The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  At the interview, I was asked why I wanted to work there. My ideas were clear: ‘To learn more about banking, finance, economics, and the corporate world. My fiance’e is working with you at the moment and she tells me that you have an educational training programme in place.’

  The interviewer, a polite lady called Sadie Jones, then explained to me the in-house training programme that HSBC offered. There were various modules one could study, taking afternoons off as study leave, and then, within four years, secure a degree in Finance & Banking from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) as well as become a member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers. Membership of an institute did not appeal to me, particularly not one where, I thought, English toffs drank French wine in bow ties. I wanted to study more. It was in books and study that I found myself most comfortable.

  Two days after the interview Sadie called me and offered me a position at HSBC’s flagship central London branch in Holborn. I was thrilled. However, there was one problem. After the interview, I had read the brochures from the Chartered Institute of Bankers and realized that the ‘banking exams’ I had been so keen to study for in order to improve my knowledge of economics were designed for junior managers who aspired to higher positions. By expressing an interest in studying before even getting the job I had come across as a would-be high flyer.

  ‘You’re too ambitious,’ she said. ‘You’re a confident young man with high aspirations, and we’re worried you may find the bank too repressive.’

  Embarrassed, I reassured Sadie that my feet were firmly on the ground and she sent me a contract to sign.

  I had graduated and got a job with a global bank working in the City of London. HSBC had done security checks and for about a week I was worried that my involvement with radical Islamism might show up. To my amazement, no such issue appeared and somehow I forgot that I had ever been an activist with Hizb ut-Tahrir. I had blanked my memory. At HSBC I adapted well. The energy and drive that I had previously deployed in Islamist activities, I now used to advance my career and improve my life. Faye and I had been together for nearly four years and I knew I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. In order to get married, we needed to save money. I worked at Holborn branch by day and studied for my banking exams in the evenings.

  I did well in my exams. I had not studied economics before, so I worked extra hard. While at Holborn I got to meet hundreds of HSBC’s top customers working in offices in Fleet Street and Chancery Lane: judges, barristers, management consultants, goldsmiths, senior accountants from KPMG, and an older clientele who made use of the branch’s deposit boxes.

  I was able to strike up conversation easily with the judges and senior managers who visited the branch and establish their financial needs. After all, they were talking to their banker and they had no reason to adhere to the English rule of ‘not discussing money’. Behind closed doors I was amused at how un-English moneyed people became when talking about money.

  The people I introduced to the wealth-management division were no mere customers but elite ‘private clients’. The private client manager in Holborn Circus was a suave young operator named Maurice Diver. Soon he and I became friends.

  In Tony Blair’s Britain we liked to think we were now meritocratic, and that the old boy network was disappearing. Wrong. Maurice was promoted to area manager for the stockbroker belt and given a whole floor in a shining new building in Surrey, from where he would oversee twelve private client managers and expand HSBC’s client base.

  On Maurice’s last day at Holborn, he came to my desk and said, ‘How do you fancy working for me, mate?’

  I was nonplussed.

  ‘I need someone young and dynamic,’ he continued. ‘Some one who wants a future in the bank, to manage the office for me and look after my clients while I expand the business, recruit new managers, and liaise with my own bosses. Basically, you’ll be my assistant. I need you in that role for two years. At the same time you learn the ropes and, all being well, you’ll become a private client manager. I think you’ll be good at it. You’re good with clients - they trust you with their money. They tell you more about their plans than they do any of the others on this banking floor. I have had some great business from you. I’ll have to advertise the position, of course, but I’d love you to apply for it.’

  That gave me a real ego boost. Perhaps I was destined to be a high flyer after all.

