The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  ‘USA! You will Pay!’

  ‘Israel! You will Pay!’

  ‘Jee-had for Bosnia!’

  ‘Jee-had for Palestine!’

  We had gathered crowds for Bosnia, but the events were boiling with the rhetoric of jihad, the duty of the Islamist state. We did not believe that individuals should go off to fight. That was too small scale for us. We wanted the Muslim armies to move in the Middle East.

  Wahhabi jihadists came to the scene much later. We introduced jihadi rhetoric, but wanted to channel the emotions to establish the khilafah that would do the fighting for us. However, the jihadi genie proved to be a difficult one to control. Going off to fight in Bosnia became increasingly acceptable and training in Afghanistan earned street credibility among young Muslims we had radicalized.

  At Whitechapel, in numerical terms, we had not been as successful as I would have liked. We drew just under a thousand people. More importantly, the media covered our demonstration as I led it from the park on to Brick Lane, through Hanbury Street, and then on to Whitechapel High Street, past East London mosque and eventually to the third largest mosque in Tower Hamlets, which belonged to the Tablighi Jamat, in Christian Street. Our route had passed the three major mosques in Tower Hamlets in an attempt to move the masses against the mosque authorities and in support of our ideas.

  A local protest march organized by Muslims was ground-breaking territory. As we marched past, calling for jihad, the shopkeepers, the council estate tenants, drivers, and Jack the Ripper route-following tourists, watched us. And so did the rest of the country. I still remember an ITN camera focusing on my face as I held a microphone and shouted to the crowd, ‘We are entering the streets of the capital of kufr, my brothers, let them know “Allahu Akbar”.’

  We had targeted the prayer hall at the Regent’s Park mosque some months before, forcefully holding gatherings there on Saturday nights and on an impromptu basis when there was a public event. During most of the 1990s there were always shabab at Britain’s central mosque. Visiting Arab dignitaries, diplomats - tourists when not resting in the confines of their embassies - prayed at Regent’s Park. Every Friday, our shabab passed concepts outside the mosque, spoke about the urgency of khilafah, and distributed leaflets. The East London management had thrown out Omar Bakri, but at Regent’s Park we still had free rein. We were able to speak in the prayer hall at any time of our choosing.

  The demonstrations in Slough and central London were addressed by Omar Bakri. I watched him as he walked tirelessly despite his limp, sustained after an injury fighting the Israelis in Beirut in the 1980s. We gained unprecedented exposure in communities across the country with our Bosnia demonstrations. Numbers were smaller than anticipated, but the concepts had been passed. Khilafah and jihad were now topics that dominated Muslim discussion.

  In central London the shabab held regular study meetings at Regent’s Park. In north London, we had access to the mosques at Turnpike Lane and Finsbury Park, and once a month we held ‘political concepts’ meetings for the shabab in London there. I went to two Finsbury Park meetings. In Newham we met at Green Street mosque, where Omar Bakri held weekly tafsir (Koran study) gatherings. Similarly, in other parts of the country we had entered mosques through two avenues: as young, concerned Muslims returning from universities on a break, wanting to ‘talk about Islam’, or through personal contacts we had among the large network of Asian uncles, the Biraderi.

  We were still struggling to produce results from our contacts in Tower Hamlets, but we never stopped trying. Patrick was insistent that we attend Christian Street mosque every Thursday night. The Muslim missionary organization, the Tablighi Jamat, held weekly gatherings there.

  ‘There is a ready-made crowd of three thousand there every week. Guys, we must make contacts. These people come from across Britain; send them back to the cities, not with Tablighis, but buzzing with our ideas.’

  It became official policy in Whitechapel. At YMO it was an unwritten rule that we never interfered with the Tablighi Jamat gatherings, and the Tablighis reciprocated by not disturbing YMO events, but Hizb ut-Tahrir broke that mould. We attended and tried to control everybody’s events. If we failed, we ensured that there was sufficient heckling to effect maximum disruption. There was nothing Muslim about our conduct.

