The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  Newham, though a neighbouring borough to Tower Hamlets, was a completely different operation altogether. It had a large Muslim population, but it also had a liberal smattering from other faiths, particularly Sikhs and Hindus. It also had a large African Christian population as well as a significant white working-class Protestant presence. As an Islamist, I saw everyone along religious lines, and all non-Muslims as inferior to us.

  During my first year in Newham, 1994, I studied well. I attended classes regularly, took part in seminars and did all of my homework. All the while Hizb ut-Tahrir was creating waves on campuses across the country, coming under fire from Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, but I kept a low profile. The college’s Islamic Society in Newham did trouble me, though, because of the group that dominated it.

  The society held weekly lectures. They were not as popular as the ones in Tower Hamlets had been, but a fair number of students attended. The speakers, without exception, were Wahhabis from JIMAS, although these young teenagers with their trademark fluffy beards, short trousers, army boots, and red Saudi scarves preferred to call themselves Salafis, claiming that they followed the Salaf, or early Muslims. In reality, they were far removed from the Salaf. In many ways they were similar to the Amish, but without the key trait of humility. While the Amish are an independent, secluded community, the Salafis are sponsored by Saudi Arabia to propagate Salafism or Wahhabism globally.

  I did, however, keep my political activities going in the community. I met potential recruits who were handed over to me by local shabab. Every Saturday night I attended a public circle in Shaftesbury Road, in the mornings helped man a da’wah stall on Green Street, and attended my weekly halaqah. Compared to the manic lifestyle in Whitechapel, this was luxury.

  During these activities I met a young Hizb activist, Eisa al-Hindi, a convert from Hindusim. Eisa used to spend nights at Shaftesbury Road and other houses rented by Hizb members. His family wanted him to return to them, if not Hinduism. Eventually they tracked him down and forcibly removed him to India in an attempt to sever his connection with the Hizb. It was too late. The commitment to jihad and destruction had already been implanted in Eisa’s young mind. In India he searched for others who held similar convictions. He ended up fighting Indian troops in Kashmir, wrote a book advocating violence which was sold in Britain’s Islamist bookshops, and then, after 9/11, his name appeared on the CIA’s list of al-Qaeda terrorists who had previously targeted New York.

  I remember Eisa in his black bomber jacket and dark denim jeans. He was always keen to socialize, spending long hours talking and attending as many events as possible. We manned stalls together in Asian-dominated Green Street, in Upton Park. He was someone who had entered Islam and started preaching to Muslims about the need for the Islamic state, jihad, and the destruction of the West without having learnt how to pray.

  The da’wah stall was a creative idea first used by the Hizb. Again, while other Muslim groups were busy organizing along conventional lines, we were pioneering new methods. I think we borrowed that particular idea, as we did much else, from radical socialists. On Saturday mornings, and occasionally at large meetings of other groups, we pitched up with our paste table and some of our most controversial leaflets, tapes, and invitations to our meetings. For about five hours every Saturday morning, five minutes away from West Ham football stadium, we took turns in groups of four to stand by our stall. Similar stalls appeared in many other parts of Britain.

  As a result of my relocation from Whitechapel, my halaqah changed too. I now had the same mushrif as Patrick. Amir Khan was a final-year medical student at King’s College London. His younger brother, the whiz-kid behind a coming campaign, was Asif Khan, a scientist at Imperial College London. Both brothers, along with their younger brother, Kashif, were dedicated members of Hizb ut-Tahrir. They lived with their parents in a maisonette off London’s Marylebone Road. I attended halaqah on Thursday nights, and usually caught a lift with Tahir Malik, a city banker.

  This halaqah was different. All the students were at top universities in London. There was an American student who was studying at the LSE, and most others were at SOAS, King’s, or Imperial. I was the youngest student there and being in such company made me take the Hizb even more seriously.

