by Ed Husain
At the end of every week I attended a meeting where we reported our week’s achievements. We wanted to outdo one another, and those who underperformed were often subjected to strict questioning. I found this environment of scrutiny, analysis, questioning, and commitment to do better enjoyable. My readings of Mawdudi’s books were boosted by the praise I received at these meetings. Week by week, Falik and I crammed more and more on to our sheets while others failed to keep up with us.
My routine sheet had one shortfall: I rarely attended congregational prayers in a mosque. We did not live in the hub of Tower Hamlets and the closest Muslim place of worship, Shah Jalal mosque, was a twenty-minute walk away in Stepney. In those days, YMO was attempting to branch out into other areas of Tower Hamlets, beyond the East London mosque, and targeting areas across the East End. Stepney was one such area.
Towards the end of summer 1991 I started to say my dawn prayers in congregation at the mosque in Stepney. I would wake before sunrise, prepare for prayers and walk over to the mosque. There were about seven of us activists who prayed at the mosque, but there was more to our presence than prayers. We were never content with merely praying - we had to do more.
After most people had left, Sami, the university student who had taught us that democracy started with the Muslim caliphs, would deliver lessons from the Koran. For about thirty minutes after the morning prayer, half asleep, I sat and listened to his impromptu commentary on the Koran. The idea behind such early-morning study sessions was to establish a YMO presence in the mosque and, gradually, win acceptance of the elderly congregation. That way, recruiting their sons to YMO through public events at the mosque would be easier.
While I targeted others’ children, all was not well at my own home. My parents were becoming seriously concerned about my sudden outburst of religious fervour. Even in a pious family like ours my behaviour was at odds with my parents’ faith. My father wondered what drove me to walk so far, so early in the morning. Was it merely to pray? Surely, God was at home too. My God, however, was no longer at home; he had to be sought out in activism, drive, energy, mobilizing and expanding the Islamic movement. I had to be a ‘true Muslim’, completely enmeshed in Islam, not a ‘partial Muslim’ like my parents.
While I supported this new endeavour of YMO to expand seriously beyond our East London stronghold, there were others who were watching me. The then imam of the mosque in Stepney was a disciple of Grandpa. I had assumed that he had forgotten me, a face among so many faces who had surrounded an elderly, frail Muslim scholar. I was wrong.
The imam had remembered me. He tried to make eye contact with me several times, while I sat among the YMO members. As with most mosques in Britain, imams, sadly, tend to be meek. They are bullied by the all-powerful mosque committees with their loud-mouthed chairmen, and are dependent on the congregational collections for their meagre incomes. As such, and contrary to popular opinion, with a small number of exceptions imams very rarely rock the boat. The YMO were perceived in Stepney as a well-connected, well-organized, educated group of young men, outside the domain of a mosque imam. He humbly led the prayers, then left us to listen to the lectures of Sami. It never occurred to us that if it was genuine knowledge we sought, it should have been the imam, the person who had studied Islam, to whom we should be listening, not an undergraduate.
My parents knew that the time for GCSE revision had long passed, but still I went to the East London mosque with Falik. This was of real concern to my father, but he was waiting for the right moment to ask me what I was actually doing. Sensing his deep unease, I tried to avoid him as much as possible in the evenings; I kept myself away from the dinner table, locked inside my bedroom, citing all sorts of excuses.
In the past I had always enjoyed spending time with my parents. If I went out I always told them where I was going and, when I returned, the first thing I did was to tell them I was home. Now I was desperate to change that. I did not want my mother to know when I left, where I went, or how long I stayed out. That way I could spend more time at East London mosque without having to explain myself. My strange conduct worried my parents.
One Saturday I sneaked out as usual to attend the weekly taleemi jalsa. We were spread in circles of five and were learning how to recite the Koran. There were half a dozen teachers from Islamic Forum Europe, children of men from Jamat-e-Islami, who were teaching us tajwid. This was an area in which I had no need of instruction - Grandpa had personally ensured that my tajwid was well developed. I was sitting in the main hall of the mosque, late in the evening, among a group of sixty or so activists when suddenly the mosque caretaker, Mr Khan, popularly known as Khan sahib, walked into the hall, his large bunch of keys jingling on his waist loops. I looked up to see him walking across the hall, more slowly than usual, and looking straight at me. He raised his arm discreetly and pointed to the main doors behind him that led to the prayer hall.