  Christian Street mosque, managed by the missionary but highly literalist Tablighi Jamat, had two floors and vast prayer halls to accommodate the Thursday night crowds. The Tablighis were well-mannered, humble people: we abused those traits ruthlessly. Humble minds, trained in mosques, were no match for our oratorical skills, sharpened at debating fora throughout the British university system in confrontation with atheists, Marxists, and other Islamists.

  The first floor was crammed with elders who came to listen to speakers in Urdu. We rarely entered the first-floor prayer hall - that never interested us. We targeted instead the young minds that often sat idle on the second floor, waiting for a translation of the Urdu lecture into English. These speeches often started after evening prayers, but for hours beforehand youth from all over Britain, and sometimes Canada, South Africa, or Australia, would sit patiently and wait. Many of them were sent there by their parents.

  The targeting and recruitment of contacts was easy. The Prophet had taught his followers to say salam aleikum as a first greeting. That was exploited by us as an ice-breaker. It was effortless to shift from saying the salam to asking, ‘How are you, brother?’ and from that to, ‘Which city are you from?’ and from that to the message we wanted to give. The maxim ‘He who questions, leads’ was utilized by us to the full.

  We knew the people we had to avoid - those who were hardcore, wearing the subcontinental long shirt, skullcap, and long beard, we avoided. It was their junior followers in jeans and T-shirts, new kids on the block, that we had in mind. On several nights we entered the second floor of the prayer hall and split up into pairs, sitting among the youth and conducting impromptu circles, rather like Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park.

  The young men were already in a religious frame of mind, sitting in a mosque waiting for a lecture to commence. We gladly entertained them with our ideas. Farid encouraged us to speak as often as possible at Christian Street. He had sharpened his own delivery there.

  Farid and his sidekick Zulfiqar would jump on a bench outside a mosque, or stand on a car bonnet wherever Muslims gathered. Farid would address the crowd with no preparation whatsoever. This style of spontaneous zealous public performance, taken from fundamentalist Christian preachers and Marxists, was developed among Muslims by Hizb ut-Tahrir: we always had something to say. Other groups leafleted, booked venues, hired speakers, invited people. We went to the crowds: wherever there were people, we spoke. At university refectories we spoke aloud among ourselves, exploiting the British habit of eavesdropping.

  At Christian Street we had free access every Thursday night for at least three months. The elders from the first floor were delighted to see that the young people upstairs were divided in groups and ‘speaking about Islam’. However, as expected, we were soon detected. We made the mistake of distributing leaflets and some of the shabab even handed out their phone numbers. That immediately alerted the elders.

  A ‘no discussion’ rule was imposed on Thursday nights - from then on, only the main speaker would speak and we were all supposed to listen. But we were not ones to obey man-made rules. A young lanky, long-bearded Tablighi politely asked several of us to leave the mosque one Thursday night.

  ‘Why, brother?’ asked Patrick. ‘How can you ask a Muslim to leave the House of God?’ We knew how to play to Muslim sensitivities. The guilty fellow reconsidered his actions.

  ‘OK. Stay. But please don’t speak.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Patrick, realizing that his tactics were paying off. ‘We’re speaking about Islam. About Muslims in Bosnia. How can you silence us? Fear Allah, brother.’

  Before Patrick could end his argument, which was clearly heading towards a successful conclusion, a Tabl
ighi elder came along and patted Patrick on the back, saying, ‘Please leave. No discussions.’

  The elders were harder for us to engage with. They were not easily persuaded, nor susceptible to our well-tried ‘Fear Allah’ blackmail.

  The following week we returned with our megaphones and the Volkswagen Polo. We circled Christian Street mosque attacking the Tablighi Jamat and their introvert, apolitical form of Islam.

  ‘Praying and fasting is not enough, O Muslims! What use are your prayers when the Jews slaughter your brothers in Palestine? Today it is more important to establish the Islamic state, the khilafah, to honour your faith. Wake up from your slumber! Bring back the army of khilafah . . .’

  Oddly, for the first time, there were police sirens behind us. I was in the back seat, with Patrick at the front. The last thing I wanted was for us to be arrested or questioned in front of the mosque, presenting ourselves as a scene for amusement for Tablighis. I asked Amjad to drive to the end of the road, where, with the police car behind us, we stopped.

