Radical

by Maajid Nawaz

  The odd thing is that up until that summer, Osman and I would bicker like most young siblings over almost anything. There was only a year and a half between us, and where he was undoubtedly the bigger one, I liked to think I was the sharper one. I would try to use my wit against his power, which led to many clashes and parental intervention. But when Nasir got us both into rap, we found a common cause, a common purpose. It was like we were suddenly on the same side against the rest. Our bickering stopped and we began sharing music, going out to the same parties, and sharing friends. We began to feel like a team with a cause. Our cause was rebellion against the status quo.

  If it was my uncle who introduced me to N.W.A, it was Osman who first got me into Public Enemy. “Rebel Without a Pause” was the first single of theirs that I heard, and it still sticks with me now. Here was a group who didn’t just have the attitude, but the political insight to go with it. There was always a thought-out philosophy to Chuck D and Professor Griff’s rhymes—this was a band sampling Malcolm X and bringing the Black Nationalist message into teenagers’ living rooms. Professor Griff had his security team, the S1Ws—the Security of the First World—and an interest in the Nation of Islam. They were fearless. The more I listened to the records, the more the lyrics and influences began to seep into me. I had never really heard of people like Malcolm X before. Now I had a real thirst to find out all about him.

  The fact that Professor Griff was an advocate for Islam made an impression, too. Considering myself an agnostic, I had never been a religious person: it hadn’t been a big issue growing up. The few times I’d been to the mosque it had been a disaster. The imam didn’t speak any English and got his message across with the use of a stick. I told my parents I wasn’t going back because he used to hit children and that was it; they didn’t make me go again.

  Professor Griff made something I had considered old-fashioned feel vibrant and interesting. He wasn’t the only one: in 1993 Brand Nubian used the Muslim call to prayer “Allahu akbar” as a sample for one of their songs in their second album, In God We Trust. I absolutely loved it. I had little understanding at the time that most of these Black Nationalist rappers belonged to racist sects of Islam such as Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters. What mattered was that these sorts of endorsements from young, streetwise rappers made me rethink my identity. The faith I had inherited was no longer some backward village religion to be ashamed of or apologetic about. It had been re-branded as a form of resistance, as a self-affirming defiant identity. On the back of such groups, the black conversion rate to Islam was going through the roof. Even members of the nascent British hip-hop band Cash Crew ended up converting. All of a sudden, it was cool to be a Muslim.

  That September, in 1989, I enrolled at Cecil Jones High School, at precisely the time that hip-hop was starting to really kick off. If rap was the form, hip-hop was the culture. Dr. Nasir’s little “Fuck tha Police” intervention couldn’t have been better timed. I had left primary school intent on never letting anyone pick on me again. At Cecil Jones I changed my dress style, wearing a baggy uniform with my sweater tied round my waist. I also changed my hair, closely clipping it to a “grade one” on the sides while leaving it long on top, and I got my ear pierced.

  On my first day at school, age eleven, I remember consciously talking myself up to people as someone you didn’t want to mess with. In fact, I got so carried away that someone even tried to call my bluff and I nearly got hit again. A very crude ranking system operates in school playgrounds, the “hardest” kids are known, and a pecking order is quickly but firmly established as kids jockey for position in the first few weeks of the term. I soon realized that merely talking myself up would not be sufficient. I needed the right friends, the right “crew,” and I ruthlessly began to seek them out.

  The fact that I was one of the first kids from my year to get into hip-hop made my task of building a crew easier than expected. White kids were lining up to talk to me, not just about rap music but the whole hip-hop scene. Hip-hop was something that could more than compensate for my absence from football games. My skin color was suddenly something that kids wanted to be associated with. Very quickly, Aron and Martyn, respectively the first and second toughest kids in our school year, had become my closest friends. I was to be their very own trendsetter, teaching them the ways of the B-boy, or someone living a hip-hop lifestyle.