  Islamism was a distant memory. I was busy building my career and had no time for the underworld of mosques and marches, shouting and sabotage. Bosnia seemed irrelevant. That was then; this is now. Why shouldn’t integration be possible in Britain? I did not drink, and yet I went to J. D. Wetherspoons on Chancery Lane for lunch. At the office Christmas party it didn’t bother me when my colleagues got drunk and stumbled into the stationery cupboard for a quick fumble. Like a good tabloid journalist, I simply made my excuses and left. And I felt a whole lot better than they did the following morning. Besides, there were plenty of teetotallers in modern Britain. My abstinence didn’t worry my colleagues or clients in the least.

  Over in Surrey, Maurice was recruiting new staff for his office. I was interviewed along with several other candidates and in late 1999 I became Maurice’s assistant, with joint responsibility for portfolios worth £500,000.

  Within two years of joining HSBC, aged just twenty-four, I had escaped the branch network, and moved into the elite private banking arm. If I did a two-year stint in Surrey, I would be in line for a City job with my own portfolio of clients to manage. The world was my oyster. It seemed that nothing could go wrong. But it did.

  My parents at last had something to be pleased about. True, we differed on religious grounds, for I still rejected their form of spiritual Islam and refused to attend the mawlid, or gathering in which the Prophet and God are remembered. But in worldly terms at least I was now respectable. And in just a few months’ time, in August 2000, their son would be getting married.

  But I was fooling myself as well as my loved ones. Really I was a sleeper Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israeli, just so busy building a career and enjoying life that I couldn’t be bothered to pursue the convictions still festering in my subconscious. I did not feel the least bit guilty. As far as I was concerned, I had done my fair share. I had recruited scores of Muslims to the Islamist cause, many of whom were still active in YMO and the Hizb. I had distributed thousands of leaflets. I had no desire to return to active Islamism of any sort, whether it was the Mawdudian YMO, the Nabhanian Hizb, or the Hamas-inspired ISB. I wanted to be alone with the ones I loved, my family.

  During my time at HSBC I had networked with countless senior managers. I had met many business leaders and the one thing that struck me most was how miserable most of them were. Many had climbed to the top of the ladder by sacrificing their family life for a pension and share options. I began to question my motives. Ironically, in the Hizb we had made much fanfare about three questions that every human had to ask, and it was these that I asked myself now: Why am I here? Where am I heading? Where did I come from? Mortgage slavery was not my idea of living the dream any more than the darkness of a life in Islamism.

  Hector Fothergill was HSBC’s probate manager. As part of our complete financial services provision, when we signed up clients HSBC was often appointed executor of their estate. Of course we charged a commission for the probate service so, in effect, when a client died, the bank made money. As always, familiarity bred contempt and it was not uncommon for advisers to tell Hector cheerfully about ‘an old codger who’ll pop it soon’. Hector would often receive notification of a death from the coroner as if he had won the lottery. ‘Yes! Excellent! I really needed it this month.’ Yet within minutes he would be on the phone expressing heartfelt sympathy to the widow.

  Moreover, we pushed our financial products by playing on people’s fears of accident, disability, or death, or the loss of their property. Either way the bank made money. To me it all seemed rather ghouli
sh, hypocritical, and not entirely ethical.

  I became increasingly disenchanted with the artificiality of it all. My snappy silk tie began to feel like a corporate noose. That year I didn’t even bother attending the office Christmas party, though it kept the office in gossip for a week. Was this really how I intended to spend my life? I needed to take stock. Where was I heading?

  During the last ten days of Ramadan the Prophet Mohammed used to retreat to his mosque in Medina for a period of spiritual growth. As a young man he had frequently gone to the mountains on the outskirts of Mecca, seeking solace in God. I decided to follow his lead and took myself off to a mosque in London, away from the clamour and hype of the new millennium. My motives were not intellectual, political, or even particularly religious. This was purely introspective; it was for me - for the good of my soul.

  11.

  Metamorphosis

  Companionship with the holy makes you one of them. Though you are rock or marble, you will become a jewel when you associate with the man of heart.

