Radical (27 page)

“If you hear anything, or come across any information that might be useful, would you mind keeping us informed?” the officer concluded.

“No,” I replied. “I have no intention of doing anything of the sort.”

After four hours of interrogation, we were finally released. Jackobi had stayed to advise us. And not just on the legal side of things. He'd dealt with prisoners returning from abroad before, and in the short space of time he had, he wanted to brief us as best he could.

“I've got to warn you,” he said. “It's going to be difficult. Don't think for a second that once you walk through that gate that all of this is over. To readjust to normal life after what you've been through is going to be really hard. You need to realize that it is going to test your relationships to breaking point. I've seen so many people come back and for their marriages to fall apart. The statistics show that most people in your position end up getting divorced or abuse their spouses. I don't want that to happen to any of you, but you've got to be aware that you'll really have to work at your relationships. Otherwise, you'll end up the same way.”

And as we stood at that airport gate, alive and alert, just about to be reunited with our families, I turned to Jackobi with a wide, warm smile. “Don't worry about me, Stephen. I'm married to a loyal wife whom I will embrace with all my heart. She's the mother of my child, and she kept me alive out there.”

I walked out of that gate, oblivious to the forces that were about to tear my heart clean out of my chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

How Many Years Did You Fail?

I see you, London. Heathrow, immune from change during long spells of absence, oblivious to the distance of lovers, you seem to welcome me back with no less warmth than when I left. I see you, London. How I despised you and loved you. How I hated everything you stood for, and yet when deprived of your familiarity, your openness, how I missed you miserably. At once head of the colonial snake that poisoned my people and snared my lands, yet also bastion of justice, the rule of law and fair play. And even now, as I rush to embrace you again, your boots stamp on my people in Iraq and Afghanistan, while I know that my boots are nowhere safer than resting in your green parks. Why do you confuse me so, beating me with one hand while drying my tears with the other? How I tried for thirteen years to rip you out of my soul, to deny you, to bury you, but how I've longed for you to claim me from the hell that I just returned from. London, I see you.

The media interest in our return was huge. We were greeted from every angle by the flashing of bulbs and the shouts of journalists. I looked around and all I could see was a blur of people—
where shall I turn, where is my family?
Then I heard my dad's familiar voice rising above the din, shouting, “Maajid!” My mind instantly traveled back to when I was a boy. I would make these silly little gifts for my dad, from the spare materials in his garage, in anticipation of his return from Libya every month. How long a month would seem in those days! And Dad would walk in, Stetson on his head, jeans, belt, and boots on, and he would shout, “Maajid!” He would scoop up my tiny little body and hold me in a huge bear hug. Instinctively, my body moved toward the voice I could hear, until I found myself embracing my dad with joy. Next to him, right there by his side, was Rabia. She was crying.

And there I saw Abi, the womb that bore me, whom I had hurt so much through the years. And I wanted to tell her everything, about the storm that was raging in my heart, about how I wanted to change, to make her proud again, about all the literature I had read. But there was no time. Then there was my childhood best friend, my protector and brother, Osman. I did you proud. I stood up for what we believed in, I fought them all the way, I didn't back down, just as you showed me. And Sorraiya! My God, you're all grown up, from nine to fourteen, what a difference! My sister, I'm sorry you had to grow up on a diet of torture, jails, and anger. No child deserves that. I will try to show you a better way now, to heal our hearts together. And John Cornwall, my friend, my humane friend. As I saw him for the first time, I felt like I knew him well.

But it wasn't just our friends and relatives at the gate. Elbowing and jostling for position were many members of Hizb al-Tahrir. No longer were we fallen soldiers who “hadn't been defiant enough”: at a stroke, we were returning heroes, and the leadership wanted to bask in the glow of our media attention. Here was Jalaluddin, the man who had admonished me from the safety of his sofa, welcoming me back like he was my best friend. “You are our heroes, brothers!” he proclaimed as he shook my hand and offered me whatever help I needed to settle back into the group.

I desperately wanted to see my son Ammar, who was waiting for me at my in-laws' house. As quickly as I could, I greeted family, friends, and colleagues and got into a car with Rabia by my side. I remember holding her hand in that car, as I had done in the car journey home the day we were married. And she smiled at me now as she had smiled at me then. And we drove off together to see our son.

Ammar was now six years old, and had been running and messing around before I arrived. As soon as I opened the door and he saw me, he stopped. His expression completely froze: it was such a shock for him to see me there. For a moment, as when I had first seen him in prison, I was worried about his reaction. But as in prison, I needn't have been. He gave a little jump and ran over to hug me. I held him so tightly then and lifted him high into the air with a love that was deep and pure. We had a celebration meal, and then went back to Rabia's flat, our flat, which she had carefully arranged and decorated for my return. And that night, after I put Ammar to sleep, I slept awkwardly, not knowing how to express to Rabia the storm raging in my chest.