  It instantly bonded me with all the popular kids in the older classes, too. In my school year there were no black kids, and only two other Pakistanis, one being my cousin Faisal. But in the year above was a boy called Michael, whom we all called Moe. He was Kenyan British and had a group of friends in his year, including Faisal’s older brother Yasser. There was a kid called Mark, who was West Indian and equally respected, and friends with Osman. In those early days, we were a small community and hip-hop was our way of life. We had a certain style of dress, spoke in a specific slang, and we clipped our hair very short on the sides, sometimes carving patterns into it, and then left it standing long on top. We believed that we had discovered “cool” where all others had failed, and we quickly bonded with each other over the music.

  I’ve never been one to do things by halves, and once I got into hip-hop, I bought into the scene big time: not just the music but also the look, the clothes, everything. I’d wear what we called “Click” or “Extreme” suits, named after the brands. These were a pair of matching jackets and trousers, the trousers being as baggy as you can imagine—almost Aladdin genie-type—and we would fold them in at the bottom with what we called “pin-tucks.” The top would be baggy too and come complete with a hood. The trainers would be Adidas, big and fat to match. Wearing the right labels was everything, and we’d travel up to London to buy the gear.

  Word went around that we were connected with the scene in London. If you messed with us, we could make a few calls and bring down heavy B-boys from the big city. We saw the benefits of this sort of hype, but back then it was all about survival. These London connections, knowing the hard knocks two school years above me, and having my own crew meant that in Cecil Jones no one dared mess with me again. Gone forever was the boy who cried alone in a school playground because he wasn’t allowed to play football.

  It was almost like having bodyguards. Aron and Martyn looked up to me for my knowledge of hip-hop dress, style, and sounds. They developed a loyalty to me, especially the bigger of them, Martyn, whom we called Sav. If anyone said so much as a rude word to me, Sav would stand ready to defend me. But I never forgot what it was like to be victimized, which pushed me sometimes to stop my best friends from getting too rough with other kids. Though other times, in my twelve-year-old mind, I felt that kids “deserved” it, like if they had said something racist. In such circumstances I would not intervene, believing in a playground sense of justice.

  At primary school, I’d won prizes for my artwork. Now I used my talents to write graffiti. I chose “Slamer” as my tag. With my friends I would go round “tagging,” writing my name and “bombing,” plastering a wall with tags. I’d use Polka Pens, which were these big, fat permanent markers with nubs as thick as your thumb. You would have to give the marker a shake to keep the ink fresh, and whenever we got the chance, we’d tag up any wall with them. Alongside my tag, I’d write different words and captions—“fight the power,” things like that. I’d draw bode, too: these were little characters, strange-looking duck figures that’d stand by the side of your work. I’d also sketch “pieces,” which were basically pencil sketches of graffiti on pieces of paper, which you’d then use as a stencil for a larger, sprayed picture.

  There was an area in Southend that the police left specifically for graffiti called The Yard. It was a derelict area left alone in the hope that by letting us tag there, we wouldn’t graffiti elsewhere. A lot of kids hung about there taking drugs, and that’s where I started. Pretty soon I graduated to the streets, because that was where you’d get your work see
n. I’d always have my pen with me, and if I saw a wall I liked, and the coast was clear, I would tag it. When we went bombing, it was a bit more planned: a group of us would target somewhere and blast the whole area in a specific raid. The whole cat and mouse thing with the police just added to the buzz I got from doing it. I was chased a number of times by the police, but always gave them the slip. I was smart enough to never get caught, and smart enough not to get into the spray-painting side of things. That was a far bigger process: to spray-paint a high street wall involved covering an area five times the size; to do that, and do it properly, you could be sitting there for an hour or so. The chances of getting caught were that much higher, and if they did catch you, they’d really throw the book at you.

  Graffiti is a culture where if you’re shit, everyone is quick to tell you. The mark of respect for a graffiti artist is how long your “piece” and tag stay up on a wall. Out of raw respect, other artists will not paint over something they think is good, and anyone who does paint over it better be prepared for a beat-down. However, if your stuff is no good, or if you are seen as an amateur, you’ll quickly find the word “lame” written over your work. The offending person would then leave their own tag at the side as a direct challenge. The only way to get even was to be good.