  Jalal al-Din Rumi, thirteenth-century Muslim poet

  Since leaving Islamism, I could no longer believe in a God who wanted us to govern in his name. In fact, I did not even think of God as ‘he’ any more. For me, God was beyond gender, limitation, and even conceptualization. God was a human construct, a human projection. God had been belittled by organized religion, particularly by literalist extremists of all persuasians.

  The Prophet Mohammed also experienced this loss of faith in the dominant norms of society and religion of his time. That was one reason he retreated to the mountains of Mecca. The Prophet believed that the anguished cries of a man in pain were communion with the divine. Such a primordial state of Mohammedan spirituality, lost to most humans, was what drove me to rediscover the essence of Islam. Like the Prophet, who in seventh-century Arabia had found conventional religion distasteful and the clamour of Meccan business life unappealing, I found the Islam of my day unpalatable. I had, by now, tried all its forms. Organized religion had failed me.

  Although I was born a Muslim, and became an Islamist, I had read widely about other religions. Being born a Muslim did not mean that I had to remain a Muslim for the rest of my life. That sort of totalitarianism I did away with when I left Hizb ut-Tahrir. I was in search of spiritual solace, meaning for my life, and whoever offered it would win my commitment.

  The Buddha, who lived approximately five hundred years before Jesus, had left little in the way of notes for future generations. I found it remarkable that he quit his luxurious surroundings in search of truth and enlightenment, but we know very little about what really happened. Hinduism proved too abstruse for me; there were far too many gods and goddesses. The earnestness of the modern Hare Krishnas in Oxford Street made me recall my own Islamist fervour. The zeal of the convert, about which Shakespeare warned, rang alarm bells in my head every time I saw a non-Indian Hindu. Judaism was really a non-starter, since I was not born to a Jewish mother. Besides, since ancient times, Jews have been considered a people, a race, rather than followers of a religion.

  I gave much thought to Christianity. Since my birthday is on Christmas Day, I have always felt a certain empathy with Jesus. But in my mind, if there was a God out there, God did not have children. And certainly man did not, could not, become God. And the entire idea of the Trinity, despite my many attempts to understand it, always seemed incredible to me.

  In most religious traditions there is a relative dearth of primary source material. In comparison Islam, the newest monotheistic faith, was unique in that its holy book, the Koran, was written during Mohammed’s lifetime. We know more about Mohammed than we do of other prophets, and he is historically well documented. Did he commune with the divine, as did Jesus, Moses, and Buddha? For me, the answer is yes. And on those grounds, I still considered myself a Muslim, a believer in the Prophet.

  On the eve of the new millennium, six days after my twenty-fifth birthday, I lay on the floor of my local mosque as the celebrations started and the others who were in retreat ran to the open roof to see the fireworks. Those days in spiritual retreat did me the world of good. Tired of materialism, disillusioned with fanaticism, I had lost my anchor in life. Still, deep down there was a spiritual craving, a yearning for something beyond the immediacy of daily existence. In this I was hardly unique. Throughout history people have sought to discover what lies beyond and have been overcome by spiritual elevation.

  I thought about the Afghani prince, Ibrahim Ibn Adham, who looked up at the stars from the roof garden of his palace and wondered how he could discover the creator behind the night sky. A Muslim mystic shouted from outside the palace walls, ‘You won’t find God by living in opulence, O Ibrahim.’ Deeply moved, Ibrahim became a founding father of Muslim mysticism. He abandoned his luxuries and became a wandering Sufi and an inspiration to many through the ages. I sought what many before me had sought: inner tranquillity. But where was I to find it?

  In an odd way, my retreat was at once selfish and selfless, designed to benefit both myself and others. As it was Ramadan I was fasting during the day. In the evening Ahbab, my younger brother, would bring me home-cooked meals to break the fast. Then at night I would stand in prayer with the local Muslim community. Afterwards the small number of us in retreat would sleep for about five hours. Then we would wake and conduct prayers, followed by private recitals of the Koran.