“Shhh, sleep now,” she said, “there's no need to talk. We'll have plenty of time to talk.”

It didn't take any time for Hizb al-Tahrir to start seeking my involvement in the group's UK leadership. The brothers had organized a press conference for the following day. My mind was haunted with thoughts of all the brothers we'd left behind, of Akram and so many Egyptians who were languishing in jails for years well beyond their sentences. I owed it to them, to the world, to get matters off my chest, and to speak of the atrocities of Mubarak's regime.

That day we addressed al-Jazeera, Al Arabiya, the BBC. As we had promised the warden, we told the world about Mazrah Tora prison and the brutal transgressions of Aman al-Dawlah. Later that week, I was interviewed for the BBC, toeing the party line, playing my role as an HT spokesman, desperately trying to cling on to anything familiar from my past to remind myself of who I was. During this period, I gave many talks for HT, spoke at rallies of thousands, and even shared a platform twice with “Napoleon,” a member of the Outlawz, rapper Tupac Shakur's former group. After Tupac's death “Napoleon” had become a hard-core Salafi, disrespectfully declaring to all that Tupac was now burning in the fires of hell.

And throughout this period, Rabia looked on with that same wounded look in her eyes, while I focused on the only thing I knew best: galvanizing and rallying crowds.

In the weeks and months ahead, I took stock of my situation, and my self-esteem began to falter. I was twenty-eight years old, still an undergraduate, the father of a six-year-old I had to support, unemployed, and a recently released Islamist political prisoner in a post-9/11 world. I began to panic. For the first time in my life I began to feel old, old inside my heart and in the depths of my eyes. The burden of what I knew and what my conscience was telling me about Islamism was heavy on my mind. My doubts kept growing, but the more they screamed for my attention, the more I sought to bury them away. This is all I've known in my adult life: “My name is Maajid Nawaz. I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir.”
What was I if not this?
So I set myself some goals—if I could give myself something to aim for, then that might help lift me out of this trough.

My starting point was my degree. I went back to SOAS to see if they would allow me to continue my law and Arabic degree. They could quite easily have told me where to go. I'd done my first year and taken two years out, done my second year, and then was imprisoned for four years halfway through my placement abroad. Abi though, God bless her, had been persistent in persuading the university to keep my place open.

To my relief two of my old Arabic lecturers, Muaz Salih and Muhammad Sa'eed, were still at the university and had kept the doors open for me. SOAS let me back in. I'd been arrested a few months before I was due to take my third-year Arabic exams, so my faculty head said I'd have to pass those in order to be allowed back. As my one-year placement in Egypt had unexpectedly been extended by several years, my ability in Arabic was not in question. I took the exam and got 97 percent.

If I had just stuck to keeping my head down and getting my degree, things might have been fine. But HT asked me to join their leadership. There were two leadership committees by this point. After London's terrorist attacks in the summer of 2005 (7/7), Prime Minister Tony Blair had threatened to ban the group. In response to this, HT had created both a front leadership and a secret leadership committee. The “executive committee” was the publicly recognized leadership, but the real power lay behind the scenes, in a “
wilayah
” committee. Because of my media profile, I was given a place on the front committee. Because Nasim knew me well and trusted me completely, he put me on the secret ruling
wilayah
committee too. Again, I had my feet in two worlds.

I began trying to find a way to accommodate my changing views within HT. I felt the way forward was to hone my arguments and convince other members to come around to my revised position. In that BBC interview, the reporter, Sarah Montague, asked me what I stood for, and I replied that HT was calling for a “representative Caliphate.” This led to a great deal of furious discussion inside the group. What did I mean by a “representative Caliphate”? The Caliphate was “
The
Caliphate.” There should have been no argument about that: this was the imposition of Islam on society.

But I had seen how people could change in prison. I had seen how someone's certainty to the point of death could turn to regret and sorrow at lives lost. I'd seen how almost every facet of our ideology relied on modern European political philosophy, and that any Islamic legitimacy it had was at best debatable. I had seen how Islam could be abused to justify almost any political position, including torture. I remembered the character flaws of all the Islamists I'd come to know, both inside HT and others. It was fanciful, I felt, that just because someone was a committed Islamist, they would run things the right way. This came back to the decoupling of Islamism and justice in my mind. There needed to be some accountability, not only built into the system but also into the very formation of our ideology itself. Our ideology, ultimately, was a man-made construct.

Nasim, who was now running the
wilayah
committee, actually began to praise me. He applauded me for my new ideas, and for my ability to think outside the box. He told the others that this was how we were going to move the organization forward. But as the year went on, and the discussions continued, I became increasingly disillusioned at the slow response I was getting. My questions bore deep, to the very legitimacy of imposing
shari'ah
as law. After learning and studying how this had never been done before, I began to see such a goal as un-Islamic. How could I remain inside an organization that I now believed was striving for a goal that ran against the very spirit of Islam?