

As against all this, Rida was defending concubinage (sex slavery) and polygamy, while calling for a revamped caliphate (the old one having been permanently abolished by Atatürk in 1924) that would put apostates to death. It was in this capacity as champion of the counter-revolution against the Arab Enlightenment (or nahda) that Rida was to inspire the next generation of what we would now call Islamists.

Not least among these young devotees was Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood at just 22 years old. In his office at the American University of Beirut, history professor and nahda specialist Samir Seikaly told NOW that al-Banna was “certainly influenced by Rida.” Pulling worn volumes off his densely-packed shelves, he showed NOW how the young Egyptian “frequently visited Rida [and was] animated by [his] writings,” even briefly succeeding him as editor of al-Manar after his death in 1935. In al-Banna’s conviction that secular decadence was the root cause of the Arabs’ decline and that therefore (in the Brothers’ party slogan) “Islam is the solution,” Rida’s imprint is clear.

Indeed, al-Banna seems to have consciously taken it upon himself to popularize Rida’s thought, much as Rida himself had Abduh’s: Muhammad Musa al-Sharif, a Saudi professor of Islamic studies at King Abd al-Aziz University argues that the achievement of al-Banna was to “develop [Rida’s] movement, which had been confined to […] the upper classes [into] a movement […] accessible to the ordinary people. This was the first time that anyone had been able to do this.”

Is Rida, then, the ideological grandfather of Islamism today? To an extent, says Professor Seikaly. “In as much as he influenced al-Banna, and in as much as al-Banna then influenced the following generations, Rida’s ideas can be said to be still alive,” he told NOW.

That influence is strongest in Muslim Brotherhood circles, according to Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian cleric who led the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir party in the UK in the 1990s before being banned from the country and winding up in Lebanon.

“Rida’s thought is closest to the Brotherhood, rather than the Salafists as some people claim,” Bakri told NOW. “Salafists do not generally read Rida today. They might come across some of his articles, but they won’t read his tafsir [exegesis]; they read the tafsir of Ibn Kathir, while jihadists are more likely to read that of Sayyid Qutb. The Brothers, however, still refer to the tafsir of al-Manar.”

(It may be worth noting that Bakri’s definition of a Salafist is somewhat stricter than most: “I believe Salafism does not really exist in Lebanon. If they call [Sidon cleric] Ahmad al-Assir a Salafist, then Mother Teresa was al-Qaeda.”)

No small achievement for the Qalamun son, then, to be the acknowledged muse of a supranational organization that continues to command influence from Thailand to Turkey to Tunisia (where the local Brotherhood leader, Rashid al-Ghannushi, praises Rida even while having the nerve to name his party after the nahda.) At a time of monumental transformation in the Arab world, in which the very foundations of states are being reconstructed, the abstract disputes of Rida’s day concerning the place of Islam have perhaps never before been so consequential. It’s both tragic and fitting that Tripoli itself – where, in a sense, this whole business began – is proving one of the bloodier arenas of the contest.

The Rida quotes, and much of the background information in general, come from Albert Hourani’s ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798 – 1939’.

The counter-Islamist: Talking to Maajid Nawaz

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Maajid Nawaz is not your typical democracy activist. For more than 12 years, he was a member of the UK branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a hardline Islamist party that calls for a global Islamic state that would invade and conquer infidel nations, forcibly veil women, and stone apostates and adulterers to death. After serving the cause in Pakistan and Palestine, he was incarcerated for five years in Egypt, where he began to question the ideology.

Upon returning to London, he abandoned Islamism and started the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank countering extremism and promoting liberal democracy, named after the first Englishman to build a mosque in Great Britain. NOW Lebanon spoke to Nawaz, who has just released a memoir, Radical: My Journey From Islamist Extremism to a Democratic Awakening.

The first half of your book tells the story of your transition in the 1990s from an essentially secular, girl-chasing hip-hop fan to a Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot. How did that happen?

Nawaz: The journey involved me suffering from a severe level of violent racism in Essex [in England]; both on the street from groups like Combat 18 and at the institutional level. In those days before the murder of Stephen Lawrence [in 1993], the level of racism in the British establishment was quite entrenched. That led me to feel very disenfranchised from society.