  I suddenly realized that the last time I had really concentrated on the Koran had been during my travels with Grandpa ten years earlier. For all my ostentatious commitment to Islam and Muslims, all my desires to bring about a Koranic government, I had lost touch with its holy book.

  At some point during that retreat I vowed to commit genuinely to the Koran. But there was one problem, unfinished business from my Islamist days: I still did not know Arabic. I wanted to feel the original language of the Koran. How could I learn? The last time I had tried, the Saudis had attempted to recruit me. Then I had ended up with the Islamists from the ISB. Could I learn Arabic without becoming embroiled in politics?

  I left the mosque with one wish: to learn Arabic, the language of the Prophet Mohammed and of the Koran that he articulated. Without Arabic I felt I would be dependent on handed-down Islam from Islamists, Wahhabis, or others. I prayed to Allah that he would make this dream true.

  I knew very few Muslims who had learnt Arabic for themselves. The Islamists were busy with politics, the Salafis were busy talking about the correct creed of monotheism. The only Muslim I knew of who had been to the Middle East and seriously studied Arabic and traditional, pre-modern, Islam was the American convert Imam Hamza Yusuf Hanson.

  As an Islamist, Islam was all there was to it. Our kind of Islam: political, domineering, and soulless. Imam Hanson had explained that we had to raise ourselves beyond Islam, while not losing its teachings and practices, and enter into a level of iman, faith, and then ihsan, perfection.

  I began to listen to Imam Hanson again, and so to realize that I had been stuck at the preliminary level of Islam for over a decade, all the while confident that I was at its apex: the Islamic state. It never occurred to me that if Islamic governance was of such importance, why did not one classical Muslim text have a chapter dedicated to this? The entire notion of the ‘Islamic state’ is a modern phenomenon.

  Imam Hanson’s grasp of the Arabic language, and the deep meanings he drew from Arabic words, left me dumbfounded. I bought more of his audio lectures and started to listen to them as often as I could. He had a lot to offer. For nearly a year I listened to almost every single one of his lectures and learnt about what seemed like a completely new religion.

  Looking back, like most of us at that time, Imam Hanson was affected by the radical wave of anger that was sweeping Muslim circles; Islamism was not absent in him. He had lived for ten years in the Middle East and returned home with some very anti-American, anti-Western, and confrontational attitudes. To me, a post-Islamist, those sentiments seemed merely normal, not politicized.
I had been committed to active removal of the entire system, Imam Hanson merely criticized the CIA and successive American governments.

  However, he, like me, was going through a period of transformation. Was he first and foremost an American or a Muslim? Could he be both, or must one prevail? The events of September 11 would answer the question for both of us.

  Imam Hanson’s lectures led me to material from another American, Shaikh Nuh Keller, which also helped me see Islam in a different, more spiritual light. They were not teaching Islamism, set up as an alternative to Marxism, but firm beliefs, the certainty of the Sufis. Theirs was an Islam deeply rooted in classical Muslim scholarship, introspection, and spiritual enrichment, transmitted from the hearts and mouths of men in an unbroken chain of narration, known as an isnad, from early times to the present. They taught Islam in its entirety, including the art of tasawwuf, or Sufism. In a world full of material competition, fashion, individualism, immediacy, display, youth, wealth, glamour, and concentration on all that is external, Sufism and Sufi-oriented scholars taught the opposite. We were to turn inside and attempt to cleanse our hearts of feelings of anger, enmity, arrogance, envy, rancour, jealousy, and other vices that distance us from the truth and put us in conflict with creation. Once God is in the heart, then the limbs respond smoothly to his worship. Without a pure heart, worship is burdensome and tiring.

  I understood Imam Hanson’s words completely: my lethargy towards worship, my distance from God, resulted partly because true faith had not touched my heart in a decade. I wore it on my sleeve, abused it for political ends, but I had lost the essence of Islam: spiritual surrender to serenity.