Radical (20 page)

“
Na'am
—Yes.”

And I stood up.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Assalaamu Alaykum,
You've Just Come out of Hell

To be asked to voluntarily walk toward your own torture is the cruelest of requests. Why can't they just carry me? Each step is a personal betrayal. My body is convulsing in revulsion against my commands. Every instinct is screaming at me to turn the other way, but I am expected to walk on. Try standing in the middle of a highway watching an oncoming bus without flinching—that's hard. Now try voluntarily walking
toward
that bus instead of stepping out of the way: impossible.

My legs are buckling under each step, but I force compliance and walk on. Guard, your chaperoning hand that helps me walk blindly to my own torture feels perversely merciful; for how could I avoid stepping on my brothers in the corridor were it not for you? Alas, without sight I cannot help but feel so disgustingly dependent on you. Now it is hard to breathe. Fighting to stay hidden away deep within me, even my breath fears coming out to face my torturer. My heart is attempting to escape the cage that is my chest, and my mind is beginning to shut down. I am in shock. Ya Allah, I need you right now. If any mercy I have ever shown to anyone has amounted to any value in your esteem, then send me your angels now to shield me from these monsters. I am trying to be brave for you, my Lord, but the truth is I am scared. Help me, my Lord, for I am very scared.

The interrogation room. I can hear my interrogator in front of me, his electrocution device crackling in anticipation. My whole adult life I've spent in preparation for this moment. This agony. Training my soul to accept what my body cannot. Now, I am so tense and tight that my jaw begins to ache.
What will happen next? Will he hit me hard to warm me up? Will he attack me without warning, as an indication that he is brazen?

If I were him, if I had sold my soul to the devil in this way, if I was going to do unspeakable things to my helpless victims, that's how I would do it. In a terrible, unpredictable, twisted way. Why sell your soul only to be useless at being evil? My mind is racing. The possibilities are too many. Come on! Do it properly, man! I can't stand the wait any longer, just get it over with. But I waited, and waited, and it didn't come. Instead, I heard the shuffle of feet and the door close.

I had assumed that they would just attack you with the electricity there and then. What I learned later from other prisoners was that there was a whole
process
to electrocution. They stripped the brothers naked, pulled them down onto the floor, pinned a chair on top of them, and while someone sat on that chair to hold them down, they electrocuted them via their teeth or genitalia, or both. At the time though, I didn't know any of this, or else I'd have known I wasn't about to be electrocuted. But I didn't know, so I just stood there, waiting for the impact, my hands ready to be released, preparing to pounce on my interrogator's neck and bite it until death came to me.

I heard the squeak of a chair as someone sat down.

“Maagid Nawaz?” This was a different person from the one who had interrogated me back in Alexandria.

“Yes,” I replied. The effort it took to make my voice audible was a battle in itself. At this moment, I felt brave just by being able to speak without breaking down.

“So tell me, Maagid. Tell me about Hizb al-Tahrir in Egypt.”

I swallowed hard. Staying defiant in Alexandria, without forty-eight hours of listening to torture, was one thing. But now I saw, I heard, I
knew
what they were capable of. You will stand among the
Sahabah,
Maajid—the Companions of the Prophet, do not give up now. The
shaheed—
the martyr—will not die. Like a green bird flying beneath the
‘arsh
(the Throne of Almighty Allah), you will live under His shade. You will be that happy little boy once again. Do not give up.

“My name is Maajid Nawaz,” I replied in English, in whatever level of voice I could muster, which probably wasn't very loud at all. I was still remembering my training, but barely.

“I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in Britain. I am in . . .”

A pause as I gasped for air.

“. . . in Egypt to study.”

I could hear the quality in my voice: though the words I was speaking were defiant in meaning, the way I was saying them was pleading. I scolded myself:
Be a man, what's wrong with you, is this how Yasir and Sumayyah, after whom you named your child, behaved? Stand strong, man!