  In the days before the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture and the appreciation of artists like Banksy, this was classic counterculture stuff. No one, apart from my friends and I, knew who “Slamer” was, though his name was scrawled all over Southend. It was two fingers to the police and law and order: we were challenging their authority, and there was nothing they could do about it. That gave us the edge, credibility among those in the know, and we felt we had a way to fight back.

  I also got into dancing to the tracks and MC-ing (live rapping) at nightclubs. We’d go to these under-eighteen nights at clubs down by the seafront, or “The Front” as we called it. We would jump around to the sounds of Onyx and House of Pain, then we’d get up onstage for a lyrical excursion over an instrumental. My MC name was “Black Magic.” The white kids didn’t know what to do and couldn’t really move to these strange new beats, so they looked to us for direction.

  Our B-boy sub-community just kept growing; we would meet kids on the streets and just bond because they were into the same scene. It’s like we instantly knew how to relate to each other. That’s how I met people like Marc, and Chill, or Tsiluwa. Marc was a white kid, and a great rapper who was able to freestyle on the spot; his skills made him the right friends. Chill had recently moved from Zimbabwe. He was walking in the wrong direction one night after a particularly violent racist incident, an attack involving a hammer to the head of a friend—a preferred style of attack by Essex-based racists. I saw Chill walking in the direction we were running from, told him what had happened, and asked him to stick with us if he wanted to be safe. This kicked off an instant brotherhood between us, and together we got up to a great deal of mischief.

  On one occasion Chill and I, both fifteen, decided to see if we could get into an over-eighteens nightclub. If anyone looked at us, at our builds and lack of facial hair, it was obvious that we were much younger. To get in we cut off some hair from our heads, and glued it with Pritt Stick to our chins. We laughed at how ridiculous we looked—Chill, who had Afro hair, looked like he had a pad of Velcro stuck to his chin—but we put our blazers on and got in. We went straight to the bathroom and washed it all off. After that, the bouncers would let us in every time.

  All of this—the music, the clothes, the graffiti, the MC-ing—the hip-hop lifestyle—meant that none of us had any problems with girls. They were almost like groupies, white middle-class girls, who were into hip-hop and wanted to be a part of it. This was a time when mixed relationships became extremely fashionable, especially on the female side: there was a whole group of girls, many from nice girls-only schools, who wanted to be in mixed relationships. They’d talk to us about how mixed-race babies looked so cute. Such talk would make us laugh, and we thrived on the attention. We were just out to have a good time, and were buzzing on a sound, an identity, that we could finally claim as our own.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Stranger Stabbed for Me

  While life in school was improving, the situation outside was escalating into something far more serious. Although my generation was being exposed to—and becoming interested in—music emanating from black culture, older generations remained unmoved by hip-hop and threatened by its associated culture. This was a generation who still had the mind-set of the father of the boy at primary school who had filled his son with all that rubbish about AIDS. It was these older, violently aggressive groups of white youths we had to be wary of.

  The result was that when we went out, we made sure that we never walked anywhere alone. If we were out in the town, we’d be in groups of five, six, or seven to be on the safe side. We were an overwhelmingly non-white group of B-boys, and as we got deeper into the hip-hop culture, a lot of our white friends began peeling away from us. This was either from fear of attack or through feeling out of place. But Sav, the biggest boy in my school, always remained loyal to me, and was prepared to stand by my side till the end. I’d seen him take blows to his head from iron bars, yet still get back up, brush off his clothes, and walk on. It was hard to find a tougher man than Sav. The rest of our circle eventually narrowed to either West Indians or Pakistanis. We were united by the threat we all faced when the neo-Nazi skinhead group Combat 18 came into being in the early 1990s. And the guy with connections to Combat 18 was Mickey. Whenever and wherever Mickey or his crew saw us, they would draw their knives and hunt us down like animals.