On top of that there was Bosnia unfolding right before our eyes. A few countries away, on the European continent, there was a genocide committed against Muslims. These combined to produce an acute identity crisis within me, which is where these ideological groups step in and push solutions that are black-and-white, which to a teenage mind can seem to make a lot of sense.

You spent five years in prison in Egypt in the 2000s, during which you began to have serious doubts about Islamist ideology. What made you change your mind?

Nawaz: There were two main factors, although I must emphasize it was a process, it wasn’t a sudden light-bulb moment.

First, Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience. I saw people fighting for justice on my behalf who weren’t Muslims, and that had a profound impact on me.

Second were the discussions I had in prison with the “Who’s Who” of political prisoners, from the assassins of Anwar Sadat through the entire Islamist spectrum to liberal political prisoners.

After leaving Hizb ut-Tahrir, you co-founded the Quilliam Foundation, which aims to counter extremist ideology and promote democratic pluralism. How, in practical terms, can that be done?

Nawaz: There’s a grass-roots approach and a policy approach, as I described in my TED talk. We work on both sides. Governments have a role—for instance in choosing their partners and interlocutors—who they engage with. They have to make sure they aren’t unwittingly encouraging extremism. Media, too, have a role to be sure [in making sure] they are not furthering the Islamist narrative through their reporting.

On the other end we try to build up a grass-roots allegiance for democratic values in countries such as Pakistan. To directly compete with groups such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Taiba who are working to recruit young Pakistanis. That is a long-term solution. The Muslim Brotherhood was established in 1928 and it took them until 2012 to win elections in Egypt. You have to start somewhere.

You’ve founded a similar organization, Khudi, in Pakistan. What sort of obstacles do you face there?

Nawaz: Security is a big one. We’re talking about an environment where “secularism” has become an insult and a swear word; where democracy is viewed with suspicion and a synonym for corruption. An environment where people are killed by mobs upon the mere accusation of blasphemy. So we have to be very careful what we say and how we say it. But there are large chunks of the country, especially the youth, who are increasingly disillusioned with the status quo and are turning to our organization.

Turning to the Arab Spring, as someone who was tortured by President Mubarak’s infamous state security, what did the Egyptian revolution mean to you?

Nawaz: It was a cathartic moment, because the ideas of non-violent uprising that led to Tahrir Square were the sort of ideas that were being debated by us in prison all those years before. And in fact some of those involved in starting the intellectual input were my cell-mates—people like Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the famous Egyptian sociologist, and Ayman Nour. So it was a vindication, especially because Mubarak is now in the very same prison we were.

Have the recent electoral victories of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia been a disappointment to you?

Nawaz: Not really; they were expected. What’s more important in these countries is to have what I call a democratic trinity in place: a firm entrenchment of democratic values, democratic institutions and the democratic process. If those three can be rooted in society it’s more important than any one party or who wins the election.

In “Radical” you write that “If the West […] had intervened earlier and harder” in Bosnia, it might have limited “the spread of Islamism and [Hizb ut-Tahrir].” Does this suggest a reason to intervene in Syria?

Nawaz: It suggested a reason for Libya, because Libya was a very uncontroversial and legal intervention. The problem with Syria is we have to try and be consistent. As Muslims, sometimes we like to have our cake and eat it too. So when we disagreed with the Iraq war, we were the first to shout that this was an illegal intervention and it was Western colonialism, and yet in Syria we are frustrated that intervention hasn’t been possible. I am frustrated about that. The problem without a coalition is that now if states do intervene, it gives other governments like Iran and Russia the perfect excuse to say, “Well this is illegal, we’re backing the Syrian regime.” And that leads to a potential regional war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

I’m sure a lot more can and must be done to help the rebels, but I’m saying it’s simply not analogous to Libya or Bosnia. It’s very complicated—Lebanon is there and suffering from sectarian fallout—so it’s one of these ones that’s genuinely stumped me, because I’m very keen to see the back of the Assads, but I’m not very keen to further entrench Iran, Hezbollah and Russia in the region. I don’t think anyone really has a solution to this.