  ‘Please step outside, gentlemen,’ an officer requested.

  The usual recording of names and addresses followed. Upon learning that we were all students, two of us medical students at leading London university hospitals, the police were lenient with us.

  ‘There have been complaints from the mosque,’ said the officer. ‘I suggest you don’t trouble the people inside. If they deem you to be a nuisance, then we will have to take things further.’

  ‘But we’re not harming anybody,’ protested Amjad. ‘We’re only megaphoning. What’s wrong with that?’ Our innate inclination to confront, to argue, could not be dampened even by the courtesy of the British police. We parked the car, put the megaphone in the boot and headed to the mosque. In the meantime, outside the mosque, our shabab were causing an uproar.

  ‘How dare you call the kafir police,’ shouted one. ‘Don’t you know it’s haram to get the kuffar involved in Muslim affairs? The Saudis invite the US to our countries, just like you. Go running to the kuffar.’ We had been trained always to link local issues to the global concerns of Muslims. Our shabab were doing well, very well. To link our expulsion from a mosque to US troop presence in Saudi Arabia was indeed an intellectual achievement of sorts. In years to come the Hizb would argue that every British Muslim difficulty, from terrorism to poor community relations, was a result of British foreign policy. And to this drumbeat, other Islamists would march.

  Among all the shouting and chaos, the call to prayer went off. Most of the Muslims went inside to pray. We were banned from entering, so we wandered off.

  Although we were ejected from Christian Street mosque, our presence pervaded Tower Hamlets. We put up posters on the walls, handed out leaflets on the streets, and held regular events at the Davenant Centre. Patrick had made many key contacts in the local media. He selected his ‘contacts’ carefully, and slowly worked to ensure long-term conviction. Many of those contacts he then handed over to local shabab in various parts of the country. In his home-town of Southend-on-Sea, Patrick had recruited over twenty young people to the cause of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Soon Patrick was sent from Tower Hamlets and ended up recruiting in Bangladesh, a result of a contact in Tower Hamlets. He had been in close touch with a university professor in Dhaka, whom he used to set up Hizb ut-Tahrir there. Britain served the Hizb ut-Tahrir as an excellent launch pad for recruitment and the export of Islamist ideology to parts of the Muslim world Nabhani never dreamed would join the Hizb: Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey.

  We had fired up Whitechapel to such an extent that summer that our faces were now well known in every mosque and community centre in Tower Hamlets. I began to wonder if I was doing the Hizb a disservice. Should we move to other areas and allow newer shabab to take over? Our brothers in the neighbouring borough of Newham were struggling with limited numbers and resources. Perhaps some of us should move there. I wanted to speak to Farid about this when an incident in East London mosque made up my mind for me.

  I regularly received reports from several of our activists about their recruitment and development of support for our ideas in East London. However, as a principle, I tried to avoid attending the mosque as often as possible. I had too many memories and knew far too many people there. Besides, I knew Brother Falik had not fully recovered from my defection from the YMO and did not want to rub salt in his wounds. However, after a lecture in the Brady Centre, I was passing by the mosque with a group of our shabab when the time for prayer came. It seemed wrong to walk past and not pray.

  After prayers I walked downstairs to the large foyer and noticed, as usual, our shabab engaged in debate there. The echoes were loud and I was surprised that there were no complaints. Debating with Islamists from YMO was always interesting for us, because we almost always won. A particular weak spot of the YMO and their parent organization, Jamat-e-Islami, was that they, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, had participated in free elections.

  ‘How could you possibly advocate democracy?’ said one activist, interrupting a leader of Islamic Forum Europe. ‘Don’t you know democracy comes from the Greeks. It is kufr. Demos kratos is people’s rule. In Islam, only Allah rules. Not people. Sovereignty belongs to God, not men. How can you follow man-made law?’

  Musleh Faradhi, a leader of Islamic Forum Europe, was surrounded by YMO people unable to believe that their leaders were silent, without argument. Faradhi made an excuse and left. Other smaller discussions were taking place and as I walked over to join one I saw the main doors of the mosque open.

