by Ed Husain
Habibur Rahman’s purpose had now become clear: I was to use the Islamic Society as a recruiting agency for the YMO.
We discussed how this could happen. How it would aid YMO’s desire to expand into the wider Muslim community outside the East London mosque. I was sitting with the head of YMO, planning a recruitment campaign for the Islamist movement. My aims were now clear. I had my orders. Habibur Rahman ended the meeting with a smile, his initial anxiety laid to rest. I had reason to be happy too: my main arena for da’wah work was no longer East London mosque but Tower Hamlets College. My parents would be relieved when I told them that, henceforth, all my attention would be focused on my college work.
During enrolment week in 1992 Falik and I plastered the college with posters making it clear to new students where the prayer room was. We also published a magazine: The Reality. Every new entrant was welcomed by Brother Falik, me, or another member of YMO, under the guise of the Islamic Society. Right from their very first contact with the college they went away with our literature, knowing who we were.
Most students travelled to and from the Poplar campus by bus, walking from the bus stop on the East India Dock Road via Poplar Park. There, they walked past gold-painted graffiti proclaiming ‘Islam is the Solution’ and, beneath that, ‘YMO’. There was no mistaking who was the dominant force in Tower Hamlets College. It amused me to see the faces of some of my old classmates from Stepney Green as they wondered at my transformation from school misfit to powerful student leader with hordes of adoring followers.
At college, as at Stepney Green, all of my friends were Asian, Muslim, and male, but now it no longer seemed odd that I, born in Britain, did not have a single white friend. The happy melting pot that Ms Powlesland had stirred at Sir William Burrough was no more than a distant childhood memory.
That year changed the lives of many, not only inside Tower Hamlets College, but within the wider community too. Large numbers of Muslim students were now attending vocational and academic courses at college for the first time. The children of Asian immigrants to Britain had come of age. Initially, I expected to create an awareness of the Islamist movement at college and, I hoped, introduce YMO and gain support for our work, guiding young people to participate in our activities at East London mosque. In fact, the immediate success of our hard work surprised many of us.
Falik and I worked tirelessly, often going without lunch, attending meetings, planning events, visiting printers for flyers, spending hours designing the most attractive posters, organizing daily distribution of leaflets to students, liaising with college management, and meeting tens of students on a daily basis. Often we missed our classes. We became popular at college as the activists who knew what we were doing in life. We were young, seemingly well rooted, and understood the problems faced by the mostly young Bangladeshi student community in Tower Hamlets.
Many came from patriarchal families, others had problems of a financial nature; some wanted to share their problems with us, others wanted guidance in how they could persuade their parents to accept their girlfriends or boyfriends. Underlining all of our social work was the banner of the Islamic Society. Soon it became common knowledge among students that we were from the East London mosque. Many started to express an interest about what went on there.
We organized fortnightly talks on Wednesday afternoons, video presentations, and hard-hitting seminars: ‘Hijab: Put up or Shut up’ was one controversially titled discussion on wearing the veil.
Again our teachers were outraged, but our work was yielding results. To packed halls we brought speakers from different Islamist groups who explained why women must cover their hair, be different from non-Muslim women, and earn God’s approval.
At the time there were a handful of young Muslim women at college who wore the hijab. This commanded my full support, but questions from teachers, and sometimes students, made the practice increasingly confrontational. We put pressure on unveiled Muslim women to join the ‘sisters’ who wore the hijab or risk being seen as un-Islamic rather than practising, proud Muslims. The resultant upsurge of hijab wearing took even us by surprise as scores of fashionable free-flowing hairstyles disappeared from view. (If the hijab was supposed to make a woman less attractive, then it clearly had not worked. Several society members commented to me that the women looked extraordinarily feminine and more desirable in the scarf than without. I shared that sentiment, but dared not express it.)
In every classroom, common room, and public area in college there were clusters of Muslim women in hijab, confident in their mannerisms and superior in their bearing. They were our sisters, linked to the most powerful and dynamic student club: the Islamic Society. We, in turn, were attached to the YMO, and so to Jamat-e-Islami, part of the world-wide Islamist movement whose aim was to make our ideology supreme. We acted locally, but were connected globally.
At prayer times, the small prayer room provided by the college management so generously the previous year no longer sufficed. We needed a larger hall, and demanded it from the college authorities. At first, in meetings with the management, I was told repeatedly that Tower Hamlets College was a secular institution and would not provide religious facilities. But that was a difficult argument to sustain. Moreover, by providing us with a small prayer room in the newly refurbished building, despite there being a community mosque a minute’s walk from college, the management had set a precedent. We did not want to pray at the mosque because there we were powerless; at college, we could organize our own speakers and rally the Muslims around us.
Several meetings with the vice-principal came to nothing. His refusal to provide us with larger prayer facilities emboldened our sense of purpose. The Islamic Society committee had lengthy meetings about what to do next. For us to back down would be a defeat for the Islamist movement, not something I was prepared to consider. Our response to management inflexibility broke new ground.