Do you worry that just as Bosnia turned you to Islamism, today some young Muslims are doing the same because of Syria?

Nawaz: Of course, absolutely. In fact we know that a minority of the fighters in Syria are foreign jihadists. However, I think that those groups would capitalize on it with or without intervention.

Turning to Lebanon, your former Hizb ut-Tahrir leader, Omar Bakri Muhammad, currently resides here. Do you think the Lebanese government should ban him and other Salafist-Jihadists from the country, as the UK has done?

Nawaz: I have absolutely no doubt that he’s involved in ratcheting up sectarianism in the Syrian conflict right now. But he’s a Syrian national, so I don’t think it’s possible to extradite him at the moment.

In general we have to distinguish between extremist thought and calling for violence. Hizb ut-Tahrir is not banned in the UK, and I’ve argued for them to remain legal, while organizations like al-Muhajiroun, which was Omar Bakri’s in London, are banned and I’ve argued for them to be banned. The distinction I make is that groups that directly call for terrorism need to be outlawed, whereas groups that call for extremist thought need to be challenged by civil society.

Finally, might you ever consider extending your activism to Lebanon?

Nawaz: I would love to, but capacity is one of the issues. We are working very hard to build up and expand the Khudi model into other countries. We’ve already started training people in three other countries. It’s a matter of time.

What a former Islamist's memoir tells us about Syria today

It would be a grave injustice to suggest that Radical, the extraordinary new memoir of former Islamist Maajid Nawaz, yields nothing worthy of comment beyond so narrow a subject as military intervention in Syria, but then these days I’m in no position to give the book the full-length review it deserves for free (enterprising editors can mail the usual address). Suffice to say whatever flesh I succeed in carving off below is but a sliver of the overall fruit available.

In brief, Radical tells the story of Nawaz’ journey from secular Essex hip-hop ‘B-boy’ to zealous Hizb ut-Tahrir revolutionary – a path which took him to Pakistan, Palestine and, fatefully, Egypt, where he was incarcerated for five years in Mubarak’s dungeons – and then eventually to democratic counter-extremist think-tanker. The relevant question here is how? How did a partygoing, breakdancing, girl-chasing British teenager, bereft of neither money nor education, go on to become a stone-faced servant of the Caliphate? Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) is not just any Islamist outfit – its alumni include the Sadat assassins and a certain Ayman al-Zawahiri (the name, by the way, means ‘Party of Liberation’. Rightly has it been said that satire is dead). Here is Nawaz’ sketch of their manifesto:

[O]nce our version of ‘the Khilafah’ was formed, we advocated an aggressive policy of foreign invasion and expansion, the death penalty for apostates, ‘rebels’ and homosexuals, and a forced dress code for women. Thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off, and adulterous women would be stoned to death.

Which of the arguments in favour of this vision did Nawaz and his young comrades find most persuasive? It remains exceedingly rare to have first-hand testimony on this; a fact which obliges us to study his account with especial assiduity.

The basic recruitment pitch, as he describes it, was that the British government was party to a global conspiracy to keep the Muslims down. Accordingly, the only way to avert permanent subjugation was for the umma to rise under the aegis of a pan-Islamic super-state.

Evidence of this nefarious conspiracy was ubiquitous, once one learned how to look for it. From the West European architects of Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration to the American invaders of Operation Desert Storm to the Soviet butchers of Afghanistan to the Indian annihilators of the Babri Mosque, Muslims were under assault from every conceivable angle, targeted simply for their deen.

What readers may be surprised to learn, however, and what is especially pertinent to Syria today, is that the conflict that produced the most outrage; the trump card that won more converts than even the Palestinian intifada; was the genocide then unfolding in Bosnia. “Bosnia was particularly crucial in bringing about a shift in identity among Britain’s Muslims”, Nawaz writes. “In some ways, you could argue that just as Pakistan’s troubles with violent Islamism – Jihadism – were born through Afghanistan, European Jihadism was born through Bosnia.”

