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.

Don't get your hopes up about Pakistan

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Scanning The Guardian’s latest dispatch on the (latest) Pakistan blasphemy case, I was slowly but steadily driven to a stupor of incredulity. Hold on a moment, what’s all this? The chairman of a major Islamic council sides with the accused in a blasphemy case? Says “our heads are bowed in shame for what [the accuser] did”? Calls the defendant (a Christian, no less) a “daughter of the nation”? Is this Pakistan we’re talking about?

As the journalist talked up the “remarkable turn of events in a country where individuals accused of insulting Islam are almost never helped by powerful public figures,” I began to wonder if a new dawn really had broken on the society that, a year ago, was showering the murderer of a blasphemy reformist with rose petals.

Turn to the Pakistani press, however, and the scribblers take a somewhat different angle. Allama Tahir Ashrafi, the same cleric described in the Guardian’s piece, is found warning “of a conspiracy to do away with the blasphemy law which, he said, would never be allowed.” In his own words: “We support the […] judicious use of blasphemy law but will never allow repeal of the law on flimsy grounds or under international pressure.” A watered-down version of the same quote was pushed to the final paragraph of the Guardian’s story.

You have to love that “judicious”. No doubt there should also be “judicious” killings of apostates, adulterers and homosexuals, in addition to “judicious” second-class citizenship for members of the Ahmadi sect. An old joke among atheists is that blasphemy is a “victimless crime.” Sadly in Pakistan, as in other countries frenzied with religion, the victims are all too real.

No, we absolutely must not 'embrace' Islamism

"[The] general enemy, of course, is extremism. What has extremism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?" – Martin Amis¹

"Question to several white, secular liberal friends in the West: why are you so keen on a #MuslimBrotherhood victory in #Egypt?" – Mohammed ‘Ed’ Husain, author of The Islamist, on twitter

Last Thursday, Reuters ran the headline, ‘West should embrace “Arab Spring” Islamists – Qatar’, citing a Financial Times interview with the Qatari Prime Minister Hamad al-Thani in which he voiced this opinion. As suggested by the above quote of Ed Husain’s, al-Thani may have been pushing an open door. So now that the ‘Arab Spring’ (if we’re still calling it that) has brought us the incredible spectacle of secular Westerners applauding the electoral successes of Islamist parties from Casablanca to Cairo, it might be worth recalling what we all knew, or ought to have known, twelve months ago.

Which is that Islamism – the politicisation of Islam, or, if you prefer, the Islamisation of politics – is extremism by definition. As much as the phrase has been allowed to infiltrate our language, there is no such thing as a ‘moderate Islamist’. From the outset, Islamism says that the practice of religion may not be left to the private domain; that the relationship between man and God is not allowed to be a merely personal one. Instead, you, the citizen, are to be given no say in your spiritual and metaphysical beliefs: the state has made up your mind for you, and is going to make certain that you obey the compulsory pieties and strictures while it’s at it. All questions of interpretation, nuance, allegory, etc., are out: the state knows best, and there is no court of appeal. By this intrusion into the innermost realm of the individual, Islamism combines totalitarianism and tyranny with the basest insult to the intelligence – the manifestation of Orwell’s Big Brother who can tell you that two plus two makes five, and make you very sorry if you dare to disagree.

And what, indeed, has Islamism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works? Are they perhaps to be found in Yemen, ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s 2011 Gender Gap report, where more than a quarter of the female child population is sold into marriage (and therefore rape) by the age of fifteen? Or how about the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which came in third-last on the same index, while topping the Committee to Protect Journalists’ ‘Deadliest Countries in 2011’ list? The sterile world of statistics cannot adequately capture the pure hell of this failed state, unforgettably described by Christopher Hitchens as follows:

Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

Nor is the picture much brighter in Saudi Arabia or Iran – the powerhouses of Sunni and Shia theocracy, respectively – where all social and cultural development is vetoed, and the people are harassed and humiliated daily by the secret police. Things are rapidly tending this way in the ‘Holy Land’, where the most admirable political cause of the modern era – the liberation of Palestine – has been hijacked by the fanatics of Hamas and Hizbullah, who want to kick out the Zionist empire only to install their own Islamic one in its place. True, life is bearable enough in comparatively relaxed Gulf dictatorships such as the UAE, so long as one is mindful not to ‘insult Islam’ by, say, criticising the Taliban. And then there is the purported ‘model’ of Turkey, where the advances made by Prime Minister Erdoğan’s party in economic and other respects have come at the price of an encroaching muscular reactionism in which a growing list of ‘vices’ from adultery to alcohol are falling under the stifling scrutiny of the state.

And now we suddenly have Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Egypt to add to the list. Only time will tell how fascistic each turns out to be, although the Tunisian ‘Ennahda’ party may have given us an early indication last month when its secretary-general, Hamadi Jbeli, proclaimed that, “We are in the sixth caliphate, God willing”. That as many as a quarter of Egyptians appear to have voted for the Salafi 'al-Nour' party – a spawn of the same sewage that nearly murdered the greatest novelist of the Arab world, Naguib Mahfouz – is also less than comforting. Of course, one must presume innocence until guilt is proven, and democratic nations should at least tolerate Islamists to the extent that they adhere to international law. But to ‘embrace’ them would be to abandon every principle – and every friend within each of these countries – to which the secular world owes its unconditional allegiance. Over. My. Dead. Body.

¹ Amis, M., The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007 (2008), Author’s Note