  How could we stand up to these guys, men really—they were much older than us—who were dangerously tooled up? It got to the point that from the age of fourteen on I began carrying a knife every time I went out. In those days, you could buy a knife as a kid without any questions asked. Crazy, really. It was a big hunting knife, six-inch steel blade and grip handle with a holder that you could strap to your back. That was very effective in concealing it—I once spent time in a police cell without them ever knowing what was hidden under my shirt. What I particularly liked about this knife was that within the design of the main blade, there was a second, hidden knife. I’d attach this one to a string around my wrist, so if the bigger knife ever slipped from my hand I’d still have the second one ready as a backup.

  I bought the knife for protection, pure and simple, not to look for trouble. I’d practice getting it out, make sure I was up to speed, could unclip it and whip it out at a second’s notice—the sort of moment where a fumbling could make the difference between getting stabbed and your attacker backing away. I’d sharpen it constantly, make sure the blade was in perfect nick, and learned how best to hold it in a fight. I was fully prepared to use it, but thankfully (and due to pure luck rather than good judgment) I never had to. In those days I trusted that thing more than God, and so we formed a kind of perverse bond. I would look over it from time to time, running my finger along its blade, and wonder whether it would save me or get me killed. I still keep it in a drawer next to my bed to remind me of those difficult times. I’m still not sure whether I love the thing or hate it.

  In my parents’ time, things were different; if you got threatened, it was all about fistfights, maybe the odd kick—it wasn’t nice, but there wasn’t the same level of threat of serious injury. That all changed with the skinheads and the arrival of Combat 18: knives went from being the exception to suddenly being the norm. Their favored form of attack was with hammers or screwdrivers, but they also carried clubs and butchers’ knives. That started a bit of a local arms race, with everyone tooling up in response to everyone else. Suddenly everyone in Essex was carrying, in a way people hadn’t been fifteen years before. Good friends of mine got badly hurt—Moe had his head smashed with a hammer and was lucky to survive. That was the climate non-whites faced in Southend, and that was why we carried k
nives. We were being hunted down for sport in our own streets by C18. They even had a name for it: Paki-bashing. Friends were being randomly stabbed, hammered, and clubbed just because of the color of their skin. I defy anyone to convince a teenager that he has no right to defend himself in such circumstances. If tooling up could deter such attacks, then for all the risks involved, we believed it was bloody well worth doing.

  That day in the park, Chill ran to us for help, and I had ended up surrounded by skinheads. Uselessly outnumbered, I dumped my own knife in a desperate attempt to convince the skinheads that I was no enemy. Whom was I fooling? For C18, my skin color alone was a sufficient crime. Finally surrounded by them, their mouths frothing with frenzy, their eyes glazed with bloodlust, I knew that my time was up. These men had come from hell, in their white van, to Paki-bash this fifteen-year-old kidult. To submit to death is a strange sensation; one can only do it by finding hopelessness attractive. The mind searches for ways to console the heart, telling it: “It’s OK, when you’re dead you’ll feel no more pain.”

  And that’s all I wanted really, for it to be done without much pain. But I didn’t die. In fact, the strangest thing happened. It was, and remains, rather surreal. A passerby, a respectable-looking, studious type of white guy, saw my plight and entered the fray between the skinheads and me. Despite the panic of the situation, I think he managed to tell me his name was Matt. I cannot be certain about this, but I feel an urge to humanize him, so I’ll call him Matt anyway.

  “Don’t worry,” Matt said, “I’m with you.”

  I remember thinking, What the heck? Who are you? Instead, I cautiously thanked him.

  Matt didn’t look like a fighter at all. Perhaps he was one of them, I thought, undercover and trying to lull me into a false sense of security. Perhaps he was secretly tooled up and ready to scare them all off. “Maybe I won’t die here after all,” I began to think. Maybe this guy is some sort of Bruce Lee; he’ll be able to take them all on and extract us both from this mob. Why else would he jump into the middle of a knife fight?