The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  Come, come, whoever you are,

  Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

  This is not a caravan of despair.

  It doesn’t matter that you’ve broken

  your vow a thousand times, still

  come, and yet again, come.

  All the while, I regularly called my parents at least twice a week. They would assure me that I was in their prayers and encouraged me to study well. ‘Give our greetings to the saints of Damascus,’ my father would say. He would mention St John the Baptist’s tomb and those of other saints. Damascus was a city filled with tombs of saints and companions of the Prophet. Following my father’s advice, I visited these islands of peace and conveyed his greetings to the sleepers in the mausoleums. Faye and I went to the mosques of Syria with our non-Muslim friends, something we could not have done in Britain. All across the Old City there were ancient mosques and churches surrounding the awe-inspiring, eighth-century Omayyad mosque. Mixed groups of women and men freely walked in this house of God, visiting the tomb of John the Baptist, known to Muslims as Yahya. I derived most tranquillity walking between the room in which the great medieval Imam Ghazali studied and the area in which he prayed in the Omayyad mosque during his ten-year spiritual retreat.

  Visiting the tombs of the pious instils tranquillity in the soul. The Prophet Mohammed instructed us to visit graves, for it helps to remember the afterlife. An added benefit of memorials to the spiritually blessed is that something of their blessing touches the visitor. I have experienced this at mausoleums across Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Alexander the Great, when visiting Achilles’ tomb, is said to have lamented, ‘O fortunate youth, to have found Homer as the herald of your glory’.

  To be able to walk freely in the mosques of Syria with Faye and her female friends was no small privilege. Under ultra-strict literalist interpretations of Islam, influenced by cultural factors, most mosques in Britain would not have welcomed Faye. Syria enabled us to be together.

  Soon my mother and later my brother and sisters visited us in Damascus. Together we enjoyed the many historical sights of the city, visiting mausoleums of saints my mother held so dear. We brought to life the childhood stories she told us of the Prophet’s grandson Husain by visiting his tomb and by standing in the prayer niche of Husain’s son, Zain al-Abedeen. At last my religion had converged with that of my parents in the sacred sites of Damascus.

  Among young Islamists references to non-Muslims were almost always to the kuffar (while many of the same Islamists took offence at being described as ‘Pakis’). The term kafir is used in the Koran in the context of the brutal persecution of early Muslims at the hands of pagan idolaters. To reinvent that terminology and use it to refer to a population that is mainly Christian, or at least theistic, is an abject failure to understand the Koran. Worse, it indicates a serious sense of superiority, arrogance, and separation. In Syria, the Muslims referred to Christians and others not as kuffar but as masihiyyeen: people of the Messiah. Where did we go wrong in Britain? Why had we opted for such harsh language?

  The word kafir has gained a deeply destructive meaning in the contemporary European Muslim mindset, connoting eternal damnation and enmity. In the Koranic archetypal sense the word is a simple derivation of the verb kafara, ‘to cover’. The assonance is telling. Cover what? To cover the blessings of God, to deny God. Christians and Jews in the Koran, believers in God, are not referred to as kafir but as ‘people of the book’ and thus deserving of reverence. The Koranic condemnation of kafir refers to the Arab pagans who violently rejected the Prophet Mohammed and his message of Abrahamic submission to one God back in the seventh century.

  This vital linguistic nuance was lost on me. It was not until I learnt Arabic for myself that I reached the kernel of the hatred of the kuffar that had been planted in me through language. But it is not only about language. The spirit of the Prophet’s teachings has been lost among Muslims in the West. Away from constant talk of Koranic ‘references’ and ‘evidence’ in Muslim circles in Britain, I was able to assess the magnanimity of the teachings of the Prophet. Those familiar with the life of the Prophet will know that he was persecuted, attacked, humiliated, and forced to leave Mecca because of a campaign led by a pagan named Abu Jahl. Among the Prophet’s companions, Abu Jahl was the epitome of evil. And yet when Abu Jahl’s son, the warrior Ikrimah, embraced the Prophet and became Muslim, the Prophet gently explained to his companions that Abu Jahl should no longer be condemned. Harsh words uttered by those who had been persecuted by Abu Jahl might have hurt Ikrimah’s feelings. This inner condition of the Prophet, replete with compassion and good will, is lacking among Islamist-influenced Muslims.