There, in the distance, stood my father with his hands in his pockets, his face long and wary, his eyes fixed on me, the son he had now lost. My heart was pounding. I froze, unable to move or say anything. Before others could notice, my father turned round and disappeared. As I saw him walk away, I knew that was the end: I had abandoned him, destroyed any hope he had had of raising a decent Muslim son. Khan sahib came up to me and tried to make conversation but I was elsewhere, in my father’s mind. All those moments he had spent, training me at Grandpa’s feet, had come to naught. I knew my father’s hurt was deep.
That night I lost my sturdy confidence among my fellow activists. I was sad and desolate at knowing, feeling, my father’s pain. Several YMO members tried to comfort me.
‘This is the way God tests his servants,’ said one. ‘Your parents will be an obstacle to your commitment to God’s work, the Islamist movement. Ours is the work of prophets, and they were opposed by their families. Abraham was rejected by his family. And in turn Abraham rejected his father.’
Another said, ‘Partial Muslims like our parents will never understand what we are trying to do. Be patient, brother. You are from among the true Muslims.’
They were wrong, I thought. My parents were different: overly protective, exceptionally caring, and committed to God as much as, if not more than, those who claimed to be doing the work of the prophets. Those arguments did not wash with me. These were difficult moments, yes, but not a test from God. Still, I decided to be patient.
As time passed, my parents and I were hardly on speaking terms. I continued to spend long hours at East London mosque.
I had not done particularly well in my GCSEs. Uneasy about my involvement in Islamism, relatives advised my parents that perhaps I ought to be sent off to work in an Indian restaurant far away from East London mosque.
My parents, though, wanted me to continue studying, and my father wanted me to resit my exams at Tower Hamlets College. However, he also wanted a promise that I would study and not spend my time with YMO or visit the East London mosque. It was a promise I could not make, for deep down I had committed myself, my life, to the Islamist movement and, like my brothers at the mosque, I would let nothing stand in the way of following Islam as a complete life code. My father and I engaged in long hours of heated debate about the nature of Islam. He told me that the men who spoke at the YMO conference were Jamat-e-Islami activists from the days when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. These included Delwar Hussein Sayedi, a prominent speaker from Bangladesh who rivalled Grandpa in his ability to draw crowds and spoke as a chief guest at YMO conferences.
‘That night I saw you in Whitechapel, you had no need to be there. Did I not teach you tajwid? What can YMO teach you about Islam that you do not already know?’
I tried to answer his questions but he was in no mood to be taught lessons on Islam from his son. I tried to explain to him that Islam had been misunderstood by most of the people he knew. I dared not mention Grandpa in this context. Noticing my newly developed confrontational attitude, both my parents looked on, stupefied.
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�You’ve changed,’ my mother said, her lips quivering. ‘You’re no longer the son I raised.’ I wanted to hear no more. Abruptly, I got up and walked out of the living room. My parents shouted after me; never in my life had I walked away from my parents while they were speaking to me.
They were both vehemently opposed to my version of Islam and made their dissatisfaction clear in no uncertain terms. My father spent hours trying to explain that Islam was spiritual, internal, and about drawing closer to God and not about radical politics, assassinating politicians and trying to set up an imaginary Islamic state. ‘If you want politics,’ he would say, ‘go and join the Labour Party.’ But British politics was man-made and I was aspiring to a politics that was God-made.
And so I continued to attend events at East London mosque while studying to resit my exams. I raised money for the mosque on Fridays, regularly helped the caretaker with small tasks, and, most importantly, started to help Sami set up a library in the mosque. We spent hours sifting through cartons of books we received from an American high school, and others from Muslim publishers. This was our attempt to create a more studious environment for our brothers.
