The Islamist

by Ed Husain

  I put it to him that when the Egyptian government arrested and jailed Majid and others from the Hizb they claimed that, as British citizens, they were entitled to preferential treatment, a fair trial, and British government intervention. Yet while in Britain, these same individuals rejected their British identity, saying they were ‘Muslims living in Britain’ and harshly condemning anyone calling themselves a British Muslim. And on these grounds of Muslim separatism, as late as 2005, the Hizb actively discouraged Muslims from participating in the British general election, arguing it was sinful, haram, for Muslims to engage in democracy.

  Again, Majid emphasized that the Hizb had changed. He conceded that it had come under the influence of Omar Bakri, and strayed from ‘the ideology’. ‘But how could a party that prides itself on its intellectual purity and depth allow an individual to derail it? Don’t you think poor Bakri is being forced to carry the can?’ I asked. And so we kept going round in circles, Majid defending the Hizb and me, his old comrade, condemning it.

  One particular point Majid made stayed with me, however. In an attempt to remedy the Hizb’s detachment from God and spirituality, Hizb members were now compelled, under orders from the Arab leadership in the Middle East, to study the writings of Imam Nawawi, a thirteenth-century scholar-saint whose popular tomb in the village of Nawa I had visited in Syria. The Hizb was hoping that study would instil spirituality, yet that is the work of living spiritual masters. But the Hizb was not sufficiently humble to learn from these living masters, for that would mean sitting at the feet of Muslim scholar-saints who approve of, and in many cases are linked to, the very governments that the Hizb wishes to overthrow.

  Still, I was pleased that the Hizb had at least now moved beyond Nabhani, a twentieth-century Islamist ideologue, and studied the works of genuine Muslim luminaries. I registered the ‘new Hizb’ in my mind and went about my studies and family life. I stayed in touch with Majid. Despite fundamental disagreements and dogged discussions, on a personal level we remain friends.

  Had the Hizb really changed? Was there any substance to the new claims that the Hizb was a ‘non-violent’ organization? How could an organization committed to the creation of a violent state seriously brand itself as ‘non-violent’? Majid and I have had long discussions on the Hizb and my conclusion is that there are now at least two strands within it. The first is desperately trying to ensure survival in Britain by adopting a more moderate tone and appearance in an attempt to gain acceptance among the constituency that matters most to them: the Muslim community, now increasingly under government pressure to sideline extremists. Britain remains vital to the Hizb, for it gives the group access to the global media and provides a fertile recruiting ground at mosques and universities. The second strand is more radical and committed to the writings of Nabhani and less concerned about engagement.

  Most members of the Hizb’s national executive belong to the former, while most rank and file members, it seems, incline towards the latter. Nevertheless, I am not convinced that as an organization they have disavowed their commitment to an all-powerful Islamist state, dedicated to military confrontation with Britain, France, the United States and Israel.10 The foreign policy of this state rests on propagating the Islamist ideology, destroying Israel, annexing neighbouring countries, and killing whoever stands in their way, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. As one Hizb activist recently admitted to me after my showing him Nabhani’s writings, ‘Sometimes force must be used to implement and expand ideology.’

  The writings of Nabhani, to which the Hizb remains committed, clearly outlines such a vision for a violent state, dedicated to jihadism.

  Soon after my return I attended a public debate entitled ‘The Future of Islam’ at the London School of Economics, the same venue where I had heard Omar Bakri declare that, in warfare, Muslims were allowed to eat their enemies and thus did not require aid, but weapons to win the battles for global domination. More than a decade later, did Bakri’s influence remain?

  New faces had appeared on the Muslim lecture circuit. The two speakers, Professor Tariq Ramadan from Switzerland, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the British-Pakistani author Ziauddin Sardar, locked horns over their conflicting visions of ‘the future’. Despite their disagreements, they were both united in their call for a rereading of the Koran, and a fundamental reinterpretation of the meaning of the sources of Islamic law. Such a discourse, they believed, was tantamount to rejecting the literalism of extremists, and a rejection of capital punishment among other things.