  Amir developed the concepts in the latter part of the System of Islam to new heights. He was an enthusiastic intellectual, keen to deliver the ideas to us as succinctly as possible. The details of the Islamic state were contained in the draft constitution composed by Nabhani and offered to several Islamist organizations as a political document. One had been sent to the Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978, though after two meetings with Hizb leaders in Paris he had rejected the constitution. We, however, studied it with more dedication than the Koran, convinced that we would see the 186 articles listed in its fifty pages implemented as state policy very shortly, preferably by ‘next Ramadan’.

  It was during the study of the constitution that doubts started to creep into my mind as to where we were headed. The draft constitution was not set in stone but a living document - the ‘architect’s blueprint’ Karl Marx wrote about as a prerequisite to political success. In the constitution Nabhani had designed a highly centralized state, controlling almost every aspect of life from the centre. He had detailed the role of the army, the function of the citizen, the purpose of the education system, the running of the economy, and the minutiae relating to the life of a caliph. Much of this was impressive, for we believed this was all Nabhani’s own research. Later, at university, I discovered a book by a thirteenth-century Muslim author, al-Mawaridi, who had detailed the structure of the Abbasid Empire; the Abbasids, like their predecessors the Umayyads, had simply adopted the codes of civil government of Byzantium and Persia. The claim to an ‘original Islamic political system’ was a myth. Nabhani had simply adopted that text without mentioning his source. Nabhani’s plagiarism, I was soon to learn, was not limited to his constitution.

  Much of the constitution was a futuristic document; although I found several of its articles unpalatable, they were not immediately relevant to my life. However, under a section entitled ‘The Social System’, Nabhani had several articles I found problematic. Article 114, for example, states: ‘Women are forbidden to be in private with any man they can marry, they are also forbidden to display their charms or reveal their body in front of foreign men.’

  By ‘foreign men’ Nabhani meant men from outside the immediate family. And the tone of the article was Koranic. However, in Hizb circles, we mixed with the ‘sisters’, or female activists of the Hizb, more than any other Islamist group. In YMO, segregation had been rigorously upheld, and one of the Hizb’s attractions for me was its comparatively liberal attitude towards women. Many of our shabab were in relationships with the ‘sisters’. Were we prescribing for other Muslims behaviour that we did not ourselves follow? Nabhani advocated segregation, but our events were far from segregated. Our shabab courted many of the sisters. I asked Amir how this could be. His response annoyed me. ‘We’re talking about the plague, here. Women are like the plague. Avoid them at all costs. I know that many of the shabab are in relations with sisters, but we shouldn’t be.’ Any further questioning would result in me being perceived as shallow and distracted. I had to be careful about the questions I asked, the assumptions I made.

  The Hizb had an ingrained culture of smothering thought and questions that it considered might conflict with the grand scheme of overthrowing governments and confronting the West. I had already gone beyond the pale; I had questioned Nabhani.

  As one who had two sisters and was close to his mother, I did not take well to this description of women as ‘the plague’. And Amir had been far too lenient on the ‘relationships’ issue. My qualm was about fairness: if we believed in segregation for Muslims and no private meetings between the sexes, then it ought to apply to us too. Meeting in parks, cinemas, cars, and university corridors in the name of ‘public space’ smacked of hypocrisy to me.
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  The beginning of 1994 was a quiet period for me. Across the country, however, much was happening. In addition to the hundreds of meetings we held, public and private, not counting the impromptu public addresses by members outside major mosques in Britain, we started the publicity for an unprecedented event.

  Our success on university campuses, the previous summer’s Bosnia demonstrations, and the headway we had made in local communities gave us great strength. My instructor’s younger brother, Asif, began to publicize an international conference to mark the official ending of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the sultanate and the introduction of Ataturk’s secularism. This we referred to as the ‘destruction of the Islamic state’. After the First World War, and Turkey’s defeat, the last sultan was removed from office on 3 March 1924. For all Muslims, but for us more than any other group, this date held particular significance.