One lunchtime we gathered about seventy students outside the prayer room, gave the loud call to prayer, the adhan, and prayed in the open space in the centre of the campus. Most of the students were ordinary Muslims, not Islamists, but we provided direction and leadership. As president of the Islamic Society I led the prayers. As we prayed I sensed our numbers growing as others started to join us. I ended the prayer and caught a glimpse of the horrified members of the management team looking on, unable to believe what they had witnessed. It was like a scene from Tehran on the grounds of a ‘secular’ college in London. How were they to put the genie of Islamism back in the bottle?
Management demanded to see the committee immediately. Again, we missed our classes and held protracted negotiations. I was told not to make threats, but I knew I held the whip hand: with prayers under attack at Tower Hamlets College we could mobilize the wider Muslim community, rally East London mosque and YMO behind us, and cause major embarrassment for the college. In the event, management backed down, provided us with a larger room, and even agreed to clear the furniture for us before Friday prayers. We had won.
Exultant at how easily we had cowed the sensitive, liberal establishment of the college, we grew from strength to strength. To be a member of the Islamic Society was now a mark of pride, an association with the college’s most successful fraternity. We became the largest student body on campus with over two hundred members.
To counter our total Islamization of the public space at college (open prayers, Islamist posters, women in hijab), the management increased the number of youth workers, counsellors, and social workers. From our perspective they were pouring in money to divert the students away from our da’wah and towards Western hedonism.
A core group of students allied with the youth workers organized raves and discos and played loud music in the student common rooms. These were haram, forbidden in Islam. As long as I was president of the college Islamic Society, such behaviour would not be tolerated.
We devised defensive strategies. Brother Falik and I knew that all the students at the college respected us, ve
nerated us even, because we were associated with something they held high in their hearts: religion, particularly Islam. Although we believed Islam was more than just a religion, and that they were partial Muslims, we never hesitated in mobilizing their support when we needed it. Most of the students attended our events, read our magazines, supported our work, and would oblige us if we asked them to do something. However, being lesser Muslims, they also attended the disco.
On the day of the disco, leading members of the Islamic Society took it in turns to maintain a presence near the entrance. We didn’t prevent anyone from entering - we didn’t have to. Muslim students arriving at the disco saw us there and, out of respect rather than fear, simply walked away. To offend us was to offend God. We had played on their sensitivities of guilt, shame, and humiliation.
The organizers were aghast. They called on the college management to remove us. How was that possible? On what grounds? We stayed put. The disco was a failure. The following day, there were stickers all across the basement common room that read: ‘Islam is the only way - YMO.’ Nobody was left in any doubt as to who had orchestrated the previous day’s events.
One youth worker at the time was an active member of the radical Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP). In spring 1992 he organized a meeting on ‘Islam and Socialism’. He had seen our rise and, like most staff at the college, was deeply anguished to see Islamist domination of its social and public life. He wanted, I think, to respond to our claims that Islam was the ‘only way’ or the ‘Final Solution’. If Islam claimed to be a solution, well, so was socialism.
Most meeting rooms on Wednesday afternoons, the traditional free period, were booked by the Islamic Society. Occasionally the sisters booked rooms for their own activities too. The SWP made a mistake and organized the meeting at 12.30 on a Friday. We were determined to make a point: at Tower Hamlets College, nothing should clash with our Friday prayers. We held our own private meetings to respond to this new threat from socialism and decided to teach the SWP a lesson.
The speaker from the SWP arrived on time and found a packed lecture theatre. The main organizer was delighted that there were so many of us. Perhaps the SWP would now also make serious headway into the student community at Tower Hamlets. What he didn’t know was that his audience consisted almost entirely of members of the Islamic Society. Just as the speaker was beginning to warm up, to deliver his challenges to Islam, our plan of action came into play. I had placed one of our key members, Abdul Jalil, also a member of YMO, at the point furthest from the podium. As the speaker began he got up, walked across the front of the theatre, and headed for the door. One by one, the rest of us got up too. The speaker reddened in embarrassment. The organizer was livid.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, looking at me.
My members were all disciplined. No chaos broke out; nobody exulted at sabotaging a socialist meeting; all waited silently for me to respond.
‘It is Friday prayer time. In future please don’t organize meetings. If you do, make sure you don’t clash with our prayers.’
Over fifty of us walked out of the room, leaving just a handful of people in the audience. The event collapsed and, with it, socialism at Tower Hamlets College. Soon the SWP even stopped selling their newspaper outside.
In six months we had changed the entire atmosphere at college. The dynamism we had created at Tower Hamlets was now spilling out into the community. The sisters who wore the hijab put their mothers and older siblings to shame. The wearing of the headscarf by my mother’s generation was not usually practised until later in life, much like women in some Orthodox Christian countries, but the fact that young, educated, confident women at Tower Hamlets College wore the hijab in droves sent a message to the wider community. They saw our sisters on buses, on the roads, and at weddings, and slowly the hijab became a symbol of defiance of Western values and of a return to Islam.
It was, again, much later in life that I learned where the hijab really came from. The headscarf was worn by Christian and Jewish women in the Levant. The Prophet Mohammed had not invented hijab, merely adhered to the dominant dress code of his time. To this day, observant Amish, eastern Orthodox and married Jewish women wear hijab, too. We were ignorant of these facts: to us, it was Islam at its best, something the Prophet had invented.
