Radical (29 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Decade-Late Apology

It was on the site of the 7/7 attacks in London, appropriately enough, that Quilliam came into being. Two years after the bombings, London life had moved on, and apart from the commemorative plaque in Tavistock Square, much had returned to normal. The London bus with its top ripped open had long been taken away, and its image was now a memory of history. Another number 30 continued the journey that bus should have completed, driving past a parked, clapped-out blue Renault Clio. Inside, an exhausted student was trying to sleep, curled up under a blanket on the backseat.

In the weeks after leaving HT and during my estrangement from Rabia, my car had become my home. I had my final exams to take and had to be in London rather than with Abi back in Southend. When I left HT, I also left my friends behind. My life had been so entwined with the organization that my entire social circle had gone with it. I didn't have a job or any money, and so the car became where I went at the end of the day. I'd drive around until I found a space in one of the streets near SOAS—Tavistock Square, Russell Square, usually—and that would be where I spent the night.

But it wasn't all bad. My final graduation ceremony, ten years after initially enrolling, was quite a sight to behold. SOAS had run out of seats in the main hall so some of us would receive our certificates and proceed to an overspill room to watch our own graduation ceremony via video link. I had waited ten years for this moment; my family was proudly in the main hall expecting me, and they had no idea that we would be denied seats alongside them. SOAS had just kicked the wrong guy out of his own graduation ceremony.

Quickly, I rallied and organized the by-now extremely distressed students. We were outraged, and I spread word that I would refuse to receive my certificate unless they made space for us all in the main hall. The majority of students followed my suggestion, and others wouldn't argue against my reasoning: if prison couldn't stop me from graduating, I'd be damned if this would. We announced our refusal to cooperate, declaring a sit-in. The management had no choice but to cave. A hasty compromise was suggested: we were told that we could sit on the stairs in the main hall, and we readily agreed.

It was a peculiar twist of fate that on that day Irene Khan, then secretary general of Amnesty, was to receive her honorary doctorate from SOAS. Irene was onstage to witness what happened next. As my name was called, I rushed onto the stage, and overcome with joy, I hugged the university president and raised my hands in celebration. To my surprise, the students started cheering my name, and they rose in a standing ovation. As I embraced her, the university president asked, “What did you do to get a standing ovation?”

“Oh you really don't want to know,” I replied, laughing.

Earlier that year, I had one of those moments when the universe seems to align itself perfectly. At just the time when all my HT friends were viciously turning on me—Traitor! Sell-out! Agent!—I bumped into someone from my old days.

“Maajid!
Subhan Allah!
Habib
—my dear friend, you're back from Egypt. I saw your news on TV. How are you?” Standing on the SOAS steps, exactly where I had last left him, still wearing his trademark blazer, was none other than Ed Husain, now studying for his PhD.

It had been ten years, but the bond between us remained as strong as ever. Ed was in the process of writing his acclaimed book,
The Islamist,
which would end up being published around the same week I left HT. Sensing that my thoughts had moved on considerably, he asked me to look through and comment on the Newham sections, which served as a reminder, if I needed one, of how far I had come. By this point I knew that I was going to leave HT but hadn't broken the news to the world yet. In fact, the first version of
The Islamist
concludes with the speculation: “Which direction will HT go in, the moderate direction of Maajid Nawaz, or the hard-line one of Jalaluddin Patel?”

The conversations and debates Ed and I shared in the back of my clapped-out car during those days were critical to informing our joint direction for years to come. For both of us, it wasn't enough just to leave HT behind.

“We need to reform the way we Muslims see politics, and revive knowledge of our traditional jurisprudence through the Sufi path,” Ed suggested.

“No,
habib
, trust me, everything, absolutely everything needs to be reformed, and that includes traditional . . . what I call medieval, jurisprudence. It simply doesn't address our contemporary problems.”

“But, that's . . . that's nothing short of a complete overhaul of the
deen,
” Ed exclaimed.

“Exactly. I'm talking about enshrining absolute freedoms, human rights, a respect for individual liberty, women's rights, and reconciling modern scientific facts with Islamic interpretation. And I don't just mean in the lofty circles of academia or theology, that's all been done before, but actually out there, in the real world, just as we did for Islamism back in the day.”

