Radical (8 page)

The violence I'd been subjected to, the police discrimination, a greater awareness of foreign conflicts such as Bosnia, all made me highly receptive to the Islamist message. I was desperately looking for answers. But it was that afternoon in the park, and the fear in Mickey's eyes, that triggered my decision to take things further.

With a defeated and retreating enemy, I finally understood what my brother had been talking about. I realized Islamism could give me the respect that I'd craved since primary school. Hip-hop had helped us a great deal; it created new friends, but it hadn't been enough to defeat our enemies. It hadn't been enough to provide me with the courage to help Matt. Yet on that day, grossly outnumbered, I stood my ground with Osman, and we won because we invoked Allah. In one conversation, Islamism did what hip-hop couldn't do. It was alive, beating in the hearts of men, and it was prepared to sacrifice everything to regain lost dignity. It wasn't interested in singing “Fuck tha Police.” Islamism was shouting from the tops of mountains “Fuck all y'all!”

And I wanted a dose of that courage.

CHAPTER SIX

When Babri Mosque Fell in India

It's important to grasp how Islamism differs from Islam. Islam is a religion, and its
Shari'ah
can be compared to Talmudic or Canon law. As a religion, Islam contains all the usual schisms of any other faith. There are ancient creedal disputes, from which we have the two major denominations of Sunni and Shia, each giving rise to numerous sects within their ranks. From methodological disputes, legal theorists and traditionalists debated whether scripture was best approached through systemized reasoning or oral tradition. From juristic differences, major schools of law emerged. And from a devotional angle, lapsed, traditional, fundamentalist, and extremist Muslims have always existed. Superseding all these religious disagreements, and influencing many of them politically, is the ideology of Islamism. Simply defined, Islamism is
the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam over society as law.
Understood in this way, Islamism is not another religious schism, but an ideological thought that seeks to develop a coherent political system that can house all these schisms, without necessarily doing away with them. Whereas disputes within Islam deal with a person's approach to religion, Islamism seeks to deal with a person's approach to
society.

As a political project, Islamism was inspired by the rise of European fascism. Like its European ideological counterparts, Islamism was not safe from its own schisms. Some groups wanted to bring about the “Islamic System” by working alongside the status quo; these were political Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Others were more revolutionary, wishing to upturn the status quo.

To the untrained eye, such Islamist groups seem “moderate” because they rise above sectarian disputes and tend not to be fundamentalist in devotional matters, focusing more on politics. But though religious fundamentalism may take on social issues, it is Islamism that seeks real power. As with Mussolini's fascists, who were also socially progressive, it is the totalitarian aspect of Islamism that gives rise to major concern. Much later on, Islamism would influence religious fundamentalists, too. This gave rise to a militant strand, Jihadism, and the emergence of groups like al-Qaeda. Jihadism then is the merger of literalist religion with Islamist politics.

My own journey into Islamism resulted in me joining a revolutionary group, known as Hizb al-Tahrir (HT). Sitting between political Islamists and the militants, HT aims to unify all Muslim-majority countries under an “Islamic state,” appropriating for it the term Caliphate, or
Khilafah
in Arabic. They hope to attain power by means of a military coup and seek to impose one version of Islam over society. My journey started in 1992 with Osman walking down the high street in Southend and being handed a leaflet. Because Southend was so white, it was normal for us to stop and talk to any brown face we saw. The pamphleteer was a man called Nasim Ghani, a British Bangladeshi Muslim who, like us, had grown up in Southend and was now studying medicine at Barts in London. He was someone we could relate to easily; he was articulate and smart. It felt impressive to us that he was studying medicine because you had to be bright and committed to do that.

The leaflet that Nasim handed Osman was about the Babri Mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya. Built by the first Moghul emperor Babar, the mosque had been there since 1528 and had long been a flashpoint between Hindus and Muslims. Hindus believed that the site was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Lord Ram. Religious violence at the mosque was first reported in the 1850s, and in 1984 Hindus began a campaign to “liberate” the site, replacing the mosque with a temple for Lord Ram. When a court order ruled that the mosque be protected, Hindu supporters decided to take matters into their own hands. A crowd of 200,000 broke through the cordon around the mosque and tore it down, using a mixture of hammers and their bare hands. Eyewitnesses reported that the extra police who had been sent to protect the mosque just stood back. The episode was the trigger for some of the worst violence India had seen for decades. Over 2,000 people died in the riots that followed.

I still remember the rather offensive title of the leaflet: “Hideous Hindus Massacre Muslims.” That one leaflet changed the course of my life. It laid bare the behavior of the Hindu extremists in a shocking and inflammatory episode. Osman, spurred on by the likes of Public Enemy's Professor Griff, had taken an interest in politics. He followed the “Intifada” that had been going on against the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and the role of Yasser Arafat's PLO. This struggle for Palestinian liberation, and the crushing Israeli response (with American support), had long been a running sore in international relations. It was undoubtedly a factor that justified the Islamist narrative of victimhood—for a lot of us. The conflict, and the accompanying Western insouciance, came across as manifestly wrong. Identifying with the resistance movement reinforced what we were experiencing on the streets of Southend: it was Muslims who were on the receiving end of things, and the state didn't care. It helped me push my identity away from being British or Pakistani, and toward defining myself as exclusively
politically
Muslim.