  As I learned more Arabic and grasped better the spirit of the Prophet, my appreciation of other faiths increased. I had always regarded Christianity as a Western religion and Islam as an Arabic, Eastern faith. But long before Christianity arrived in England the religion developed by Jesus’ disciples had been an established part of people’s lives in Syria.

  My time in Damascus changed my perception of the Christian faith for ever. Arab Christians of all denominations freely and with no qualms used the word Allah for God. At first this was extremely difficult for me to digest. Allah, I thought, was the preserve of the Muslims. Granted, I knew that it was a translation of God, but did not realize that ‘Allah’ was an intimate part of the lives of millions of Arab Christians. Everywhere in Damascus, Muslims and Christians used phrases that I thought only Muslims used: inshallah (God willing), mashallah (as God willed it), alhamdulillah (praise be to God). There was no sense of religious zealotry or grandstanding in the name of God. The mutual recognition and respect between Christians and Muslims in Damascus had a lot to teach Muslims and Christians in Britain. Even Britain’s Rudyard Kipling expressed ‘thanks to Allah, who gave me two, separate sides to my head’. Muslims did not have a copyright on the term.

  Inside the tomb of a Christian saint in Sednaya, on the outskirts of Damascus, I saw Muslim women in meditation. Beside them sat Christian nuns. Only the colour of their headscarves differentiated them.

  The people of Malula spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. I stood beside people in the markets and churches and listened to the words that Jesus spoke. Jesus was revealed to me anew on that day as an oriental, not the blue-eyed Caucasian I had become accustomed to. Christianity, like Islam, was a religion from the Middle East.

  The Christian women who were visiting Malula, as well as the many Muslim women, all wore the hijab. Almost without exception, images of the Virgin Mary show her in hijab. In Protestant England the hijab or wimple had become the preserve of Catholic nuns and immigrant Muslims. Here, in Syria, were the historical roots of hijab, a Byzantine practice prescribed by the Prophet as a mark of dignity and modesty for his female followers in seventh-century Arabia. Hijab was not new to Muslim women. At best it was an expression of Eastern ideas of modesty.

  As time went by Faye and I felt increasingly at home in Damascus. To our relief, the war in Iraq did not spill into Syria and my jihadi acquaintances from my first evening in Damascus were spared further calls to arms.

  At university Muslims from the US, Britain, France, and Germany had full beards and wore Arab-style robes. The women wore full hijab and jilbabs, or flowing coats. In contrast, on campus there was not a single bushy-bearded Syrian student. They mostly wore trendy goatees and the women were much better dressed. To my astonishment, leading imams at many mosques were clean shaven or had neatly trimmed beards. How could that be? We wore Arab clothes and liked to appear as Arabs in Britain and yet the Arabs I thought I dressed like did not exist! I had confused modesty with ethnicity. One did not have to wear ethnic clothing to appear modest - Syrian imams in Western-style shirts and trousers were living proof of that.

  Hizb ut-Tahrir and other Islamists wore Western clothes, yet they despised the West. I had turned to traditional Muslim clothing to reject Islamism from within and without. Now I discovered that the best of trad
itional Muslims, Syrian Muslim scholars, had accepted Western dress codes, and yet remained modest and loyal to their faith. And, interestingly, orthodox Christians in Bab al-Tuma, the old Christian quarter of Damascus, wore long robes, grew flowing beards, and donned skullcaps. What I, along with thousands of Muslims in Britain, considered ‘Islamic’ clothing is essentially the outfit of Arab Christians.

  Syrians, unlike most Muslims from Britain, did not wear their Islam on their sleeves. They did not need to. In a Muslim country they did not have to show they were Muslims. Interestingly, the minority Christian community did not need to illustrate their faith in public either. Faye and I began to rediscover our Western wardrobes.

