Radical (33 page)

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OSTSCRIPT

On July 23, 2011, the day after the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik had committed his appalling massacre, I was waiting for my train home after work. On the platform, a man was racially abusing a helpless old grandmother in a hijab, walking with her young grandchildren. “Go back to your own country! This is England, we don't want you Muslims here!” he shouted at the terrified family. England had been tense. The anti-Muslim English Defense League had been on the rise, and Breivik had just taken their reasoning a step further. Now there was this man terrifying Muslim children in front of me on the train platform. Perhaps it was the freshness of what Breivik had done, perhaps it was the visage of cowering children in headscarves and the memories of Bosnia, perhaps it was everything—my entire life—that flashed before me then. Whatever it was, I found myself instantly transported back to the Essex of my teenage years. Memories of “Paki-bashings” came flooding back, and I saw nothing but Mickey standing before me. I hurtled toward this man in a rage, my voice bellowing out expletives and my eyes a tale of fury. In an instant the racist bully was transformed into a spectacle of fear. I didn't even need to lift a hand—he teetered away meekly in the hope that all could be forgotten. The family thanked me graciously, but as I started walking home, my hands began to tremble.

After all that's happened, this is not over. The cycle of hatred is coming back around. Time hadn't healed me. Somewhere deep inside me lurked a menace, and it took a trivial racist incident to bring it all back out. That scared me, and it took me awhile sitting alone at home to resume my composure. “Much remains to be done,” I thought. But the question of what was playing on my mind.

As I pondered my next move, my thoughts turned to my son Ammar. I try to teach him what basic football skills I can offer whenever I manage to get access from his mother to see him. I smile every time he cheers on Liverpool FC, just as his father had done over two decades earlier.
You can be whatever you want to be, Ammar. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
Returning again to the world he would be raised in, I thought of the work that lay ahead.

“But how much more can I do before I'm too old to be running around like this?” I asked.

“Maajid, you're only thirty-four. You have a whole life ahead of you to consider such things,” Fatima laughingly reassured me. “Right now the movement you're building needs your support. It won't grow just like that.”

“Yes, perhaps you're right,” I said. “Maybe my next move can wait till I hit forty-two.”

Here I am, back in Mecca. I am still travelling, trying to broaden my mind, for I've seen too much of the damage narrow-mindedness can make of things, and when I return home . . . I will devote what energies I have to repairing the damage.

—MALCOLM X (1925–65)

LETTER TO JAMES FARMER

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PILOGUE

2013: IDEAS ARE BULLETPROOF

Following the release of the UK version of
Radical,
I wrote this letter to a former leadership member of
Hizb al-Tahrir
who had left the group after extensive discussions with me:

Dear _________

I wanted to tell you something: you often ask how I have time to do so much and make sure all the loose ends are met. Please know, I don't have time. I am forced to prioritize. And I have prioritized you above other things in my life, as I did that day when you came to see me in London, and when I was meant to see my son.

I'm telling you this because I want you to know the reason I prioritize you. It's simple. I believe. I believe in what we must do together to make Europe, and the world, a better place. I believe in redemption. I believe that change is the only possible hope for Muslims in Europe to advance, and progress, and the only way for Muslims in Muslim-majority countries to become unstuck and to advance along with the world's nations, is to debunk this Islamist deadweight that has dragged us Muslims down to the status of the world's problem, rather than examples for mankind.

I wanted to thank you, for having the sincerity to pursue my arguments to the end, and for having the courage to take a bold and brave step and allow yourself space to discover new thoughts. Your country, and hopefully your region, will be a far better place with you in it.

Wassalam,

Maajid Nawaz

There is something more compelling than state power, more intimidating than all the bullets, all the torture, and all the chains that a brutal dictatorship can muster. It is fiercer than the iron fist of a despot and stronger than the stench of death. Since time immemorial, kings, rulers, and generals have feared the power of an idea.

An idea can outlive a demigod, outpace armies, and outlast censorship. And something that's even leaner, swifter, and more potent than an idea is a narrative. If an idea is a belief, its narrative is the propaganda used to spread that belief. The narrative, the story used to “sell” an idea, is the engine that gives an idea its power and influence. If an idea is nebulous, its narrative acts like a vortex, driving the idea forward. To control a narrative is to frame events and, ultimately, to shape history.

The Islamist narrative—that “the West” is engaged in a war against Islam—is a quintessential one. It has taken root and gained power. It has done what narratives are supposed to do—give ideas a way to spread. Those who fail to shape narratives face a lose/lose scenario: intervention in foreign countries is spun as “far too little, too late” in the case of Bosnia, yet spun as “illegal invasion” in the case of Syria.

True mastery over the destiny of nations comes by creating a vehicle that can carry the idea and narrative across time and space: enter the social movement. Social movements bring an idea to life, imbuing entire generations with a sense of emotional attachment to a cause or belief.

Ideas are like water: they take a while to reach boiling point, but as soon as they do, they erupt. We are still at the heating stage of our ideas; we require patience for our work to embed itself into society. Ever so slowly, we will start to see the boil.

Soon after the UK version of
Radical
was released, I was contacted by a stranger. His name was Nick Jode, a self-confessed former racist and supporter of the right-wing British street movement, the English Defence League (EDL). He reached out to me after having read my book and said that it had changed his life. His letter said, in part:

I started to read lots on the internet about race issues and about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7. . . . I looked at the problems the world was facing and saw that they too were caused by Muslims. It's no wonder then that I started seeing Islam as a destructive force, believing that Muslims were the cause of not only my own but also all the world's problems. I began shouting for and fighting for anyone who spoke out against Islam, eventually becoming a supporter of the English Defence League (EDL). . . .