The atmosphere at home was horrid. In January 1992, when I was seventeen, I minimized my involvement with YMO for a two-month period in an attempt at conciliation. I wanted to regain some of that old warmth and love my parents had showered on me, but I did not want to lose my brothers, my friends at East London mosque. Falik was now studying with me at Tower Hamlets College and he kept me up to date with events at the mosque. I still maintained my daily routine sheet, and read bulletins issued by Jamat-e-Islami. These bulletins carried pictures of thousands of people gathering in Dhaka for protest meetings, Islamist brothers fighting against leftists, many of whom were martyred. Every month we received these from Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh.
Then, in March 1992, the leader of Jamat-e-Islami, a political science professor named Gulam Azam, was arrested in Bangladesh on trumped-up political charges. For the next six months the atmosphere within YMO and Islamic Forum Europe changed completely. Our sole aim was to secure the release of the elderly professor from prison. We launched a campaign, during which I helped put up posters across Tower Hamlets late into the night, organized protest meetings, and distributed leaflets demanding justice. One of our key arguments was that the British government issued visas for visiting Jamat-e-Islami leaders and MPs. If they were extremists, as my father and others claimed, then why did the government permit them free rein in Britain?
That summer my father saw on my desk at home a pile of the leaflets I had been handing out. As far as my father was concerned, that was the last straw. He had seen me drift further and further away from the family; he had spent hours trying to engage with me, explain to me that Islam was not politics, but about purifying our hearts and drawing closer to God.
He was shaking with anger.
‘What is Gulam Azam doing in my house?’ he shouted, before launching into a monologue about the Islamists, their shrewd manipulation of religion to suit their political needs, their hatred of traditional Muslims, and their disregard for Muslim saints. He called them ‘the enemies of the Prophet, the cursed of God, allies of the devil, and the rejects of the Muslims. From this day onwards, you will have nothing to do with them! Enough! Enough of pretending to study, then lying to us, deceiving us . . .’
He slammed the door and left. My mother stood in the room alone with me and wept profusely, repeatedly asking in a broken, shaking voice, ‘Why? Why?’
My disagreements with my parents were now so deep, their revulsion for my Islamism so powerful, and my commitment to ideological Islam so uncompromising, that my father had little choice but to give me an ultimatum: leave Mawdudi’s Islamism or leave my house.
‘We raised you as a Muslim, you understand Islam. If you want to stay under my roof, then you will be a normal Muslim, none of this politics in the name of religion.’
I turned to my friends in YMO for advice and they told me again that this was a test from God.
‘You must choose between family and God’s work. The Islamic movement is more important to us than our families,’ said a leading member of YMO.
My father continued to apply pressure on me. He was worried that I would be a negative influence on my siblings. All the while my friends in the Islamic movement were critical of my parents, suggesting that they were not true Muslims. Only those who accepted Mawdudi and his Egyptian counterpart, Syed Qutb, understood ‘true Islam’.
Unable to accept two authorities, one night, late in the summer, I wrote a farewell note to my parents, left it on my pillow and crept out of our house while they slept. I left home for the Islamic movement without a penny in my pocket and with only the clothes I was wearing.
Outside in the still, dark night I walked along Commercial Road towards East London mosque and the brothers I knew would help me. It was a long, silent journey. Occasionally, cars drove past, but I ignored them. What if my father had driven out after me? Strangely, I did not feel that God was on my side. I felt it was a fight between my father and me: I had to win. By challenging me, my father had challenged the Islamic movement. I reached Whitechapel and made for the mosque’s rear entrance in Fieldgate Street. It was locked. There was not a soul in sight. I sat on a bench for a while and then a black hearse pulled up. A small, white-bearded old man got out and slowly opened the mosque gates. He did not say anything to me: he, I knew, like my father, despised Islamism and Islamists.
He was Britain’s first Muslim undertaker, Haji Taslim Ali. His offices were attached to the East London mosque and he was one of its earliest associates. However, under Islamist influences, I was too arrogant to respect him. In the eyes of an Islamist, he was not part of the Islamic movement and therefore not worthy of deference.