Why does this matter for Syria? Because it was precisely the West’s non-intervention in Bosnia that scored the slam dunk for the HT narrative:

[T]he fact that Britain and other Western governments were doing nothing about it reinforced their ‘blind eye’ approach to world politics. When it was Muslims who were under attack, and there was no oil to defend, the West wasn’t interested in getting involved. And why should they? These were our people not theirs, which is why we needed ‘the Khilafah’. 

How much whiter could you get than the Muslims of Bosnia, and just look at what was going on there while the rest of Europe stood by and watched. [My italics]

The point could not be plainer. While it has become liberal dogma that it is Western intervention that swells the jihadists’ corps and coffers, it was in fact Western isolationism on Bosnia that most infuriated them. The argument that Islamists would have no quarrel with the West if only it would leave Muslim peoples to their fate hits a brick wall here. Indeed, Nawaz candidly puts the case the other way around:

If the West had been more proactive, if they had intervened earlier and harder as when Tony Blair and NATO did so over Kosovo, the situation would have been different, not just for Bosnia, but perhaps also for the spread of Islamism and for [HT]. [My italics]

The West may be punished, in other words, for what it doesn’t do no less severely than for what it does. The lessons here for Syria are as obvious as the parallels are ominous. Here is Nawaz, for instance, describing some of the more dedicated “brothers” he encountered in the ‘90s:

British Muslims went as civilians, trained in camps funded by the Saudis, fought in Bosnia and had come back again to recruit more soldiers.

Now take the following, published in an AFP report last month, quoting a British photojournalist captured and later freed by Islamists in Syria:

I ended up running for my life, barefoot and handcuffed, while British jihadists – young men with South London accents – shot to kill […] They were aiming their Kalashnikovs at a British journalist, Londoner against Londoner.

Perhaps even less encouraging is the common denominator of Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Syrian-born cleric who was HT’s leader in the UK when Nawaz joined. Bakri is sometimes dismissed today as a bit of a jester, a media bogeyman with no real following, but his stature in the British Islamist circles of the ‘90s was titanic. “Under Omar Bakri’s leadership HT swept across the UK”, Nawaz writes. He was eventually fired by HT’s global leadership for being too extreme (if you’re able to imagine such a thing) and moved on to the now-banned jihadist groups al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK. By sheer chance, I ran into Bakri in June while covering a Salafist demonstration in Lebanon, where he has wound up after being banned from the UK. Though the ostensible purpose of the rally was to call for the disarmament of Hizbullah (because Shia jihadists obviously won’t do), Bakri was soon denouncing “the atrocities in Syria”. In a subsequent interview, Bakri described the Assad regime as “genocidal”, thus echoing the Srebrenica comparison that even Ban Ki-moon was able to make.

Of course, in one sense this is all irrelevant. The case for intervention in Syria does not stand or fall on the approval of sectarian bigots, and the moral obligation to defeat the regime’s death squads would certainly be no weaker if we knew it would upset al-Qaeda. Nawaz’ testimony doesn’t change any of that. But it’s very useful all the same to learn, in hard-nosed “realist” terms alone, that if averting jihad in Syria is the priority, the “earlier and harder” the intervention the better.

Postscript: After writing the above, I had the opportunity to put the hypothesis to Nawaz himself, while interviewing him for NOW Lebanon. Though he didn’t exactly endorse it, nor did he convincingly rebut it either, in my opinion.

He spoke for some time about the need for intervention to be “legal”, by which he means authorized by the UN Security Council, which seems to me more of a procedural (not to mention impossible) demand  than a strictly moral one. He correctly pointed out that an “illegal” intervention would give Iran and Russia the cover to back the Syrian regime, but then added that “Iran and Russia are already intervening”.

He said “I’m sure a lot more can be done and a lot more must be done to help the rebels, but it’s simply not analogous to Libya or Bosnia”, for reasons he never quite made clear. “It’s one of these ones that’s genuinely stumped me, because I’m very keen to see the back of the Assads, but at the same time I’m not very keen to further entrench Iran, Hizbullah and Russia in the region […] I don’t think anyone really has a solution to this”.

