by Maajid Nawaz
Mr. Moth was a lovely guy. He was gay and quite relaxed about it, but I failed to pick up on this. Once, some students and I had managed to get on to the topic of homosexuality. I found myself openly making homophobic jokes while waiting for our economics class to begin. (Behind the jokes was the fact that in HT we prescribed death for homosexuals in our “Khilafah.”) Mr. Moth entered as my childish jokes were in full swing, and I continued, totally oblivious. A kind soul, he went along by hiding under the table and pretending to shake as the class roared with laughter. It was only afterward, to my utter embarrassment, that everyone said to me, “You do know he is gay, right?”
Nevertheless, Mr. Moth continued to treat me not just with respect but also with encouragement. I can credit him as the teacher who made me see for the first time what I might be able to achieve academically. I’d been thinking about getting a law degree, which required three Bs for entry. When the time came to apply to university, Mr. Moth shocked me by setting my official predicted grade as an A in economics—allowing me to study both Arabic and law. I remember asking him in disbelief, “Are you sure?” But he responded with certainty that I could do it.
“I predict that you’ll go very far in life, Maajid. You’ll become something like an ambassador, or take on a similarly important role.”
I thought to myself, “I’d rather be the Caliph’s ambassador to Britain.”
But still, I was grateful that Mr. Moth held me in such high esteem. This was a moment akin to when Dave Gomer gave me that look just before the murder. I had this overwhelming feeling that I didn’t want to let Mr. Moth down. Predicting an A to a former B-boy from a comprehensive school background was a risk for Mr. Moth, but as a mentor he had shown faith in me, and so I worked harder for him.
However well I got on at Westcliff High School, I still couldn’t quite shake the sense of feeling different. Part of the history syllabus was British Imperial history, and so we studied British India. We looked in detail at the Raj. We studied events like the Indian “Mutiny,” where even the name of the event is significant. In the Indian subcontinent the event is referred to as “The First War of Independence,” rather than a mutiny implying false rebellion. During one lesson, as we were discussing India and the Raj, the teacher asked the class, “How many of you here are proud of our Empire and its achievements?” Everyone put a hand up, except for me. “Is there anyone who isn’t?” Everyone looked around as I put mine up. I sat there in class and pondered for a while that “No matter how well I get along with these people, no matter how much I hide my beliefs, they will always see me as belonging to a race they civilized.” It was just enough to override the individual kindness Mr. Moth had shown me, and for me to interpret his behavior as an exception to this norm.
Although I had left behind Newham, London, and all the other HT activists, my game plan was still very much focused around the group. When Omar Bakri left, he took with him not only the more aggressive tactics but also the more thuggish elements of HT. What remained was the more thoughtful, more serious side of the organization. The emphasis now was on activists focusing on their studies—HT didn’t want people getting expelled or ruining their education. They wanted to produce pillars of society who believed in our ideology and who would be of real use in Muslim-majority countries. In an echo of my grandfather moving to Britain to make the most of its schooling for his children, HT stressed how respected the British education system was abroad. To gain qualifications in the UK and then travel to work in places like Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan would give the activists access to the best jobs. That suited HT’s cause: they wanted to control the intellectual life of a nation, to be in such a position of influence that they could hijack the army and instigate a coup. The fact that recruitment was on the rise in British universities gave them an opportunity to do this.
I also gave my weekends to recruiting. Despite the way things had turned out at Newham, the leadership remained impressed with how I’d brought interest and activists to the cause. I was selected as part of a team seeking to create an HT cell at Cambridge University. I’d go up on a Saturday morning and spend most of the weekend there.
We would go to the prayer hall and the mosque, and get talking to the students. We’d befriend them, take them out for food, and engage with them in discussions about Islam and, ultimately, Islamism. There was a student called Arshad, who was reading Arabic at Cambridge and had already expressed an interest in HT. It was up to us to make him properly committed to the cause. During this time, I also recruited a cell back in Southend. The Muslim community there was pleasantly surprised at my and Osman’s conversion, and many held me up as an example to their sons, which I took full advantage of.
At the same time, I was thinking about my university choice. I had wanted to study Arabic, and my father wanted me to study law. There was one university that offered a combination of both, and that was SOAS: the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. To my delight, I got the very grades my teachers had predicted, and I was offered a place at SOAS. This pleased my parents enormously: more importantly for me, it also pleased HT. Out of our elite group I was the first one selected to become a full member of the group, a hizbi. It wasn’t a big ceremony, just one on one with Nasim, by now one of the leaders of the national group. I swore an oath of allegiance to God, the Qur’an, and to obey and follow the instructions of the group’s leader, or amir. I promised to represent the ideology at all costs, and to be prepared to make sacrifices for the cause. Convinced of the injustice of non-Islam, or kufr, I meant every word I uttered with the chilling sincerity of a true believer.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Romanticism of Struggle
If I had thought becoming a full member of Hizb al-Tahrir was going to lead me into an inner sanctum of understanding, I was in for a shock. Within a couple of days of taking my oath, I was instead introduced to a world of in-fighting and ideological division.
