Radical (30 page)

But it wasn't just the media who were interested in my story; the government was, too. On the day the
Newsnight
piece was due to air, Ed and I were invited into the Communities and Local Government department to brief them about Islamism. As we entered the room, we realized just how senior the meeting was: as well as Hazel Blears, then Communities secretary, also present were Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, and Charles Farr, the director general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism.

The last time an official had asked me about my political views, I was fingerprinted and had my DNA taken in the interrogation rooms at Heathrow Airport. Here we now were, offering our opinions to three of the UK's seniormost cabinet members. Later that week, I received a rather bemused call from Abi. “You'll never guess who came to see me after your story was aired on
Newsnight,
” she said between laughs. “It was the Essex Police. They came to offer an apology for having arrested you at gunpoint all those years ago when you were fifteen. They saw it on TV and felt bad.” I burst into laughter. This was my “green backpack” moment with the police. My message was reaching people, but this time it was a democratic one, and I was encouraged.

Quilliam was to be the world's first counter-extremism hub for activism. We would create a platform from which we could directly challenge the dominant discourse of Islamism. We would speak, debate, lobby, brief, mobilize, galvanize, write, publish, and organize in order to spread a counternarrative to Islamism, hoping to inspire the mushrooming of our cause anywhere and everywhere.

The problem was money. Starting up something like this wasn't a cheap thing to do: there was the expense of running an office and hiring staff, the cost of traveling to conferences and countries to spread our message. We would travel around the country meeting with religious figures, former Islamists, and government officials, trying to create a base for our organization. We wanted to get enough people on board to create a critical mass.

But we still had no idea where the money would come from. We were both still students. Ed was still completing his PhD at SOAS; I—having completed my law degree at SOAS—had now enrolled for an MSc in political theory at the London School of Economics. And so, to begin with, Ed and I simply used our credit cards and student overdrafts to pay for everything, a sure way of accumulating thousands of pounds of debt. But this was our baby, and we desperately wanted it to work.

Eventually, Ed's book led the way. Someone who had read
The Islamist
and had been impressed by our ideas gave us an introduction to a Kuwaiti organization called the Babtain Foundation. We met their representatives in London and explained our vision for Quilliam. To our delight, they agreed to give us the seed money to get the organization up and running. We were able to set up an office and to hire a couple of other former Islamists, Dawud and Rashad, who joined us to form Quilliam's first office team.

In January 2008, right behind Russell Square at the British Museum, to a great deal of media fanfare and public anticipation, Ed Husain and I launched Quilliam, the world's first counter-extremism organization. I'm still amazed at the speed with which we managed to pull it all off—to go from a discussion in the back of my car, to a full-fledged and funded organization in less than a year. I was most moved by the speech given by 7/7 survivor Rachel North, who stirred the audience to tears recounting her ordeal of being caught up in London's bombings and the work she has done since to reconcile both herself and communities.

Not everyone from within Muslim communities, however, wanted to congratulate us for our work. Though he had long since left HT, and disagreed with them on many counts, my brother Osman, my childhood friend and protector, completely disagreed with my decision to make our fight against Islamism public. As did my cousin Yasser, who also had left HT by now; he took Osman's view that challenging the ideology itself was one step too far. Our relationships inevitably suffered.

Very few of my childhood friends who had previously held me in such high regard for my commitment to Islamism agreed with my work. The most vindictive attacks came from Nas, the Greek, who began what seemed a personal campaign against me online, in the mosque that my
Nana Abu
founded, and in the local community. The only one who stood by me from the old converts to our cause was our British-Kenyan friend Moe, who back in the day had been attacked by skinheads with a hammer. A particularly touching moment was when my non-Muslim school friends, led by Sav and including the likes of Marc, Jamie, Katrina, and others, organized a welcome home gathering for me in Southend. Despite all that I had done during my Islamist years, and the distance I'd tried to place between us, they still cared. Indeed, Sav had continued to write to me in prison, offering me his moral support. Such deep loyalty spurred me on further; faced with a friendship like that, I knew was doing the right thing.