I then asked if he believes Syria today is turning young Muslims to Islamism in the way that Bosnia did for him. “Of course, absolutely, that’s a worry. [But] I think that those groups to be honest in Syria would capitalize on it whether there was intervention or not. If there was intervention, they would capitalize on it from one angle, and in the absence of intervention they’re capitalizing on it from another”. If this is true, which it may well be, then it’s as much as saying the West is damned either way, and so incurs no additional loss by intervening.  Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d prefer to be hated for fighting a fascist mass-murderer than for not fighting one. 

Is Lebanon ready for a Pope protest?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

While much of Lebanon looks forward to celebrating the Pope’s arrival next Friday, a small group of activists were until recently preparing to mark the occasion in a rather different way.

On August 24, a Facebook event was created calling for a peaceful protest against the Pope during his three-day stay, citing the Vatican’s “corruption and immorality.” Users posted photos and anti-Pope slogans and debated with others opposed to the idea. On Monday, after over a week of infighting and physical threats to the organizers, the event was cancelled. As of Tuesday, 61 people had pledged to attend, while 49 said they “maybe” would. The event page has since been taken down.

The protest was aimed at specific Vatican policies, rather than Catholicism in general, according to Firas Taher, the organizer. These included the “embargo of contraception,” the “cover ups for pastors in clear cases of child molestation,” the “unjustified hatred and discrimination towards homosexuals,” the Pope’s “unexplained wealth,” and his “stand on abortion,” said Taher in correspondence with NOW Lebanon.

The cancellation raises the question of whether such a protest is yet possible in Lebanon, a country often seen as the freest in the Middle East but one in which public criticism of religious institutions remains taboo. “Are you serious? The religious assholes will slaughter us,” said one Facebook commenter, echoing the concerns of many. Indeed, within days Taher announced on the social network that he had “received a threat” to “hurt” participants in the protest.

Taher insists, however, that it was not security concerns that drove him to call the protest off. “The event wasn’t cancelled because of the threats, the threats were there from the beginning,” he told NOW Lebanon. “I cancelled the event because I realized that the Lebanese public is not ready for a demonstration of this type.”

“Most Lebanese people do not understand what a real protest is; their perception of a protest is people starting fights and burning tires and cars. This protest will definitely be misinterpreted and will only cause more problems.” Indeed, some mistakenly believed the event to be organized by Muslim extremists, following a call by Salafist cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad in early August to prevent the Pope’s visit on the grounds that he had “insulted” Islam. “Many of those who actually read the event description thought this was a religiously affiliated and/or a violent demonstration. Imagine what people who haven’t even read the description would think of it,” said Taher.

From a purely legal perspective, too, it’s unclear if such a protest would be possible. Lawyer and constitutional expert Marwan Sakr believes it would be protected under free speech legislation, provided demonstrators did not personally insult the Pope. “It’s a free speech issue, so as long as it’s peaceful there should be no problem,” he told NOW. “However, it is a crime to insult the Pope, because he is a head of state and we have legal provisions against insulting heads of state. There are a couple of articles in the civil code that were used very frequently during the Syrian occupation years against those attacking the Syrian president. So if anti-Pope demonstrators get really aggressive with their statements, they could be prosecuted.”

For their part, the organizers of the Pope’s visit told NOW they would not prevent demonstrators from staging protests. “If somebody wants to voice their opinion we cannot stop them,” said Father Abdo Bou Kassm, media coordinator of the Pope Visit’s Campaign. “But I can tell you that every Lebanese from all sects and parties welcomes the arrival of the Pope.” All the same, Bou Kassm told NOW that a number of security measures were being taken, including electronic frisks at entrances to the Pope’s various destinations.

Civil society groups, too, defended the rights of the protesters. “In a country where we have so many religious communities as well as people who don’t believe in any religion, you cannot shut everybody up. We have to agree to disagree,” said Lea Baroudi, co-founder of the MARCH NGO promoting free expression. “As long as the demonstration is not threatening or violent, then they are free to express whatever feelings they have.”