It wasn’t just the UK division of HT where disagreements over policy erupted; the same was true of the global leadership as well. The leadership had been in the hands of Abdul Qadeem Zalloom, who was from Palestine, where the group had its origins and enormous support. However, some of the more dogmatic and puritanical elements of the group were unhappy with the way he ran things. One of the many disputes, which was absurd, was over the introduction of color into publications.
HT’s books had traditionally been white, with a red font on the cover; under Zalloom’s leadership, a variety of colors had been introduced into the group’s publications. For the purists, this was anathema: they felt the look of the books had always been different and was easily recognizable in bookshops. Now they just looked the same as everyone else’s: symbolic, to them, of the way that under Zalloom’s leadership the group was losing its distinctive message.
A new grouping was led by Abu Rami, who had previously been a member of the leadership committee. Rami’s stance found favor in Europe and in the Far East, whereas Zalloom’s support was in the Middle East. The UK was one of the countries unsure which grouping to support.
All this was happening as I became a member. Within a matter of days of my taking my oath, we were receiving delegates from the Middle East, pitching to HT in Britain to take their side. There was a cloak-and-dagger element in all of this. No one was ever quite sure where the global leadership was—they kept their locations hidden for security reasons. Also no one was completely sure which side a delegate was from. Was he from the original leadership or from Abu Rami? Was he pretending to be from the other side in order to check our reaction? It was typical of the way the organization was run that no one was completely sure.
In a member’s house in South London, about thirty or so UK members gathered to be told it was up to our own consciences whom we decided to back. I may have been the youngest in the room, but I felt compelled to speak.
“How dare you come here and tell us to choose!�
� I snapped. “You know that the means to acquire the leadership is done through the electoral college of the qiyadah. What you should be saying is that Abu Rami is a nakith, an oath breaker, and a baghi, a usurper. You have no choice but to consider him and anyone who associates with him as usurpers.”
The delegate was taken aback by the ferocity of my argument.
“Brother Maajid,” he asked. “How long have you been a member of HT?”
“Two days.”
“Well,” he said, somewhat patronizingly, “I’ve been a member for fifteen years.”
“I don’t care,” I came back, now even more riled. “The haq—truth, isn’t judged by how long you have been a member. What is right is right, and that’s the end of it.”
By this point, I was certain he was touting for us to join Abu Rami’s group.
A couple of days later a second delegate arrived from the Middle East. He was an Algerian, there to argue the case for Abdul Qadeem Zalloom’s leadership. For the majority of us this man felt like the real deal, and we were inclined to trust him. Together with another hizbi, Irfan, I took the Algerian back to the hotel where he was staying and returned to my student residence.
When Irfan went to pick him up the following morning, there was no reply from his room. After knocking repeatedly and getting no answer, Irfan persuaded the hotel staff to let him in. He discovered the Algerian delegate lying dead on the bathroom floor, his trousers round his ankles. There were no signs of trauma or bullet wounds on his body.
When we’d dropped him off the night before, he hadn’t struck me as someone who was about to die. At the same time, there was no shortage of enemies who might have wanted him dead, and the techniques were available to do so. The Israelis, for example, were known for using nontraceable poisons. We knew that because we were attempting the overthrow of certain regimes, it was likely that their intelligence agents were operating against us. It also could have been an internal affair: Algeria was locked in a vicious civil war between its military leaders and the Islamist and jihadist rebels. Then there were rumors that the split in HT had been caused by Jordanian intelligence infiltrating our ranks. There were suggestions that Abu Rami was acting on behalf of Jordanian intelligence, and it was they who had killed the delegate for his support of Zalloom. We never got to the truth.
Then Abu Rami also died. Again, trying to discover exactly what had happened was impossible. Prior to Rami’s death, Zalloom had confidently written to all HT chapters around the world, offering an amnesty to any members who had left—they could come back into the fold within a certain time frame. Rami had died just around that time limit. Zalloom then wrote another letter, slamming Rami and his followers: anyone who hadn’t rejoined before his death would never be allowed to return.
Even so, my life was moving forward. I was at SOAS, doing a course I wanted to do. I was a full member of HT, one of the most effective recruiters in the organization, responsible for coordinating activities across Central and South London.
But something was missing in my life—a meaningful relationship. I’d already had my share of romantic liaisons, starting way back with Sarah—the girl I’d left on my first day at secondary school because there were “too many girls here.” At Cecil Jones girls were a big part of the B-boy scene, and I loved it. Once I joined HT, however, all this changed. The group frowned on such behavior and wanted its followers to focus on their studies. HT wanted you to do things properly. If you were interested in a girl, it had to be serious, and then you could approach her family with a view to marriage. If the family agreed, then you would become engaged. You would be allowed to see and speak to each other, but you were not allowed to be intimate. You would have to be patient, wait for the marriage arrangements to be made.