Among Muslim communities across the UK, my name was dragged through the dirt. Ed and I were both targeted in a highly personal and organized smear campaign. Where Islamist rappers had once sampled my voice on their songs, their supporters were now declaring me an apostate. Such declarations are a necessary prelude for any attempt on a Muslim's life to be “legal.” Islamist teams of agitators toured the UK with information packs about why my colleagues and I were heretics.

As all of this unfolded, I was still officially married to—albeit separated from—Rabia. Any chance we had of reconciling matters was destroyed with the founding of Quilliam. I had left her home as an emotionally vulnerable ex-prisoner going through a second identity crisis. I wanted to rediscover who I was and needed the clarity of thought that seclusion could bring. Once I started the painful journey of my mental and emotional realignment, I felt that I was ready to begin working with Rabia to fix our marriage.

Rabia had married an ardent, fiery, passionate Islamist, but she was now getting a liberal Muslim, intent on standing up to challenge everything he had once held sacrosanct. Despite our best efforts, and much heartache both ways, there was no putting the relationship back together again.

Rabia's reaction to my work was not atypical. We hadn't just made enemies of HT but of most Islamist organizations from all branches of Islamism. Ed and I were accused of apostasy, of heresy, and far worse. Nowadays, a few years after founding Quilliam, such a reaction is harder to imagine. With the rise and spread of counter-extremism initiatives globally, with the debate being so much better informed, and with increased visibility for the liberal Arab youth behind many of the Arab uprisings, challenging Islamism is becoming increasingly common. But back then death threats and bomb warnings at our office were a frequent occurrence, even directly from al-Qaeda sources. We had to install blast shields in the office, and went to great lengths not to advertise our location. Even now, we keep the office address off our literature and website; even now I continue to be cautious about my movements.

A month or so after the launch of Quilliam, Ed and I were in Denmark. Many years earlier, I had been a regular visitor to Copenhagen, actively recruiting to build an HT chapter there. Now I was back, giving a speech in the town hall about the very organization I had helped to set up. The raw recruits I had persuaded to join had been different from the typical HT supporters in the UK: many of them hailed from the criminal fringe—drug dealers and gang members. After my speech Ed and I went to Friday prayers at a nearby mosque. As prayers concluded, Fathi, our host, approached me inside the mosque looking very worried.

“Brother Maajid, there is a very dangerous man outside the mosque asking for you, please do not leave.” Naturally, being me, I went out to talk to him.

“Are you Maajid Nawaz?” he asked.

“Who are you?”

“Yes, you are Maajid Nawaz,” he said, nodding, and cycled off.

The man was a well-known local drug dealer. As soon as he'd seen me, he put a call through. The next thing we knew, there were three cars full of young Islamist sympathizers, parked at the end of the road, waiting to attack us.

“Fathi, let me talk to them,” I argued.

“No, brother Maajid, I'm afraid you don't understand. These men, I know them, they have guns. You must leave immediately.”

Ed and I had to take shelter in the back room of an Islamic bookshop, and there we hid until a car came to collect us and evacuate us. This was Copenhagen in 2008, not Kabul in 2000.

Things got worse. While we were hiding from the Danish thugs, Ed's phone rang. It was our contact from the Babtain Foundation, telling us that they had decided to withdraw our funding. I felt they were unhappy with some of the public statements we had made. At a stroke all our financial support had vanished—we had a huge bill to pay the British Museum for hosting our launch, and now we had no way of paying for it. Assuming we got out of Denmark alive, Quilliam was in danger of being closed down before it had even started.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Monkeys in a Zoo

Ed and I coined a phrase in that hideout in Copenhagen: “We don't do fail.” That became our mantra, our unofficial slogan. We weren't going to be intimidated from speaking by violent threats, nor financial ones. Ours would not be the sort of organization that tailored its message to suit its sponsors. If that was the sort of influence people thought their money would buy, then we were better off without their support.

We hit the same problem again with the next person to fund us, an Egyptian businessman who wanted to use Quilliam to promote a socially conservative version of Islam. We were a nonreligiously aligned organization with its focus on political rights; our backer wanted to become the public face of a conservative form of Sufi Islam. There were elements of our message he wanted adjusting, for example over civil rights for minorities and homosexuals. We accepted a goodwill donation from him, which cleared our debts, but we did not take the relationship forward. Again, the funding ceased.