Baroudi dismisses the idea that Lebanon isn’t ready for a Pope protest. “Our authorities always deal with these things by saying we’re not ready, everything is taboo, but this only creates more frustration. I think we underestimate the Lebanese population. People can handle it.”

Taher, however, is less hopeful. “I do not believe that I will live to see an anti-Pope protest in Lebanon.”

Omar El-Tani contributed reporting.

The Free Lebanese Army?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Though rejected by the Sunni establishment, the idea is endorsed by extremists.

Sunni fighters on the ground in Bab al-Tabbaneh on Wednesday (AFP)

Following a week of pronounced anxieties in Lebanon brought on by the kidnapping of 20 Syrians and a Turkish national by the self-described “military wing” of the influential Shiite Moqdad clan, Tuesday’s reports of the formation of a “Sunni military council” by a prominent Tripoli Salafist—echoing calls in May for the creation of a “Free Lebanese Army”—had many in the country fearing the worst.

Those fears now look to have been somewhat misplaced, as Sheikh Salem al-Rafei—the cleric said to have announced the formation during his Friday sermon—appears to have backtracked amid near-unanimous condemnation of the idea from the Sunni establishment. “All of the officials and sons of Tripoli reject the idea of forming military councils,” said Future bloc MP Mohammad Kabbara on Wednesday after discussing the issue with Rafei. Similarly, the Tripoli mufti, Sheikh Malek Shaar, categorically ruled it out on Friday, while Future bloc MP Ahmad Fatfat called Thursday for “turning Tripoli into an arms-free city.” Rafei himself declined to talk to NOW Lebanon about the matter, though he has told NOW in the past that he too advocates an arms-free Tripoli.

At the same time, some of the more hardline Sunni Islamists have openly and enthusiastically endorsed the idea. Despite telling NOW in June that he opposed all non-state weapons, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, the former UK leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir and founder of Salafist-Jihadist outfits al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK, now says, “I support the establishment of a military council for the Sunnis of Bab al-Tabbaneh […] not just in the North, but in the wider region. Everyone has weapons in Lebanon: the Internal Security Forces, the army, Hezbollah, Amal, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Palestinians. It is only the Sunnis who are without arms. So when Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s demands [to rid the country of non-state weapons] were not met, we had to say that we will arm ourselves in return.”

When contacted for comment, Assir was equivocal, ostensibly rejecting the military council idea while not materially differing from Bakri’s position. “In no way are we creating a military council, nor do we approve of it,” he told NOW. “What Rafei meant was that in case the government cannot protect us, we will have to take measures to protect ourselves.”

Bakri made no such evasions. Asked to explain how the council would function in practice, he asserted its activities would not be aggressive. “It will not be formed to face a certain group or party but only for self-defense and as a contingency in the event of an attack. We have seen the army’s failure to carry out its duty of putting an end to the [Moqdad] kidnappings. Also consider that Syrian tanks are shelling our borders and are entering certain areas constantly and making arrests. The military council is a reaction and is not an organization or party, nor does it aim to replace the state or the army.”

Sheikh Nabil Rahim, who was arrested in 2008 on charges of belonging to Fatah al-Islam, essentially agreed with Bakri, although he claimed that Rafei’s original proposal was non-sectarian. “I listened to the statements of Sheikh Rafei, and he said there should be a military council for all sects, including Shiites, Christians and Sunnis. We are with the state and the army, but this is in self-defense in case they cannot provide protection for their citizens,” he told NOW.

In any case, for actual fighters on the ground in Tripoli, these debates may be largely academic. A Sunni militiaman from the Qobbeh neighborhood who preferred not to be named scoffed when asked about the military council, dismissing it as a rhetorical retort to the “military wing” of the Moqdads. Though Rafei is held in high esteem in Tripoli, and could certainly mobilize militants if he wished, the idea of a formally structured paramilitary outfit for all Sunnis in Lebanon was fantasy, he told NOW.

Moreover, as the tragic re-eruptions of violence in the city over the past week have amply demonstrated, the Sunnis of Tripoli’s Bab al-Tabbaneh have already had a de facto militia for quite some time. In the words of the Qobbeh fighter, “What difference does it make if we call it a ‘military council’ now?”