Our dynamism had reverberations in sections of the student population that we had not known. Our magnetism and vitality drew people to us. A college security guard, after detailed discussion with our members, converted to Islam. Soon his wife converted too. A female student who had attended some of our events, and spoken to me at length about Islam, also converted. There were plenty of others who looked on dismayed at what we had done to the college: a visible Muslim presence everywhere, women veiled, ubiquitous posters of Islam, and the student population, almost without exception, under our control.
5.
We Will Rule the World
We need weapons, not food and aid. In war, we can eat our enemies.
Omar Bakri, leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain
The social ethos among Britain’s young Muslims was such that the more extrovert we became in our perceived expression of Islam, the more highly valued we were among our peers. Young girls whom I had seen arrive at college in trousers and blouses, moderate enough, now thought they had been immodest sinners. Now many wore headscarves and long dresses we called jilbabs. Some started to cover their faces with the niqab. However, the traditional dress worn by our sisters was modelled not on elderly piety but on a style of hijab wearing which reflected trends in Egypt. There was no room for the odd, careless moment when a light covering fell off one’s head, as in the case of the Pakistani prime minister at the time, Benazir Bhutto, who donned her headscarf so graciously. Instead a pinned-down-tight, face-grabbing style quickly gained acceptance as a perceived symbol of godliness and rejection of the West. Indeed, the main argument of our ‘Hijab: Put up or Shut up’ seminar was illustrated by posters of a woman in a miniskirt and another completely covered in hijab, jilbab, and niqab. We asked which woman was a man most likely to look at and desire? The implied answer was that the woman in a miniskirt would, undoubtedly, provoke fitna, or moral dissension in society.
It was not, however, all plain sailing. Falik and I learnt the very hard way about Muslim women in pious dress. The initial group of six or so who wore the hijab immediately formed a group among themselves. (We used to refer to them as the hijabis.) Soon, these same sisters started to wear jilbabs, and within weeks their faces disappeared behind niqabs. When we spoke to them, they looked away from us. Some even started to wear gloves to cover their hands from us. Even as Muslim men, we felt they were radically different from us, somehow too superior for us to address them as fellow believers. Their conduct became increasingly intimidating.
I found it hypocritical that the same ‘sisters’ readily spoke to the few non-Muslim men on campus; with unbelievers they were at ease! However, they assumed that we Muslim men would somehow treat them differently and thus avoided eye contact and would not respond even to our most basic greeting of peace, Salam aleikum. For me, this was going too far. Unable to restrain myself any longer, during one meeting with a fully veiled woman who insisted that she speak to me from behind a screen, I asked her, ‘Do I have a contagious disease of some sort? Or do you think I am going to rape you?’
I had spoken my mind but, to her, I was blasphemous. How dare I question her perceived piety? Those were the words of an unbridled teenage Islamist, unable to accept female rejection, perhaps.
Though we had worked among the brothers to recruit people to YMO, we had neglected our sisters since YMO was not a particularly welcoming place for women in those days. The segregation at East London mosque cut into YMO events and then into the Islamic Society at college. Our sisters, we discovered, had been under the influence of Muslim female teachers, trained in the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi school of thinking, which taught that women had a responsibility to protect men from themselves. It w
as in order that we should not fall prey to lust that they had resorted to such extremes.
The brothers started to call them ‘ninjas’. While we had been busy trying to Islamize the social scene at college, the ninja sisters had been in close contact with a group of Muslim male scholars who, we were told, strove to live like the early Muslims, the salaf. They claimed that they were now ‘free’ from men, and were no longer viewed as sexual objects. How were we to explain to them that their perceptions of men were wrong? Among the brothers, many wanted to marry those very sisters who had covered everything. They were considered to be the ‘truest Muslims’ and evoked the desires of many a brother. Rather than ask for a date, as was the practice of the kafir, we made marriage proposals. Several of my members who had previously had little interest in women now fell head over heels in love with one of them simply because she had covered all. The craving to unclothe the excessively clothed was cruel. But it was not a one-way street.
Oddly, the ninja sisters openly proposed to several of the brothers too. As courting and dating were considered morally degenerate, my members found partners of the opposite gender under the pretext of marriage. Many were still teenagers. They cited scripture from early Islam to prove that a suitor could approach a potential partner directly, agree the terms, and then ask a woman’s parents for her hand in marriage. In theory, and in the medieval social structures of the Arab world, there were such instances. In the modern West, however, I saw my members, male and female, struggle with their new form of ‘Islamic love’.
My generation of young British Muslims was torn between two cultures. The mainstream British lifestyle of dating, premarital sex, living together, and dissolution of partnerships with comparatively little fuss was not something that appealed to us. Simultaneously, the customs of our parents’ generation - arranged marriages with cousins - were equally abhorred. So we paved our own alternative way: approaching sisters directly, without parental interference, judging the merits of a possible marriage on the ground of perceived piety, and then, in many cases, eloping to get married.