[O]ne night, while I was browsing the web, looking for websites and information against Islam, I happened to come across a link on Twitter to Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam debating with Anjem Choudary of Islam4UK on
Newsnight.
(Link)
As I watched the video, in which Anjem was advocating Islamic law in Britain and Maajid was opposing it, with interest, I found myself mesmerized by how Maajid beat Anjem in the debate.

At the same time, I began to investigate the future of EDL. Many of the people I met in the EDL were extreme and weren't interested in seeing another side to their issues, and I started to realize that I had been as closed-minded as the extremist Muslims I was against. Many of my so-called friends who were still EDL supporters stopped contact with me. . . .

When I came across Maajid's book
Radical,
I decided I really needed to read it. I wanted to learn more about Maajid and Quilliam, and I wanted to learn more about how Islam and Islamism are distinct. Over the past month I have seen so many of Maajid's speeches and have enormous respect for what he has achieved. I can finally say that I too have changed—I think we are all the same and can live alongside each other in peace.

Feeling proud that I could have a hand in pushing back not only Islamist extremism, but the racism that I spent my teenage years fighting, I tweeted about Nick Jode's turnaround. Soon after, and to my delight, another former EDL supporter replied saying that he knew of at least five others who had stopped supporting the EDL after being influenced by our work at Quilliam. We were carving out that middle ground, a united nations of democrats opposed to extremism in all its forms. It seemed like our efforts were beginning to find a place, even among British street politics. The vortex pushing our ideas forward was clearly working.

But, of course, ideas can be bad as well as good, and there is no guarantee that a popular idea will be a good one. In fact, sometimes those two things are diametrically opposed. In the twentieth century, communists realized the potency that is latent in ideas and began planting the seeds for their doctrine across the world through a series of social movements committed to spreading communism. In the Middle East, the communist idea was halted only by another: Islamism.

Islamists also realized that setting up social movements over generations to spread their idea (and by extension, their narrative) helps to create an unstoppable momentum. And so it was that they comfortably stepped into the vacuum created by young democratic Arabs who so passionately revolted against their dictators, but had failed to organize their own idea over decades. What despots have learned to fear, democrats are yet to master.

In perceiving the potency of ideas, Islamists vehemently oppose the rise of any intellectual alternative. They realize that if another idea were to take root in Muslim-majority nations, it would spell the beginning of the end for their own ideological stranglehold. This is why in October 2012 the world spun in shock as it woke to the news that the Taliban had shot fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Malala Yusufzai in the head at point-blank range simply for advocating that young girls should have the right to go to school. I went to Pakistan that month, working as usual to spread our own ideas and to build our own social movement, Khudi. We felt the need to respond with urgency.

The Khudi team had been preparing the ground for a weekly TV show that eventually aired as the
Khudi Debates
on Pakistan's Express TV every Saturday evening. We decided to film an episode of our show in Mingora, Swat, where the Taliban had shot that brave little schoolgirl as a gesture of solidarity with Malala and a protest to the Taliban. Our message to Pakistan was clear: the Taliban does not own Swat, nor does it own Pakistan. That same week
Newsweek
featured my profile in the global edition of its magazine,
(Link)
and
Newsweek Pakistan
placed this story on its cover. I had been worried that such prominent coverage might attract unwelcome attention to Khudi in Swat during a period as tense as this, but any cautionary hesitation I faced was dwarfed by the shame I felt that a schoolgirl had stood where a nation should have. We pressed ahead, and the episode in Mingora, debating who bears responsibility for extremism in Pakistan, became the first episode aired from our weekly series.
(Link)

Since her shooting and her miraculous survival, Malala has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and has fast become an international symbol of courage. In my 2011 TEDGlobal talk
(Link)
, I had argued that any counternarrative to Islamism in Muslim-majority societies needed to generate its own ideas, narratives, leaders, and symbols. Perhaps finally, in the tragedy and shock of Malala's shooting, democratic activists could find inspiration in a symbol of resistance. Perhaps, at long last, Pakistan could seize the moment and turn the tide of public opinion irreversibly against extremism. Alas, the window of opportunity was there, but it was brief. Again, lacking the machinery of social movements to make their case, democratic activists started off on a huge offensive, only to see their efforts eclipsed by the ubiquitous Islamist messaging machinery. Once again, the Islamist narrative had won.

Pictures of Malala sitting with the late US diplomat Richard Holbrooke fast began to circulate, first on the Internet and then in Urdu newspapers and on TV. Slowly, and with dread, we watched as the Urdu media of Pakistan started to entertain the despicable notion that, by sitting with Holbrooke, Malala may have been complicit in a US conspiracy to brainwash youngsters. Counteroffensives were launched, drawing attention away from Malala and instead to the innocent victims of foreign wars and US drone strikes. Without a preexisting and decades-old social movement in place, the basic fact that the Taliban had killed more Pakistanis than the US, Israel, or India simply would not be heard. Those who control the narrative control the nation.

On that same trip we took our counter-extremism movement to the streets, organizing a protest directly against the Taliban at Liberty roundabout in the city of Lahore.
(Link)
A few other civil society organizations had also held such protests, but none of us attracted anywhere near the throngs that come out whenever Islamists rallied the masses. More was needed—we had to continue to push the boundaries if our call had any chance of taking root. Our message was clear: the Taliban are child-killers; they can attack us, shoot us, blow us up, but they cannot silence us: our ideas will live on, they will continue to inspire people to stare down Taliban gunmen in defiance. You can't kill an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.
(Link)