  There were jeers and boos from certain members of the audience, some more confident about their knowledge of Islam than the speakers. After the event the same individuals were arguing loudly with other members of the audience in order to attract attention, and distributing leaflets about the ‘War on Islam’, Islamist parlance for the War on Terror.

  Memories of my Hizb days came rushing back to me. As I observed the young men from a distance, I recognized two of them. They were Hizb ut-Tahrir activists. What were they talking about? I approached a gathering of people and the Hizb activist saw me and extended his hand to greet me.

  ‘Wow! Where have you been, man? Haven’t seen you for years!’ I briefly explained that I had been abroad and asked after his older brother, whom I also knew. He answered my questions quickly and then turned to asking about me again. His line of questioning was designed to establish if I was still an Islamist or if I’d sold out. I regretted saying hello to him. As I turned away, he shouted, ‘You faggot!’

  I attended congregational Friday prayer at a University of London college. The preacher, a stocky Arab student from the Palestinian Territories, rose to castigate the recent election results of the Palestinian Authority. As in the 1990s, religious sermons are still being delivered by political activists in British universities. Hamas had won, but the sermonizer’s argument was that they should not have participated in the first place. The only way to regain Palestine was by all-out war, or jihad. His mantra, ‘Democracy is hypocrisy’, rang a few old bells in my head. He attacked the Palestinian Fatah movement and the American occupation of Iraq before turning his vitriol against ‘the latest attack of the West against the Muslim ummah’. References to Hamas, Fatah, and Iraq were only a prelude to his main grievance: derogatory cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that had recently been published in a Danish newspaper.

  I did not recall seeing the speaker in Hizb ut-Tahrir circles during my time. But his inflammatory rhetoric and considerable skill in rousing Muslim sentiment made me suspect him to be a Hizb activist. I recognized the training. He ended his sermon by calling on God to destroy the kuffar.

  I looked around me; the prayer hall was tense, but in the name of ‘Muslim unity’ the Hizb had ensured that opposition to such rhetoric would always be deemed a betrayal. Nobody opposed the speaker. The radicalization of yet another generation of young Muslims continues unabated.

  After hearing him attack the USA at another meeting, and calling for the killing of future Muslim leaders who opposed the Hizb’s coming caliph, I learnt that the preacher was indeed a leading member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, responsible for dealing with the Arabic media.

  Soon afterwards a plethora of events was organized by student union societies with names such as the ‘Open Mind’ or ‘Thought Society’ on various London campuses. These were, of course, front organizations, and from Muslim friends I learnt that other equally innocuous cover names were deployed at other British universities. I attended several such events where prominent members of the Hizb had been smuggled in under names assumed for the occasion. They were sometimes introduced as media figures from Channel 4, Sky News or the BBC, but never as members of the Hizb. The Hizb game of charades continues.

  In one meeting, filled with anti-American statements, a prominent Hizb member stated that ‘some people in Britain should be bombing Washington DC’. To his mind, that was the ‘logical conclusion of unilateral action’ conducted by the US to attack al-Qaeda in various co
untries. Could I believe Majid’s claims of a reformed Hizb when their speakers, while publicly condemning terrorism in media interviews, privately sow the seeds of it?

  As we left the prayer hall a young undergraduate distributed leaflets about a protest outside the Danish embassy that afternoon. There was no mention of who had organized the protest. His zeal reminded me of my leafleting days. The sermon had raised the temperature; the leaflet guided us to action. Was the Hizb still active on British university campuses? Apparently, yes. Had the Hizb really changed? Apparently, no.

  On TV that evening images from that demonstration were broadcast all around the world. Radical Islamists, their faces covered by Saudi and Palestinian scarves, yelled, ‘Democracy, hypocrisy. Democracy go to hell. Denmark go to hell. Freedom go to hell. Behead the kafir. Bomb, bomb Denmark. Bomb, bomb USA.’

  The demonstration had been organized by the Hizb’s more candid offshoot, al-Muhajiroun, but the rhetoric and ideology were the same. The following Friday the Hizb organized its own demonstration to which an activist from Bedford turned up dressed as a suicide bomber.