I followed Haji Taslim Ali into the mosque for dawn prayers. Soon the popular caretaker of the mosque, Khan sahib, appeared in the main prayer hall. Khan sahib knew that I had problems at home and immediately understood that I had run away. Why else would I be at East London mosque at 4 a.m.? While I prepared for prayers, he made up a bed for me in one of the offices. He even made me a cup of tea, switched on the boiler for hot water, and asked what I would like for breakfast. I suspected that he had done this all before.
Around 7 a.m. my immediate superiors arrived at the mosque. Siraj Salekin was especially considerate; that morning he treated me like a family member and took me along with him everywhere all day. He was a youth worker, so the sight of a confused teenager accompanying him to work was no great surprise to his colleagues.
That morning my mother called the mosque and accused its activists of kidnapping her innocent, naive son. She asked to speak to me. I was sitting in the office but the clerk said I was not there. My mother phoned back several times that day until, reluctantly, I took her call. All I could hear on the other end of the line was incessant sobbing and prolonged gasps for breath. My mother could not utter a single word to me.
Now it dawned on me just how much pain I had caused. In my arrogance I had given no thought to the consequences of running away. And since arriving at the mosque my seniors had shown no disapproval of what I had done. Deep down I wanted to go home, but that would be seen as backing down in the face of parental pressure. I had to win. The Islamic movement must prevail.
Still, my much-coveted freedom to engage in YMO activities unhindered suddenly no longer seemed so glittering a prize. I attended meetings with a heavy heart and began to miss my family. What did my two younger sisters think? What was going on at home? How were my parents coping?
My distraction became apparent to my brothers. I think they were now convinced that I had passed God’s test and should return home. In my absence, communication was established with my father and my repatriation was discreetly arranged. Siraj Salekin deposited me back in Limehouse after three nights away. Contrary to my expectations, my father behaved as though nothing had happened and conversed with Siraj Salekin and me withou
t a hint of confrontation. He had misjudged my fanaticism: his ultimatum to me had backfired. Nevertheless, I was moved by my father’s ability to forgive.
My mother, on the other hand, had found her voice. She had never expected that I would leave and was now effectively washing her hands of me. From today, she said, I was free to do as I pleased. She and my father on the Day of Judgement, before God, would no longer be responsible for my involvement with Islamism. From today I was answerable only to God. I had got my way and I was free to do what I wanted without my parents’ interference. I was glad.
With my parents defeated, there was no stopping me. At Tower Hamlets College I became active in the college’s Islamic Society, managed by members of YMO. By secret ballot I was elected president. I had rather hoped that my friend Falik would be elected, but my commitment and drive to Islamism outdid even his. The college had a majority Muslim population and the Islamic Society had an extremely high profile. The events I organized attracted crowds of over 200 students. In essence, I was running an Islamist front organization operating on campus to recruit for the wider Islamist movement and maintain a strong Islamist presence. With the help of my members I was successful on both counts. With parental obstacles out of the way, my zeal and commitment to Islamism were unconfined.
4.
Islam Is the Solution
I have written Milestones for this vanguard [Islamists], which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized.
Syed Qutb, Islamist ideologue
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had declared in the Communist Manifesto that the ‘History of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’; as Islamists we believed that history was a clash between good and evil. We represented the former, the West the latter, and we had to prevail. Assassination attempts on Mawdudi’s life and the stories of martyrdom that reached us from Afghanistan of jihad against the Soviets convinced us that ‘true Islam’ had to be in perennial conflict with kufr - the disbelief of the kuffar. And so we were critical, derogatory even, of organizations such as the Tablighis who engaged in missionary activities in the Soviet Union - true Muslims should be persecuted by the Soviets, not accepted. To us, being a Muslim meant being in conflict with non-Muslim society. How could an atheistic society allow the Tablighis to preach Islam? That very fact allowed us to pour scorn on the Tablighis. Some of our leaders even claimed that the Tablighi group was sponsored by Moscow to pacify Islam. The Tablighis retorted by saying we were sponsored by Saudi Arabia and, thus, America to politicize Islam during the Cold War.