The other source of potential funding was through the government. This, in its own way, brought as many potential problems as private donors: it can make people suspicious of your message and lead to accusations that you are little more than government agents. However, we had maintained good relations with the British government after our initial meeting; we had briefed them where requested, and they had continued to support us. If the various Islamist groups in the UK, the Salafists all over the world, and the “Afghan Jihad” could receive funding from the British, Saudi, and Pakistani governments respectively, why couldn't our cause benefit from this sort of boost?

It did not seem unreasonable to try to formalize the relationship a little and see if any funding was available. We went back to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism and spoke to their head, Charles Farr. Farr kindly agreed to support us via the government's Preventing Extremism program. We met various ministers and were granted government funding, until such a time as we could find alternative sources of financial support. Farr deserves credit for helping to get Quilliam onto its feet during these early days.

From these touch-and-go beginnings, Quilliam started to gain real momentum. We were able to start speaking publicly, debating, commissioning reports, lobbying politicians, traveling to conferences, working the media, offering policy advice and consultancy. But very early on, we saw that it was not just Islamism we would need to tackle. Away from Muslim circles, the two dominant trends we would most often come up against were polar opposites, either that of the patronizing “Orientalism” or an anti-Muslim form of conservatism.

Both sets of people attempted to use Ed or myself to grind their own ideological axes. In their own way, neither group was happy with half of our message. When we were critical of Islamism, the “Orientalists” got upset. When we raised the grievances in society that acted to fuel the Islamist narrative, the conservatives objected. Both sides wanted to keep us as their pet monkeys in a zoo: to come to us for entertainment and benefit when it suited them, and ignore us when our ideas went against their established ideological bent.

On many occasions after my talks, people—usually white liberals—would stand up and declare that I had no idea what it was like to suffer as a victim of society. They would assert that there was no way someone like me, an educated, articulate English-speaker in a suit and tie, could ever understand people who felt so desperate that suicide bombing was their “only” option. I was told that terrorists' reactions cannot be separated from their social causes and the blame lies squarely on society. I had invariably just spent half an hour telling my entire story, of violent racism and police harassment in Essex, and of torture and solitary confinement in Egypt, but because my conclusions didn't align with the angry “monkey” they were expecting to see, it was as if they hadn't heard any of it.

“I am a pure product of these grievances you keep harping on about,” I would declare, “now deal with my conclusions.”

Our aim would be to criticize Islamophobia and Islamist extremism as openly as possible. We would defend the right of Muslims to practice their faith, even those who were conservative, while vehemently challenging the idea that any one version of Islam—even a “moderate” one—should ever be imposed in any society as law. This position placed me on interesting sides of various motions. I argued on a panel that “Political Islam”—the desire to impose a version of Islam as law—was a threat, while I defended the religion of Islam itself as essentially one of peace, against Islamic-critic and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Word soon spread, and from my appearances on
Larry King Live
to being interviewed on al-Jazeera, Quilliam was fast becoming the recognized authority on challenging both anti-Islam and Islamist extremism globally. Our work now started to attract a critical mass of support across society. Among the media,
60 Minutes
profiled our work and my story.
(Link)
In the arts, people like Jane Rosenthal, founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, helped to introduce our work at the Festival and to her friend Robert De Niro (or Bob, as she calls him). On the technology side, when learning how best to use social media in order to galvanize support, my work on Facebook benefited from the early advice of people like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz. My use of Twitter to spread our message was a task personally assigned to me by its founder, Jack Dorsey.

The corridors of political power were also beginning to show immense interest. Soon after setting up Quilliam, I received an invitation to address the US Senate about our work. The invitation came from Senator Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security. I would become the first former Islamist ever to testify in the US Senate.

Being a senior former Islamist, however, is not without its problems. The State Department had sorted out all my travel arrangements, but a week before I was due to go, my visa had still not come through. At this point, I received a worried phone call from the Department of Homeland Security. There are problems with your visa, I was told. We're not sure we'll be able to get you one because of your conviction in Egypt. My conviction in Egypt, I replied, is exactly why the Senate has invited me to come over and talk! Back and forth we went, between Homeland Security and the State Department, with nobody sure exactly where the visa was stuck. Eventually, word got back to Senator Lieberman, who rang up the US Embassy in London, shouting as he instructed them not to embarrass him.