“Yes, we can start doing
da'wah
for these values, just as we did back at Newham for HT.” The glitter in Ed's eye began to betray his excitement.

“Indeed!
Da'wah
for a religion-neutral space in the public sphere,
dhormo niropekhota
, I think it's called in Bangla. You know, it's so bad that in Pakistan's Urdu there is no appropriate word for secularism? They use
laa-deeniyat,
which implies no-religion. With such a translation, obviously Islamism will have a head start.”

“You do realize there is a mammoth task ahead, Maajid, we will be roundly attacked,” Ed said rather too eagerly. “But I have just the idea for how to begin. Let's start it all with a think tank, to lay the seeds for this idea globally, and let's call it after the Englishman who opened England's first mosque, to make the point that Islam doesn't always have to clash with society. His name was William Quilliam!”

And so it was, in that old Renault Clio, parked somewhere on Russell Square in London, the idea for Quilliam was born.

What Islamism had done in Europe was to set Muslim communities back an entire generation. It created a separatist agenda that became self-fulfilling. In an effort to protest discrimination, all it achieved was further segregation. Further social immobility created more discrimination, not less. When Omar Bakri Mohammed had left HT, he had founded al-Muhajiroun, which had protested against the bodies of soldiers returning from Afghanistan. In response to this, the English Defense League had been formed. Islamism was in danger of making the situation worse, repeating the cycle of racism: Islamist extremism, more racism, and more Islamist extremism. It is no wonder then that Omar Bakri's own daughter grew so disillusioned with her father's rhetoric that in one monumental act of defiance she left home and became a stripper, proudly declaring her profession to the tabloid press with glee.

What exacerbated the situation was a lack of understanding about what Islamism was. Governments were allowing the Islamist narrative to drive the debate, accepting it as the majority Muslim voice. This simply wasn't true: Islamism was a modern political phenomenon with opinions that could be every bit as offensive as those held by far-right organizations—its anti-Semitism and homophobia, for example. But government and society instinctively resisted challenging this for fear of coming across as racist.

Official policy lumped all Muslims together as “one community,” the so-called Muslim vote, which required a “native-chief” to speak on its behalf. Instead of being represented by their Member of Parliament, like everyone else, Muslims were encouraged to seek separate representation via an exclusively Muslim political umbrella. In a “poor natives” sort of way there was the arrogant assumption that Islamism was a true expression of our authenticity, even if the so-called moderates tried to distance themselves from it. In a form of reverse racism, liberal values were expected of the civilized white person, but the brown Muslim could not be held to those same standards and should be judged by his or her own “authentic” culture. This was a colonial “poverty of expectation,” which inevitably leads to segregation, low aspirations, patronizing expectations, and cultural glass ceilings, practically stalling Muslim social mobility and progress across Europe.

Ed and I wanted to expose all this. We wanted less separation of communities and more involvement of Muslims in every aspect of society: to focus less on the differences and more on the similarities of cultures. Mainstream society, not just Muslims, bore a great deal of the responsibility to make this happen. The state could help here, but it could never drive the process: imposing ideas like democracy and human rights would only lead to resistance. Instead, the change had to come from within communities themselves—the flowering of more liberal ideas through civic debate and discussion. To be successful, our initiative had to be the exact opposite of neo-conservatism: a “ground up,” not a “top down” process.

The shaping of these ideas into what would become Quilliam wasn't an overnight event. Ed and I had many discussions, and disagreed at times too, while fretting over where and how to begin. We weren't the first people ever to want to change the world. Coming up with ideas, in a way, was the easy part. The difficult bit was how to take them forward: how to turn our excited talk into action. What would the process actually involve? Where would the money to fund it come from? Where would we even start?

Right from the start we were encouraged by the reaction to our ideas. Ours was the most visible and credible insight mainstream society had ever gleaned from inside Islamist organizations and the prisons that held them. Ed's book,
The Islamist,
was published to a lot of media attention and discussion. In the wake of that, when I finally announced my resignation from HT, we went to meet Peter Barron, then editor of the BBC's flagship news program
Newsnight,
who agreed to do an extended piece about my departure from HT. In late 2007, my story headlined the program; they were so keen for me to speak that they allowed me to tell my story directly to camera, rather than via an interview with a journalist.