The interrogator said nothing. He let the silence unsettle me. Then, in Arabic: “OK, Maagid. I think you should listen to this.” My interrogator got up and opened the door. As the door opened, the sound of screams flooded in from a nearby room. As I heard the screams and pleas, trying not to listen, a terrifying recognition dawned upon me. The person being tortured was pleading in English.

“
Kallim ‘Arabi!
” the interrogator shouted back. “Speak Arabic!”

“I'm trying,” the tortured soul replied, attempting through the shouts in badly broken, barely understandable sentences.

My God,
I thought.
That sounds like Reza. They're torturing Reza Pankhurst.

Subhan Allah!
My last trump card, my British citizenship, really did mean nothing to these bastards. If they're torturing Reza, then there's no reason they won't torture me. Poor Reza, how on earth was a man supposed to speak in any language, let alone a foreign one, through the pain of electrocution!

The door to the interrogation room slammed shut again. The interrogator sensed from my reaction that I knew who was being tortured. Now he was right up to me, lowering his voice with menace.

“You hear that, Maagid? You hear what we are doing to your brother? Don't think we can't do that to you. For your own sake, stop these games and start speaking to me in Arabic.” He was shouting at me now. “Start talking to me about Hizb al-Tahrir . . .” He spat the name of the group out in disgust. “. . . Everything! I want to know everything about your group in Egypt!”

The next thing I knew, I felt his fist in my stomach. A big, deep, powerful punch; it took all my strength for it not to knock me over. My mind went black and I struggled to breathe as the wind left my lungs. Somewhere in my distant memory, during more innocent days, I remembered that I hailed from a place where someone called Patrick had done this to me. But I had survived, I had lived to tell the tale and see Patrick cower in fear before me many years later. And that memory brought me back up with strength and a renewed
eeman.
Allah is with me. I see it now. This is His sign! Allah never abandoned me. He has been with me all along. And now I knew what I needed to say next to my enemy.

“I have nothing more to say to you. Do whatever you want.”

And I loosened my hands in preparation for my attack. To this day, I find it hard to believe that I actually stood there and said this to him. There are many moments in my life, and in this story, I am ashamed of telling. But knowing that I uttered this one feeble sentence on that day fills me with pride. Ammar will surely be old enough one day to read these words, and right here he will know that his father tried with all his strength and all his might to be a noble, honorable man. Because he was named
Abu Ammar,
named after martyrs. And the rest is for the world to judge.

My enemy paused. I could hear him pacing. Then, to my surprise, almost as an anticlimax to what I had just embraced as the inevitable, he said in a dismayed tone, “I'm sending you back to your place. You have twelve hours to think about what you just said to me. And if, after those twelve hours, you still don't tell me the truth, be in absolutely no doubt that I will torture you in ways you have never imagined. Is that clear?”

I said nothing. The interrogator came close again, close enough that I felt his breath on me. Behind him I could hear the door being opened, and more footsteps entering the room. “You know, you've got such a nice face, Maagid,” he hissed. “It would be a shame to have to ruin it.”

With that, I was shoved and manhandled down the corridor. The guard was laughing.

“Such a nice face,” he repeated. “He likes you. You know what we do to people we like, don't you?” The implication was clear as he dumped me back down on the floor. And he left me with that thought, to fester and rot in the darkest corners of my imagination.

The beatings continued. The numbers kept on being called, higher and higher: up into the hundreds.

I replayed in my head again and again the comments that the interrogator had said to me.
Such a nice face.
I remembered the pleas of the prisoner being assaulted in the cell behind me. What was going on? Why hadn't he just tortured me and got it over with? Why was I being spared in this way? I began to feel guilt, as if somehow I had escaped unfairly while all the others, even my brothers from the UK, were treated in the same, brutal way.

I had been in situations before where I had escaped by the skin of my teeth. Matt's stabbing by neo-Nazi hooligans in Southend was meant for me. The murder conviction in Newham was almost me. Somehow, I had always managed to get away with it.
Was Allah saving me for something else?
But as the night continued, punctuated by the sharp screams and sound of electricity ripping through the souls of men, it was a hope I was finding it increasingly difficult to cling to.