Before my expulsion from Newham, there was a tall, beautiful Pakistani girl who attended some of my talks, at the time not in a headscarf, and so not yet as religious as she would go on to become. I did things properly and got my friend Ed Husain to talk to her on my behalf. The girl was flattered, expressed an interest, and even donned the headscarf soon after. We made approaches to both sets of parents, to tell them that we were interested in a betrothal with a view to eventual marriage once we had finished our studies. Our parents met to discuss the matter, but much to my disappointment, her parents opposed our relationship.
It transpired that her father had already fixed her betrothal in Pakistan. Just before I started university she went with her parents to Pakistan, on the assumption they were going there to visit family. While there she was married to her cousin—a pressured and arranged marriage. The girl I had waited two years for was suddenly taken from me without warning. I was angry, and she was heartbroken. She called my number and said that she was prepared to run away to be with me. Abi, delighted at the idea that a girl could potentially calm the wave of anger she could see rising in her son, offered to take her in and protect her.
Ever the righteous ideologue, I failed her miserably. I didn’t want to do anything that went against the teachings of HT, or bring the group into disrepute. So I played it by the book and told her that I didn’t want to break up anyone’s family. I said that the issue was now a religious one, and that she needed to see a religious cleric, a shaikh. This shaikh, I told her, would be able to rule on the legitimacy of her marriage in Pakistan. They would be able to say whether the marriage was void because it had taken place under duress. If a shaikh ruled the marriage illegitimate, then we would be free to pursue our relationship.
The shaikh the girl chose to go to was a Salafist. In her innocence, she wasn’t in tune with the whole debate: as far as she was concerned, a Muslim was a Muslim. As soon as I heard whom she had gone to, I felt my stomach turn. I knew already what the Salafist’s answer would be. The Salafist shaikh knew exactly who I was, and when the girl explained the situation, he quickly backed up her parents. Yes, he told her, your marriage is quite legal. You must forget all thoughts of a relationship with Maajid.
The Salafists finally got their revenge. I had won the crowd at Newham, but they made sure that I lost my heart. And so, full of delusions of piety and sacrifice, I said goodbye to my college sweetheart, failing to offer her the support she so clearly needed. In my heart, I would be hard-pressed to say that romanticism was dead. It was more like the romanticism of a cause, of a struggle, had won a decisive battle against the romanticism of love.
Eventually, Osman told me that he’d met a young Pakistani woman he thought might be suitable for me. I met her in public places like cafes, and I quickly realized she was everything my brother had promised. Perhaps most importantly of all, she was a leader for the HT sisters on her campus. Rabia was a biology student raised between Karachi and London. She had a serene, pretty face, a quiet, high voice, and she was an all-round sensible and loyal person.
Once again, I went through the process of approaching her parents about the possibility of marriage to their daughter. This time, my reception was different. The father had been a senior banker with Pakistan’s Habib Bank, and all seven of his daughters supported HT and had pressured him to become a follower as well. His response was to become increasingly devout, to the point where he left his job a year before he was due a golden parachute from his bank. He’d come to the conclusion that bank interest was to be classified as usury, prohibited by Islam. He quit his job, didn’t take his retirement package, and instead set up an Islamic bookshop in Shepherd’s Bush. That is where my discussions with him about his daughter took place. He saw a smart young man, a law student, promising to take care of his daughter in the Islamic way. To my delight, Rabia Ahmed and I got engaged.
I took the second year out from university to get married, which we idealistically did during the month of Ramadan in 1999. We moved into a two-bedroom flat in East London that Osman had previously been living in. It was not a great start to married life—within a week of our moving in, the landlord reclaimed the
flat and kicked us out.
We found another one, a nice flat in Wembley that we were just about to take when my HT activities took over. Rabia was about to face the true extent of my attraction to the romanticism of struggle. A communiqué had been issued from the qiyadah asking for British Pakistani members to go to Pakistan and help found the group there. With dreams of a coup fit for a caliph, I told Rabia that I wanted to answer the call.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dreams of a Nuclear Caliphate
In 1999 Pakistan successfully tested its first atomic bomb, becoming a member of that small group of countries that could boast nuclear weapons capability. For Hizb al-Tahrir, this meant that if it could infiltrate the Pakistani military and successfully instigate a coup, then “the Khilafah” could start as a global heavyweight. Overnight, our dream of a Muslim superstate felt that much closer.
The difficulty was that HT had virtually no representatives in the country. It had never invested time there because of the view that “the Khilafah” should emerge from an Arabic-speaking nation, which Pakistan is not. The second problem was that the few HT members who were already there had been abysmally unsuccessful in drumming up recruitment.
Nasim was extremely reluctant for me to travel and felt I would be better off continuing my studies. As part of my course, I was already due to spend a year in Egypt studying Arabic, and could be of better use there. My parents, too, were doubtful. I told them that I wanted to go on a one-year study course to reconnect with my Pakistani roots. Remembering a much more tolerant, diverse, and spiritual Pakistan from her childhood, Abi thought this trip could do my Islamist fervor some good. My father, though, smelled a rat. “I will support you through your degree,” he said, “but if you go to Pakistan, I’m afraid I can no longer support you.” By now, he had a far clearer idea of my politics and wanted no part of it.