  At several universities, when we were expelled from the Islamic societies, we started a ‘1924 Society’ with the aim of making the events of that year seem recent, relevant, and reprehensible. In Sunni Muslim minds the khilafah was associated with the first four caliphs who ruled after the death of the Prophet and, after some turbulence, their successors in the Abbasid Empire, which ended in 1256. However, Hizb ut-Tahrir successfully recast our imaginations, arguing that the rightful caliph of the Muslim world had been the Turkish sultan and that 1994 marked only the seventieth anniversary of the khilafah’s destruction. Inside the Hizb, there was a feeling that something was about to happen in the Middle East. That we were on the verge of a new world order, that our brothers in the armies of Jordan and Iraq would move to topple the regimes, and empower Islam and Muslims by declaring an Islamic state.

  As always, our duty in Britain was to prepare the ummah for the caliph, to swear allegiance to the future Islamic state, deeming the Queen and the British government wholly irrelevant to British Muslim life. We planned a major conference, billed as the ‘largest outside the Muslim world in history’. We booked Wembley arena.

  With the Hizb’s network of nearly 300 core activists, and a further web of ‘contacts’ nearing 4,000, we were confident that we could easily attract a crowd of 12,000. We started the advertising early, seven months beforehand.

  As I was attending halaqah with Amir, I got regular updates from the motor-mouthed Asif about intense media interest in the event, forthcoming press conferences, and the agonizing of Arab regimes. ‘Something massive is about to happen,’ he would tell us. ‘Take it from me.’ There were secret late-night meetings between Omar, Farid, and other tight-lipped leaders of the Hizb. Asif organized the production of thousands of luminous orange stickers that read Khilafah - Coming Soon to a Country Near You! Tahir Malik and I were given a car boot-load of rolls to deliver locally. As we left, Asif was on the phone arranging for others from all over Britain to do the same. ‘I want to see these plastered everywhere’ he said excitedly. ‘Every public lamppost, road sign, notice board . . .’ To help us target the right areas, members from every district went to the local library to consult the electoral roll. We were against democracy, and the first Islamist group in Britain to declare voting in general elections haram. Yet we had no qualms in using the government’s electoral rolls.

  Within weeks local newspapers were running articles about our ‘vandalism’. The shabab had put khilafah stickers everywhere. Many sections of the media, like the general public, were bewildered: what was khilafah? Who was putting up the stickers?

  Those were the very questions we wanted people to ask - particularly Muslims - to generate interest in the Wembley conference. With awareness at new heights, we plundered the electoral rolls for Muslim names and went knocking on doors. To our surprise, when those doors opened we were often received with hostility. Many criticized our indiscriminate fly-posting. Others refused to speak to us at all. Some were downright abusive.

  We retreated to safer ground, leafleting mosques and selling tickets to our own friends, families, and neighbours.

  London was a popular tourist destination for many Gulf Arabs during the summer months, so the Hizb made it their business to maintain a six-hour presence every evening near the hotels they favoured. The intention was to distribute leaflets calling for a replacement of Arab governments and inviting Arab tourists to join the work ‘towards establishing an Islamic state’, but most of the Gulf Arabs I met on the Edgware Road, many of whom were Saudis, were more interested in calling female escorts from phone booths than listening to a Hizb politico ranting about an Islamic state.

  That was more or less my first contact with Arabs outside the Hizb. Their lack of support for what we were trying to do, their indifference to the future Islamic state, and their derisive attitude towards Hizb ut-Tahrir struck me as odd. There we were, trying to liberate them from tyranny, and they could not care less.

  One evening, I was called to a press conference in Edmonton, where Omar Bakri had recently started his one-man School of Shariah, teaching rudimentary Arabic and Muslim law. When I arrived I was introduced to a stocky middle-aged Saudi physics professor: Mohamed al-Mas’ari. Farid Kasim presented the professor to a packed room of British journalists as the effective opposition to the corrupt Saudi government. There was great excitement - Hizb ut-Tahrir in Saudi Arabia was active, perhaps on the verge of taking power.