Bassem Nemeh, Assem Bazzi and Nadine Elali contributed reporting.

Inside the Salafist "intifada"

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon, with Luna Safwan]

Salafi cleric Ahmad al-Assir addresses supporters at the Saida sit-in (Alex Rowell)

As Ahmad al-Assir brings a lengthy and emotive sentence to a close from the pulpit, a voice pipes up from the middle of the crowd: “To heaven we go! Martyrs by the millions!” The Salafist cleric has earned a reputation for divisive rhetoric, but here at the sit-in he launched on Wednesday on a main road in his hometown of Saida, the audience is gripped. “Take your hand down, O Nasrallah, you are not greater than Allah!” cries another voice, referring to the Hezbollah secretary general, and suddenly 500 people are echoing the chant and clapping their hands excitedly. “Go forward, O Assir, we are all with you for change!” goes a third one.

Supporters of Assir listen to his Friday sermon (Alex Rowell)

After the speech, in which Assir reiterated his refusal to unblock the road despite numerous requests from local political and religious notables, NOW Lebanon spoke to him about the reasons for the protest and his followers’ possible next steps.

“The issue of non-state weapons has reached a point where we can’t take it anymore,” he said, referring to the Resistance’s arsenal. “Lebanese dignity is being taken for granted. Our patience has its limits. We will keep the road blocked until, at the very least, we see evidence that the weapons situation will be taken seriously by the government.”

He added that the protest was also a reaction to intimidation of his co-religionists in Saida. “Saida is controlled by Hezbollah’s thugs, who continually insult us and our mosques. Everyone who goes to our mosques is being threatened. This must stop.”

Asked what he meant by remarks that he will “escalate” the protest if this goal isn’t achieved, Assir was evasive. “I don’t like to reveal the steps I’m going to take before I take them.”

NOW also asked whether he would take complaints about the protest from locals into consideration. “From the days of Adam until today, there has never been a demand that everybody agrees on. This [issue] is my pain, and it’s my right to raise my voice. If others don’t share my pain, they are free not to join. Some asked me to open the road again, and I told them, ‘Sorry, I’m not convinced.’”

Also present was Omar Bakri Muhammad, former head of the Islamist Hizb al-Tahrir party in London, who is now banned from the UK. “It’s my duty as a Muslim to support a just cause,” he told NOW when asked what brought him to the sit-in. “We are asking peacefully for an end to non-state weapons because we can’t take anymore. And this is not just about Hezbollah; this applies to everyone, whether you’re Muslim or Christian, a supporter of the atrocities in Syria or of the Free Syria Army.”

Attendees at the sit-in tended to voice similar concerns. “We want our dignity back, not only for ourselves but for all of Lebanon,” said Rima Shaaban, who stood with other female supporters in a designated women-only area. “We simply want all weapons to be with the army, as is the case in any other country.”

“We share Assir’s demands,” said a young man. “To live in freedom and dignity, with no person or group above any other. This is what Lebanon should be; a place for peace and tourism, not weapons and war.”

“We want to be under the protection of the army,” added another man. “We definitely are not for disrespecting the army.”

Elsewhere in Saida, however, some residents are less enthusiastic about the whole enterprise. “None of us want roads to be closed,” said a grocer on the main road. “If I’m forced to close my shop, who would notice? This is not the way to solve these issues. It should be done with dialogue. People shouldn’t take to the streets like this. It scares people, and this is not the image we want for our country.”

Others are sympathetic to Assir’s general message, but have reservations about his confrontational approach. “I definitely agree with his demands as far as weapons are concerned. But to face up to Hezbollah, which is so powerful, you need to be equally powerful. It’s his right to protest, and it’s a correct demand, but I don’t know if he really has the necessary strength.”

Whether or not Assir’s “intifada,” as he calls it, ends up yielding tangible results, it’s clear that the cleric’s various initiatives in recent months have established his name on the Sunni Islamist street. “Assir has broken down the barriers of fear,” says Bakri. “No longer do the Sunnis in Lebanon feel fear. Now, for the first time, they are able to speak out.”