  Looking back, Islamist ideas of gender relations reveal much about their attitude to life. Mawdudi advocated that Islamist women ought to wear the face cover and maintain strict segregation from men. In Britain, among observant Muslims of most persuasions there was a culture of not shaking hands with the opposite gender. In Syria, observant women readily offered their hands to me. Much of Muslim social sensitivity is about understanding different social contexts. What is considered sexual in the East is not so in the West.

  In late 2004 I saw two members of Hizb ut-Tahrir from Britain register for Arabic courses at the university. I knew them from a meeting I had attended in Bayswater: they were Arabs and had studied at Imperial College. Immediately I wondered why they were really there. The Arabic language administrator at the university was a good friend of mine. I alerted him to the Hizb’s presence on campus.

  ‘But they are here to learn Arabic,’ he protested.

  ‘They are Arabs!’ I protested. ‘They do not need Arabic classes. They’re using the classes as a pretext to stay in Syria and recruit for their group.’

  At the time, I was also teaching at the university, so my concerns about extremists on campus were not easily dismissed. Soon, Syrian intelligence interviewed me. They thought that I had sounded the alarm not because I cared for Syria, but because I was worried about Britain. I mentioned that Britain’s first suicide bomber, Asif Hanif, had passed through Damascus en route to Tel Aviv.

  It turned out I was right. For the first time in many years, several Hizb ut-Tahrir cells were functioning in Damascus. Police raids led to arrests and the seizure of Hizb material. London, it was clear, was still sending Hizb ut-Tahrir members to the Middle East with the protection of a British passport and the consular assistance of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service.

  One of the most painful aspects of my stay in Syria was the inability of Syrians to accept me as one of them. As an Islamist I had yelled about the global ummah, the ‘One Nation’ of the global Muslim community. Almost every day in Syria, whenever I interacted with new people, they asked me where I was from. Worse, when I replied that I was from Britain, they always responded, ‘No, where are you really from?’ My brown skin could not belong to Britain; it had to come from elsewhere.

  Such questions of ‘origin’ infuriated me. I would argue that the millions of Syrians from the coastal regions crossing into Lebanon could not possibly claim to be ‘Arab’. They were a conquered people. If they could become ‘Arab’ by virtue of speaking Arabic, rejecting their Phoenician heritage, and accepting Islam, then I was British by virtue of birth, upbringing, and acceptance of British values of tolerance, freedom, and the English language. Such debates were frequent. Just as the Syrians did not take well to being told that they were not ‘originally Arab’, I did not take well to their rejection of my Britishness.

  The longer I was away from Britain, the more British I became. Syria forced me to ask myself who I was. Sharing a religion was not sufficient to bond me with Syrians, much as I adored my Arab friends.

  Faye and I found ourselves keeping company with fellow Brits from the British Council. Within a year I had more white non-Muslim friends in Syria than I had ever had in Britain. We gathered for dinner and tea parties at various homes and discussed questions of religion, identity, acceptance, and expatriate life. A theory that had been floating round my mind became crystallized: human beings could form groupings and associations based on factors other than religion. I shared with my non-Muslim friends a common language, country, culture, and belief in the broad values of plurality, fairness, and acceptance of the other.

  At home in Britain these values had seemed trite; living in the Arab world among people who were not born into freedom, they were priceless. In countless discussions with Arab friends I was free to express sentiments that they dared not even think about, let alone utter. I had become a stronger, confident Brit, bold enough to challenge ideas that I perceived as wrong. The timidity of my first night in Damascus was no more.

  Much of my strength came from my TEFL work at the British Council, still considered as the cultural arm of the British embassy by most Syrians. Almost without exception the Syrians I taught were extremely polite and courteous. Many were genuinely shocked that a Muslim from Britain would choose Syria in which to study, and then teach them English. Often my classes became a debating forum for politics and current affairs.

  I decided to form a debating society at the British Council in which Syrian students of English could interact with British and American students studying Arabic. Despite some initial reservations owing to the lack of freedom of speech in Syria, the society flourished and has become part of the institutional fabric of the Council. Today it continues to be a focal point for lively discussion and debate in Damascus.