  In later years al-Mas’ari became famous as the Saudi dissident whom the British government wanted to deport to the Caribbean island of Dominica. I remember him as jovial, friendly, and considerate. By wheeling him out at a press conference the Hizb hoped to give the impression that ‘something big’ was about to happen in the Middle East. Mas’ari was scheduled to address the conference in Wembley; we seriously believed it was part of a strategic move to declare the caliphate in one or more Arab countries on the day. Intrigue was further raised on the day of the conference when, for ‘security reasons’, Mas’ari pulled out.

  The khilafah conference was a shambolic failure, though at the time very few of us were prepared to admit the fact. Thanks mostly to the Jewish Chronicle and London’s Evening Standard, BBC local news channels, and a host of other media outlets, we gained acres of media coverage. However, attendance was nowhere near the 12,000 that we had expected. In typical Islamist fashion we blamed the Jews for sabotaging the conference by ‘buying all the tickets’ and thus making them unavailable for Muslims! The possibility that Muslims were simply not interested in our conference did not dawn on us.

  Peter Tatchell showed up with a group of people from the gay rights organization Stonewall to protest as ‘Queers against Mullahs’. His arrest ensured that the conference at least made the papers the following day.

  Representatives of the Hizb from the United States including the Jordanian Abu Talha, addressed the conference, as did Omar Bakri, Farid Kasim, and a crowd-pulling cleric from Pakistan. Large numbers of Islamists from other organizations also attended, primarily to gauge the success of the Hizb. The swathes of glaringly empty seats inside the conference hall sent them away with smiles on their faces. They, like us, had overestimated the organizational ability of the Hizb.

  All that day we monitored the news. Between stewarding duties I would watch TV, hoping for breaking news of the Islamic state. We had used the conference to launch English translations of Nabhani’s books, particularly his revisionist history book The Islamic State. Surely this would be in huge demand now that the state was about to be announced. The kuffar would, no doubt, turn to it for information following the months of publicity, a plague of Day-Glo stickers, and a major conference.

  But nothing happened. There was no Islamic state, no military coup, and no caliph. There was not even a rush at Waterstone’s. Soon, inshallah, we consoled ourselves.

  Back at college, I now had classmates who were not Muslims. Not since Sir William Burrough had I been acquainted with non-Muslim British students. At Newham I studied alongside Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and, of course, many ordinary Muslims. They had not noticed anything particula
rly ‘different’ about me. Some had seen me on the stall on Green Street and wondered why I sold Islamic tapes at the weekend, but they did not seem to care much.

  Patrick had recruited an active core of about twenty young men in Southend-on-Sea and had been holding study circles with them. (They knew him by his Muslim name, Naseem, but his parents called him Patrick.) Most of these young Muslims were in their final year at school and many were children of middle-class Asian businessmen, attracted by Patrick’s ideals of an Islamic state in which there would be no racism, Muslims would be first-class citizens, the kuffar would be put in their place and an army would declare war.

  One acolyte, Majid Nawaz, embraced the Hizb ut-Tahrir’s message more tightly than most. After completing his GCSEs he left for London to attend Hizb cell meetings, keen to know more. I had met Majid on a speaking visit to Southend and he had asked me where he should study in London for his A-Levels. I suggested a number of colleges but he opted to join me at Newham, where there was a significant Muslim population and where, to date, I had avoided going public with Hizb ut-Tahrir.

  I liked Majid, he was sharp, committed, and open to new ideas. He was also a master barber, and gave me and other Hizb members haircuts to help subsidize his stay in London. Brother Falik, the old friend whom I had lost as a result of leaving YMO, was finally replaced.

  In less than a decade Majid would become a national leader of the Hizb in Britain, advocate the Hizb’s extremist ideas in Egypt during his Arabic language placement year, and be tortured while serving a four-year prison sentence in the notorious jails of Cairo. But in 1995 we thought only of Newham.