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Maajid Nawaz: young radical to party hopeful
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MARCH | ISSUE 4
Maajid Nawaz
FEATURE
Now on the Lib Dem leadership programme, Maajid Nawaz tells Matt Withers about his journey from radical Islam to anti-extremist campaigner
with a cause 4
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n April 2002 Maajid Nawaz was living in Egypt’s second city, Alexandria, when his home was raided by state security officials. He was taken to the state’s security headquarters where he and his fellow prisoners were numbered, from one into the hundreds. Nawaz was number 42. “From the first day, officers would call a roll call, and number one would go to the interrogation room and the rest of us would have to listen to him scream as he was electrocuted on his teeth and genitalia,” he recalls. “Then they would call number two, then three and so on. As number 42, I had to listen to 41 people before me being tortured, waiting for my turn.” That torture lasted four days. Imprisonment – for “propagating by speech or writing for the ideas of a banned organisation” – would last for four years. Roll on eight years and Nawaz found himself staring at Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and where, he says, he had “an epiphany”. “I think that the sheer size of that tacky monstrosity – I don’t like it much – and the sheer scale of what I was looking at inspired me to look beyond the horizon, to look towards the future and I decided that I needed to look towards the future of my own political horizon,” he says. “It was right there that I resolved, before the elections, to join the Liberal Democrats.” How did he get here? How did a boy from Southend find himself a leading figure
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Maajid Nawaz
FEATURE
in Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in Europe and Asia, imprisoned in Egypt, rejecting his ideology and now a member of the Liberal Democrat leadership programme, tipped as a future star? The answer lies in Essex in the early 1990s. Nawaz presents the UK at the time as rife with violence and intimidation. He speaks of the phenomenon of “white flight”, as East Londoners moved out to Essex – “a bunch of people who were trying to run away from people like me finding out there were 15 of me already there”. By the age of 14 Nawaz was already dodging hammer, screwdriver and machete attacks from neo-Nazi group Combat 18. At the age of 15, he was surrounded by a group of knife-wielding thugs. A passer-by, known only to him as Matt, stepped in and asked why they were picking on a young boy. In response, they turned on him, stabbing him numerous times. He was taken to hospital with a collapsed lung. Nawaz never saw him again, although assumes he survived. “I didn’t see any headlines the next day that there had been a murder on London Road,” he says. “I believe he saved my life that day.” At the same time, in Bosnia, Muslims were being massacred in the full glare of the world’s gaze. That, says Nawaz, “awakened within me, for the first time, that I was a Muslim. Up until that point, I was agnostic. I wasn’t a believer, I certainly didn’t go to Mosque and I had no care for the faith of my father. “What happened in Bosnia, what happened domestically, left Muslims around the world angry, but also vulnerable. At a key age, the crucial age, of 16, a local man from Essex came to my hometown, Southend, and propagated a narrative that has subsequently come to be known in this field as an Islamist 6
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narrative. That narrative joined the dots between religion and race. “To my angry teenage mind it was easy for him to be able to demonstrate that the racism at home and the genocide in Bosnia were one and the same thing. Afterall, why would I think that my problems would be limited to my skin colour if in Bosnia, where the Muslims were white, they were also being targeted? This then connected the dots between the treatment of Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir and to Chechnya.” With no counter-narrative to challenge the view, he joined the Islamic political group Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose aim was to overthrow every Muslim regime in the world and replace them with one pan-Islamist caliphate which would
Despite packing enough to fill several lifetimes into his 35 years, he still has plans, and, as a member of the leadership programme, the Lib Dems are at the heart of that eventually expand and conquer. He left Essex, moved to London and enrolled in Newham College, which he used as a base to recruit others to the organisation. Elected president of the student union, his entire student council was made up of Islamists and the college was, he says, “taken over”. They set about radicalising the campus, turning pre-existing racial tensions “into an ideological conflict, not religious. Of course we weren’t religious, we were politicised; we were using the religion for our ideological purposes. This was identity politics at its worst.” The atmosphere at the college was poisoned to such an extent that one of
Clockwise from top left Speaking at Cambridge Wordfest 2012; Nawaz in 2012; at the London Lib Dem conference; a book signing; Radical, Maajid Nawaz, published by W.H. Allen; taking part in a debate at the George C Marshall Center, Germany
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Maajid Nawaz
FEATURE