  Shoes in hand, in came an old acquaintance of mine. Zachariah had studied at Tower Hamlets College the previous year. He was always stern, but friendly towards his acquaintances. I knew Zachariah fairly well and had heard others speak about his mastery of martial arts. I knew he often trained in the basement of the mosque with other martial arts fans. Khan sahib would reserve the rooms for him. ‘Zachariah is training’ was understood to mean that there were a small group of people in the basement who were not to be disturbed.

  I went over to greet him. He was not his usual self, taken aback by what he saw: several activists of the Hizb publicly debating on what he considered to be his own turf. And I, in his eyes a traitor who had left the YMO, was there too.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I responded, puzzled.

  Zachariah walked up to one of the shabab, grabbed him by the arm, dragged him down the stairs, swung open the main doors of the mosque, and threw him outside. I could not believe what I was seeing. How dare he?

  ‘Stop it!’ I shouted. ‘Stop it! How can you attack Muslims? It’s haram!’

  At that moment Zachariah grabbed my shirt collar and violently tugged it, ripping the buttons while bending my neck suddenly. He pushed me down the stairs and out. Within seconds, all the shabab were fleeing the building.

  I was almost in tears, but I knew this was a moment at which I had to remain strong and provide leadership to those who looked on.

  How could Zachariah, a fellow brother in the Islamist movement, commit such a crime? The pain was unbearable, the humiliation unprecedented. Only a year earlier I had run away from home and been given shelter by Islamists at this mosque. In all my life, I had never been treated violently. Even during the racist days of the 1980s, my secondary school years, there had been taunts and the odd tussle, but nothing like this.

  We crossed over Whitechapel High Street and I called Farid Kasim. On our very first halaqah he had told us that he was like a father to us. Farid’s response on hearing what had happened stunned me: ‘You must change public opinion in the area. That is the only way to control the mosque.’

  There were no words of comfort, no promise to complain officially to the mosque, and we were not allowed to go to the police. It was Muslim business.

  Farid’s impersonal, indifferent response shook me. How could he? When Farid had been expelled from university campuses, we had stood by him. At SOAS and at
Tower Hamlets College we had smuggled him in by changing his name to Abu Yasir, defying the authorities and risking expulsion. And yet, when we were down, he did not care.

  What sort of human beings was the Hizb creating? This experience sowed the very first seed of doubt. If Zachariah, a fellow Islamist, was prepared to fight us in a mosque, what were Islamists capable of doing when in power?

  8.

  Inferior Others

  The only meeting place between a Muslim and a Jew is the battlefield.

  Hizb ut-Tahrir leaflet

  My defection from YMO to Hizb ut-Tahrir, involvement in setting up the Hizb in Whitechapel, and managing the college Islamic Society through a turbulent period meant I had little time left for my studies. My mind was on Bosnia and Palestine rather than my studies in Britain. My daily life was dedicated to activism: recruiting new activists, organizing events, distributing leaflets, arguing and debating with those who opposed us.

  At home my parents thought that I had left YMO and Islamism and began to express some joy. It was short lived. My disagreements with YMO were not theological, they were political. My father soon pointed that out to me. At the beginning of the previous academic year he had suggested that I study for A-Levels at any one of the three further education colleges in Newham. I refused. I had been elected president of the Islamic Society at Tower Hamlets and had a duty to serve.

  Now, exhausted and wary of Islamist factionalism in Tower Hamlets, I decided to study in Newham. The previous year I had flunked my exams and scraped through my resits, using my pass to access the college and attending classes only occasionally. This year, I promised myself, I would study.

  I chose history, government and politics, and sociology for my A-Level subjects and applied myself to study. I was fortunate that my request for a transfer from Tower Hamlets to Newham was granted by the leadership. The ‘scene’, as we called it, in Newham, was totally different from that at Tower Hamlets. There, we fought tooth and nail with rival Islamists from Jamat-e-Islami’s offshoots, were in conflict with apolitical Tablighis in Christian Street mosque, and, in my case at least, tried to avoid Brick Lane mosque for fear of clashing with my own father in public. Nevertheless, I left a Hizb that was growing in numbers, confident in its expression and able to maintain a visible public presence with its innovative ideas.