  Listening to the fierce rage of the Friday preacher, watching the burning of the Danish flag on television, hearing the charge of Islamophobia brought against Western governments from less extreme Islamists, I wondered how the personality at the centre of the row, the Prophet Mohammed, would have dealt with this. During his own lifetime he was subjected to the worst forms of abuse. Islamists I spoke to claimed that the Jyllands-Posten newspaper had violated the sacred by depicting the Prophet as it had. But the sacred was also violated during the time of the Prophet, before his eyes, on several occasions.

  In a famous incident an Arab man from the desert came into Medina, entered the most sacred of places, the Prophet’s mosque, and urinated within the holy grounds. What did the Prophet do? He cleaned the mosque with his own hands and forgave the ignorance of the Bedouin. Why does the ignorance or racism of a Danish newspaper provoke so much rage among modern Muslims? Where are those Prophetic traits of forgiveness and compassion? For if the cartoonist did not know the merciful Prophet, Muslims should.

  Other demonstrations followed in Trafalgar Square. Islamists masterfully manipulated Muslim sensitivities and successfully linked political issues to the Danish cartoons. My non-Muslim friends, a Danish journalist among them, were dumbfounded by the irrationality of attacking embassies, boycotting Danish dairy products, and calling for bombings and beheadings.

  Increasingly it became apparent to me that Islamists could still be successful at mobilizing Muslims, in Britain and elsewhere, partly because there exists heartfelt reaction against genuine imbalances in the world, from Palestine and Iraq to Darfur and Afghanistan. The Friday preacher knew full well that the cartoons on their own were not sufficient to provoke an uprising, so in true Hizb fashion he linked them to other issues: the American occupation of Iraq, the War on Terror, and the Arab- Israeli conflict. Why else would the calls for bombings at the demonstrations include the USA? The ideological confrontation was highlighted by attacks on democracy and freedom. Just as Omar Bakri had trained us in the 1990s, issues had been linked to capture the popular imagination.

  Bakri was expelled from the Hizb not because he called for the assassination of Prime Minister John Major in 1991, at which time he was leader of the group, but because he disagreed with the Hizb’s Middle East leadership in 1995. Bakri wanted greater concentration on Britain while the leadership wanted greater focus on the Middle East, the launch pad of the Islamist state. The terrorist attacks on London were conducted by suicide bombers from Beeston, Leeds, home to three of the four bombers. Omar Bakri had preached in Beeston. He emphasized to the media that he was not responsible for the suicide bombings, but he desperately wished that he had been. It was, in Bakri’s eyes, a praiseworthy act.

  The events of 7/7 did not occur in a vacuum. The suicide bombers were not trained in isolation, away from Britain, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Long before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, in Britain’s Muslim communities the ideas of a global jihad, an ummah transcending Britain, and preparation for the all-powerful Islamist state were, and still are, accepted as normal and legitimate.

  Siddique Khan, the lead 7/7 suicide bomber, spoke of ‘my people’ as those in Iraq. He declared that he was ‘at war’ with Britain, and in this war he was ‘a soldier’. Khan did not see fellow Brits as human brothers and sisters. I too once expressed such sentiments. The 7/7 suicide bombers were symptomatic of a deeper problem: unbridled Islamist ideology gaining a stronger hold in Britain’s Muslim communities. That ideology and its prescriptions are becoming the acceptable norm for expressing political disenchantment against ‘the West’ - a mythical conception just as much as ‘the ummah’.

  Regardless of Islamist myths of a glorious, unified Muslim history spanning fourteen centuries, most Muslims know that Shia Islam broke away from what became mainstream Sunni Islam because of the bloody civil wars within our religion. The details of this history are a subject in their own right, but we would be ill served were we to forget that the so-called Islamic state of the Umayyads killed the noble grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, Imam Husain, and other members of the Prophet’s family. Islamists, masters at misreading history, see a lesson in this: opposition to the so-called Islamic state warrants the killing of Muslims, even the Prophet’s own family. They will exploit such ‘evidence’ to annihilate mainstream Muslims who oppose the expansionism and so-called jihad of the Islamic state.