Nawaz’s “self-appointed bodyguards”, Saeed Nur, murdered a Nigerian student, Ayotunde Obanubi in February 1995, by stabbing him through the heart with a machete. He was convicted and jailed for life, and the entire student union committee was expelled. “My mother hit the roof and called me back to Southend. She told me she refused to subsidise my studies without me being under her roof and under her watch.” Eventually, he ended up at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) to study Arabic and Law. But that changed in 1998 when Pakistan tested an atomic bomb for the first time. “We got a message from the global leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir telling British members of Pakistani origin to go to Pakistan and attempt to set up a chapter there, so that the caliphate we wanted to create, instead of declaring a jihad against the world could
People I had defined as my enemy were sticking their necks out to defend me declare a nuclear jihad. How lovely.” Nawaz left university and moved to Pakistan at the age of 21 to set up its Hizb ut-Tahrir division. He joined Lahore University and began travelling around the country, spending a year there before returning to SOAS to complete his degree. But even then he would fly to Copenhagen at weekends to set up the group’s DanishPakistani branch. It is no little irony that Nawaz’s difficulties came in 2001, when for the first time he was travelling for “a genuinely legitimate academic purpose”, taking a gap year in Egypt – admittedly with a view to “dovetailing the 8
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two and resurrecting the organisation” there. It was in Egypt that Nawaz became head of the group’s revived Alexandria chapter, and where the authorities came knocking in the early hours of the morning in April 2002. At the age of 24, he was sent to prison. But two things happened in prison that led to a fundamental change in Nawaz’s thinking. The first was his adoption by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. The organisation took the view that all he and his fellow detainees had been doing was promoting a view, albeit not one it would agree with. “I realised people I had defined as my enemy were sticking their necks out to defend me. That had a profound effect on me,” he says. The second factor was that, now speaking fluent Arabic and with time on his hands, Nawaz took to studying the original sources of Islam and began debating his religion with a who’s-who of Egypt’s jihadist scene and Islamists. He says he experienced what he calls an ‘Animal Farm scenario’. “Living with these people on a day-to-day basis, I began to see the Napoleons and the Boxers. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “I began distinguishing the ideology from the faith itself and came to the conclusion that this ideology that I now call Islamism was an entirely modern concoction, inspired by and with more in common with post-first world war European fascism than it did with the 1,400-year-old faith of Islam.” Upon his release from prison and his return to the UK, Nawaz had decided to speak against a view he had once promoted. But this did not come easily and it took 10 months for him to pluck up the courage to leave Hizb ut-Tahrir. But on 1 May 2007, he did just that, becoming the first senior figure to abandon
the organisation. A process of “picking holes” in the organisation’s ideology resulted in the founding of Quilliam, a thinktank focussed on the discussion of radicalisation. “The journey hasn’t stopped. I will continue to question and I will continue to test.” If the journey has not stopped, where now? Despite packing enough to fill several lifetimes into his 35 years, he still has plans, and, as a member of the leadership programme, the Lib Dems are at the heart of that. “Wherever I’ve ended up, whether it’s with Islamism and prison, as founder of Qulliam in the UK and Khudi [a counter-extremism social movement] in Pakistan, and even now on the leadership programme with the Lib Dems, I’ve never guided my personal political ambitions in the way that I’ve defined where I want to be and then arrived at it, but rather I’ve made
decisions based on principle and I’ve landed on my feet most of the time,” he says. “The way I look at it, it isn’t ‘I want to be Prime Minister’ or ‘I want to be leader of the party’ or ‘I want to be an MP’. The way I look at it is, ‘I want to stand for what I believe in and I want to work towards that practically’. That usually that ends up with me getting along with people in order to achieve that. “What I’d like to do is use the party machine, and the party itself, for good; breaking across racial, religious and other such community divides and try and work with the Lib Dems to unify people around the citizenship and Liberal agenda. The party is the perfect vehicle to do that because of its track record on these issues. Wherever that journey takes me, hopefully it will be as fine as any I’ve been on so far.”
On air: Call Clegg on LBC Nick Clegg began the year making history as the first senior government figure to co-host a regular, live chat show. The first Call Clegg slot on LBC radio saw Clegg take questions on a range of issues, Lib Dem policy and the Coalition, promising listeners he would be “clear and candid”. Callers wanted to talk about tuition fees, benefits and Clegg admitted there was a CLEGG ay CALLevery Thurd “big repair job” required for the party. 9am 97.3 FM sten But, he said, “Where we can get on a li / co.uk doorstep – or microphone – and explain LBC. allclegg #c to people why we’re doing what we’re doing, people see why we are making the decisions we are.” Nick Ferrari told Sky News after the show: “He handled it very well. It’s not scripted and anything can happen. It’s democracy in action.”