  As an Islamist I had been ‘passing concepts’ to undermine Britain and the West. Now I made it my business to take more seriously than most other teachers the British Council’s commitment to promoting modern British culture. I ensured that every single student left my classes with a better understanding of modern, diverse, vibrant Britain. Citing universal values of human rights, freedom for women, rights of oppressed minorities of all categories, and conflict resolution through non-violent means, I initiated discussions of social and political issues in Syria ranging from domestic violence, religious tolerance, the Arab-Israeli conflict, to the hopes of young people. The optimism of most young Syrians was always uplifting, although there were moments of despair when Hitler was considered to be a hero and the Holocaust was denied.

  Again and again, students expressed the view that Britain was a colonial power, an enemy of Islam that was plotting against the Arab world, that 9/11 was not perpetrated by Arabs, that they were only learning English to ‘get to know the enemy’. ‘Was I their enemy?’ I asked. British Muslims worked in the civil service, the media, in parliament, the professions, were millionaires, and practised their religion freely - how could Britain be an enemy of Islam?

  I hope Faye and I changed the perceptions of Britain among the hundreds of Syrians we came into contact with. We were fierce and, I believe, convincing in our arguments and defence of Britain. However, there was one argument I could not win.

  Many of my students asked why, if Britain was not an enemy of the Arabs and Muslims, did it give shelter to the Arab religious fanatics who wanted to kill and replace political leaders of the Arab world. Why was Britain home to Abu Hamza, Abu Qatada, and Omar Bakri, rejects of the Middle East?

  Keen to avoid my own Islamist past, I tried to explain the British traditions of allowing freedom of expression and giving refuge to the persecuted. Britain had a long history of taking in dissenters, including Karl Marx. I failed to convince either them or myself. Islamists bore no comparison to Karl Marx. One student even warned me that these fanatics would cause problems for Britain, as they had caused problems in Syria in the 1980s. ‘Watch out,’ he said. ‘They will turn on Britain.’ That warning, given in 2004, would soon prove all too prophetic.

  With trusted friends I discussed the most private topics that Syrians do not comment on in public. As an Islamist I had repeatedly called for the forceful removal of all Arab leaders, puppets of the West, and their replacement by an all-embracing caliph. My Syrian friends, speaking to me in their mother tongue and at
complete ease, pointed out to me that Syrians had united with Egypt in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic. The experiment was a total disaster.

  Without my prompting, they spoke in disparaging terms about the 400-year ‘Turkish occupation’ of Syria. Nabhani preferred to call this a ‘unified Islamic state’. The reality on the Arab streets, as I experienced it in countless discussions, was far removed from the aspirations of Islamists operating in Britain. To my surprise, in private meetings in Syrian homes, young people of all religions expressed support and admiration for their president, Dr Bashar al-Asad. Where was the passion for a new president? Regime change, an idea advocated by neo-cons in Washington and Islamists in London, was not the priority of ordinary Syrians. Most Syrians criticized government ministers and hated government bureaucracy, but supported their president.

  In Syria, Omar Bakri’s homeland, there was no public support for the ideas he had implanted in our minds. Syrians desired economic betterment, political transparency, and infrastructural development, but they were in no mood for an expansionist Islamic state in their country. Nor were they keen to import Western democracy, not after the debacle in Iraq. The toppling of Saddam Hussein had prompted whispers in Damascus of regime change, but soon, particularly after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the complete breakdown of law and order in Baghdad, most Syrians I met opted for the security of the regime they knew, rather than the insecurity of the American promise of freedom. Stories of the commandeering of Iraqi houses by American soldiers spread amongst the chattering classes. Iraqis I met in Damascus, fleeing the chaos of Baghdad, told me that American troops had initially commanded respect as they picked up cigarette stubs from the streets and tried to keep Baghdad clean. But soon, as the attacks against them increased, they had begun to use the same tactics as the old Saddam regime. Iraqis from Mosul told me about incidents of poor soldiers from the Deep South in America stealing gold and money from wealthy Iraqis’ homes.