The night before I was due to fly, my visa still hadn't come through, and by now I was resigned to the fact that it wouldn't happen. Suddenly, I received a call.

“Mr. Nawaz? I'm calling from the US Embassy. I have your visa here.”

“Great. I've got to be at Heathrow early in the morning: should I get a cab and pick it up on the way?” I replied with relief.

“Actually,” the man said, “I'm not at the US Embassy.”

I was confused. “But I thought you said you were.”

“I'm with the US Embassy, but I'm based somewhere else.”

“OK, where are you based? I'll come to you,” I asked in bewilderment.

“Here's what we're going to do,” he said. “I'll meet you myself at Heathrow tomorrow morning. I'll be waiting for you at the information desk of your terminal.”

“How will I know what you look like?”

“I'll be wearing a blue raincoat.” And with that, he hung up.

The following morning, I went to the information desk as arranged. There, sure enough, was a man in a blue raincoat.

“Good morning, Mr. Nawaz,” he said, and handed me three brown envelopes.

“Is this my visa?” I asked.

“Sort of,” Blue Raincoat replied. “We couldn't get you a normal visa, I'm afraid, but we are very keen for you to come and speak. Do you know about the Mafia?”

“What about them?”

“Sometimes we have court cases where we need to bring people over to testify. But these people are convicted criminals and technically aren't allowed into the country. So what we do is to arrange for a parole visa. This allows them into the US under the aegis of federal agents. From a legal point of view, they're under arrest for the duration of their stay.”

“Right,” I said, taking the envelopes. “So I'm on a parole visa, like a Mafia boss? I'm under arrest?”

“Technically,” Blue Raincoat was keen to assure me. “Please don't be offended by that. We're not implying anything, it's just the only way that we could get you into the country to speak at the Senate.”

“Are there any conditions to being technically under arrest?” I asked.

“Yes,” Blue Raincoat admitted. “You will have a twenty-four-hour federal detail following you for the duration of your stay. But please, consider them your chauffeur service, rather than your arresting officers!”

It was one of those moments where my former and current lives slammed against each other. Phrases like “agents” and “detail” and “technically under arrest” were enough to give me a flashback or two from my time in Egypt. Heathrow was also where I'd been interrogated by Mr. Blue Raincoat's British equivalents. But I took the envelopes and handed them over as directed. I was escorted off at the other end, fingerprinted and interviewed, before being handed over to my federal detail.

The federal agents, from Immigration Customs Enforcement, took the hotel room next to mine. I had to inform them of my movements at all times. They were armed, and we were tailed by two more cars wherever we went. The agents were quite suspicious of me. It was only after I'd spoken at the Senate that their attitude changed.

The speech itself was a defining moment, as it allowed us the opportunity to define Islamism, explain its causes, and present the doctrine of civic challenge to the world. It all went out live on C-SPAN and hit the news globally. “I'm sorry, sir,” the lead agent, Bryan, said as he offered me his hand. “Up until now, I had been under the impression that our job was to protect America from you. Now I realize that we are here to protect you
from
America!” That visit was the first time I'd been to the United States, and I was determined to make the most of it, federal detail or otherwise. Sayyid Qutb, Jihadism's ideological godfather, had visited the United States back in the 1940s. Qutb's trip inspired him to write a book about his experiences,
The America that I Saw,
in which he was heavily critical of the “licentiousness” of America. I wanted to challenge this, and created a rival version. I posted my “The America that I Saw” as a video blog on YouTube, and argued for the positives I'd seen. Without those same freedoms Qutb had been critical of, I argued, Muslims would not have been allowed to ever build mosques in this country. Having spent some years in the same prison that held Qutb before his execution, I felt somehow connected to his radicalism. The radical message for the Middle East of his time was Islamism.

How odd it was that now the truly radical idea for the Middle East, which was straddling dictatorships and extremism, had become grassroots democratic activism.