  I believe the duty to combat extremist rhetoric, the preamble to terrorism, does not lie with the government alone. Muslims have a responsibility to stand up and reclaim our faith. It is Muslims who are able to recognize Islamist extremists most easily. Before extremists are on the radar of the intelligence community, we see the changes in modes of prayer, selective mosque-attendance patterns, modification of behaviour and of dress, an increasing harshness in attitude, and condemnatory rhetoric.

  My warnings to university authorities and student union officials where I saw the Hizb and other groups recruiting in Britain on my return were repeatedly met with arguments defending the right to freedom of speech. If an organization is not illegal, how can it be barred? I understand why most British Muslims simply refuse to confront extremism. My time outside Britain has perhaps instilled in me an urgency that is lacking in British Muslim circles, a reflection of the wider British willingness to turn a blind eye, avoid a fuss, and hope that somehow it will work out in the end.

  If British policy makers and elected officials are content to tolerate intolerance, and give a platform to those who are committed to destroying democracy and advocate religion-based separatism, why should a minority Muslim population turn on its own? While I was in Syria, the British and American governments exerted unprecedented pressure to expel from Syria Western Muslim students who were studying privately and not enrolled at universities. Syria was deemed a training ground for terrorists, as was Pakistan. Demands were made that Syria expel Hamas members from Damascus, and Pakistan close several of its madrassas. But when the British government is content to allow a sophisticated extremist organization to operate and recruit in Britain, why should Syria or Pakistan do their job for them?

  Unsettled by the prominence of the Hizb in London, despite Tony Blair’s unfulfilled threat to proscribe the organization, I wondered how my teenage hangout, the East London mosque, had fared. In late 2006 I visited the mosque to meet an old friend and see if the management had moved away from Islamism. After all, many of the leaders of the East London mosque are now influential in the Muslim Council of Britain, with access to ministers and large sections of the media. Sadly, I was disappointed.

  Despite two High Court injunctions in 1990 in response to violence at the mosque, and its role as a platform for various Islamists (later to include jihadis such as Abdullah el-Faisal, now serving a prison sentence for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred in Britain), the British government subsidized and facilitated the
expansion of the East London mosque into Europe’s largest Islamist hub, the London Muslim Centre (LMC). Prince Charles was scheduled to officially open the centre.

  The Saudi-trained imam of the mega-mosque continues to lead a faction against modernizing elements and, like Saudi clerics, prohibits gatherings of ‘dissenting’ Muslims: opponents of Islamism or Wahhabism.

  The chairman of the mosque, the mild-mannered Dr Abdul Bari, a lifelong admirer of Mawdudi and public host of several leaders of Jamat-e-Islami from Bangladesh and Pakistan during my involvement with the mosque, now heads the Muslim Council of Britain.11

  At the mosque bookshop I bought an updated copy of Qutb’s Milestones, published not in Riyadh but in Birmingham, England, in early 2006. It contains lengthy articles in the appendices from leading Wahhabis, chapter headings such as ‘The Virtues of Killing a Non-Believer’, and ideas such as ‘Attacking the non-believers in their territories is a collective and individual duty.’ Just as I had done as a sixteen-year-old, hundreds of young Muslims are buying these books from Islamist mosques in Britain and imbibing the idea that killing non-believers is not only acceptable, but the duty of a good Muslim. I showed the passages to a Muslim friend that evening and we shook our heads in disgust. From such messages are suicide bombers born.

  This literature was on sale five minutes’ walk from the Muslim Council of Britain’s new offices. And there was more. Mawdudi’s books, the very same ones that I had read, were still on sale and prominently displayed. In my day, we only spoke about the bravery of ‘our brothers’ in Jamat-e-Islami and saw black-and-white pictures of ‘martyrs’ in monthly bulletins from the subcontinent. Nowadays Islamist activists can buy full-colour videos of Jamat-e-Islami cadres engaged in pitched battles with fellow Muslims in Dhaka, leftists from the Awami League. The Qutbian belief that killing non-Islamist Muslims of a secular persuasion is permissible is being acted upon in the Muslim world and disseminated in Britain’s Islamist mosques.