The Intifada had been going on since 1987, so by the early 1990s it wasn't anything new. It caught Osman's attention because of the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and combined United Nations forces removed him. Saddam Hussein, albeit a brutal tyrant, was a champion of the Palestinian cause, and his provocation of Israel (the threat of launching Scud missiles at Israeli towns) kept the issue in the news.

But the Babri Mosque incident in India was something different. The destruction of an ancient Muslim place of worship felt particularly shocking. The number of people killed in the subsequent violence was horrific. It strongly reinforced the message that Nasim's leaflet and Hizb al-Tahrir were pushing. Southend, Gaza, Bosnia, Iraq, India: wherever you went in the world, the story was the same—Muslims were unprotected and under attack, and now was the time to do something about it. After all, we didn't believe in turning the other cheek.

Nasim was everything the mosque imam in Southend was not. Here was someone who was young, slick, and successful, and without a beard. He was studying and living in London, which for us on the edge of Essex felt like a glamorous lifestyle. Osman was exactly the right person, in the right place, at the right time to receive that leaflet. Osman was receptive to such a message, and when Nasim suggested he come to a talk to discuss the idea further, Osman agreed.

Nasim would turn out to be not just any pamphleteer. He was on the path to becoming the leader of HT in the UK and the founder of the organization in Bangladesh. As someone who has gone on to co-found movements myself and has met numerous political leaders of all stripes, I can tell you that Nasim is one of the most committed recruiters I have come across. He is not especially handsome, intelligent, devout, or articulate, yet he combines just the right level of all these traits to give him a dependable-leader quality. I have rarely encountered anyone with such a skill to say the right thing at the right time, in order to convince a person to follow him. He's not someone who leads through sheer force of his personality or authoritarianism. He is pragmatic, rather than dogmatic. An ordinary guy, but extraordinarily good at being one.

Osman started going with Nasim to his talks and study circles, and pretty soon became a changed person. Everything we'd been doing together—going to clubs, chasing women—was now anathema to him. And I thought he was crazy. “What's wrong with you, man?” I'd ask. I'd mock him and laugh at him, but to my surprise he'd just take it. He stopped going out with our group of friends, told women to stop calling for him at our house. Generally, he just retreated.

As much as Osman's change surprised me, it pleased my dad. For many years at home, it had felt as though my brother and I had sided more with our mother and taken advantage of her more liberal views. For the first time, one of my father's sons had taken a serious interest in Islam. At this point, my father didn't understand what Islamism really meant. What he saw was his son taking an interest in religion and behaving more like the traditional Muslim he had always wanted us to become. He approved of that and encouraged it, and that led, inevitably, to a change of mood in the household: the balance of power, as it were, had started to shift. You could see it in Abi's reaction. She didn't know how to respond to Osman's criticisms of her behavior. Later on, when I joined him, she would become even more isolated.

At that point, my impression of
practicing
Islam was still based on my early teenage experience of visiting the mosque. Osman's conversion felt not only as if it had come out of nowhere but also like a retrograde step. To go back to that, to spurn all the girls and partying, just didn't make any sense.

Osman was nothing if not persistent in trying to get me to go along with him. During that year he worked on those friends he thought would be most receptive: Moe, Nas, and myself. We all eventually converted. Although I would dismiss what he said at first, there was no denying his inner confidence when he spoke. As he continued to talk to me, I realized one of the fundamental points about Islamism that so many people fail to understand. The way Osman was speaking wasn't in the orthodox, religious way of the imam with a stick; he was talking about politics, about events that were happening
now
. That's crucial to understanding what Islamism is all about: it isn't a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences.

Osman had learned well what the study circles had taught him. Nasim was an excellent teacher, able to expound his theories into a simple, coherent narrative that Osman soaked up. As part of Hizb al-Tahrir training, he had the answers and counterarguments at his fingertips, so any questions I had he could respond to and throw straight back.

Nasim knew that Osman and I were already quite anti-establishment. He knew that he needed to channel our energies from hip-hop and race issues to something more serious, more global. And he had just the thing to achieve this: the Islamist narrative. This was a powerful toxin and it resonated with us. Nasim argued that the suffering we had experienced in Southend, the attacks by Combat 18 and the discrimination we felt from the police, were not isolated incidents but part of a bigger picture. And we were deluded if we thought that it was just a race thing. Yes, race was a factor, but even if we solved that, Western society would never be satisfied with us
. How much whiter could you get than the Muslims of Bosnia, and just look at what was going on there while the rest of Europe stood by and watched? And look at our brothers in Palestine, at Kashmir, or at the Muslims killed for defending the honor of the Babri Mosque in India. Why is it that every conflict and war today involves the killing of Muslims? Are you that blinded to believe this is a coincidence? Are you as shallow as the racists to believe it's merely about skin color?

The truth is that there is an international effort to keep Muslims down, he said. They intervene in Kuwait for oil, yet stand by and watch as Muslims get murdered in Bosnia because, truly, they cannot tolerate a Muslim power in the heart of Europe. And if they cannot tolerate white Bosnians, what makes you think they'll ever accept you? We have gone from being the world superpower, the Islamic
Khilafah
, to being the downtrodden minority who get stabbed in the streets of Essex. And we've sunk so low we don't even know how to identify the problem.

The first time Nasim mentioned the concept of “the
Khilafah,
” I hadn't even heard of it. That just served his argument.

“Why do you think you have never heard of it?” he asked. “Because it is the West that has written the history books, and decided what they want to teach in schools, even in Muslim lands after they left us their colonial ways.