The online publication of the Innocence of Muslims video was the catalyst for violent and at times deadly protests in some countries. In the UK the series of events has pushed debates on freedom of expression and cultural sensitivity into the mainstream. For October’s First Wednesday an expert panel took to the Frontline Club stage to grapple with the big issues raised by the video and the violence.
Chaired by the delightfully dynamic Paddy O’Connell, the debate opened with each panelist outlining their stance. Whilst their views were varied, the speakers agreed that the British media had placed too great an emphasis on reporting extreme views rather than the reaction of moderates. The role of moderate thinkers and academics would come up later in the discussion.
In an examination of the root causes of the violent protests, long term American foreign policy was mooted as a cause by writer and academic Myriam Francois-Cerrah:
"It’s people in the third world who’ve been bombed, who’ve lived under dictatorships who for years have regarded the West and in particular the US as having played an important part in holding them down and they view the film…you’ve got to remember that for people in the Middle East it wasn’t clear that the American government had nothing to do with it. I know that’s absurd but preachers were coming in telling people that Hollywood had made this movie and that the government approved it."
This view was hotly contested by a number of the panel including The Times columnist David Aaronovitch:
"There is a perception that’s created by people who are on the right of political Islam which creates a sense of total victimhood and plays upon grievance at moments like this in order to get a reaction."
Maajid Nawaz who’s previously spent 13 years inside an Islamist organisation suggested that the causes lie somewhere between the two:
"We used to look at occurring geopolitical events and discuss how we could use those events to further our narrative that there’s a global war going on against Islam and Muslims… There’s a vested interest in two extremes. The anti-Islam extremists and Islamist extremists. Foreign policy is only half the truth."
Award winning author Tom Holland stressed the importance of belief that led to the protests:
"The reason we’ve had this response is that Mohammed is regarded by Muslims as the model of human behaviour. The ferocity of the response maybe reflects an over emphasis on certain elements in global Islam on the life of the Prophet and not on the divine."
The debate shifted to questions on censorship as a result of the deadly protests. Index on Censorship chief executive Kirsty Hughes expressed concern that self-censorship has already crept in when discussing religions like Islam:
"People in this country feel inhibited about whether they can analyse and challenge through our politics and our documentaries. Especially Islam. So there’s self-censorship going on."
Whilst the biggest cheer of the night was reserved for Aaronovitch‘s call for everyone to learn to get offended less readily, the panel agreed that in the globalised digital age these types of protests are likely to repeat.
Watch the event here:
]]>"We were attacked by hammers, by screwdrivers, by knives, by clubs with nails," Maajid Nawaz said of the attacks he faced as the teenage son of Pakistani immigrants in Essex, South London, in the early 1990s.
"These were men in their 20s, with shaved heads…it was a sport for them. They called it ‘Paki-bashing’."
Nawaz discussed his memoir Radical at the Frontline Club, tracing his path from an angry, hip-hop obsessed teen, to a high-level organizer for the global revolutionary Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), to a four-year prison term in Egypt, to his co-founding of Quilliam, a London-based think tank that counters Islamist extremism.
"Hip-hop culture was crucial in developing the self-confidence needed to assert oneself," Nawaz remembered. But it was Islamism that truly gave him community, security, and identity. An organizer for HT handed him a flyer one day,
"an articulate, young, trendy, and intelligent man who was studying medicine, from my hometown, who could relate to me and my problems."
Nawaz joined HT, electrified by
"the level of power and seeing results that came immediately as a result of me adopting this identity… how we managed to face down so many of the conflicts and violence that we were exposed to on the streets of Essex…. Suddenly, we had backup. Suddenly we were members of this internationally feared and renowned club…the global Muslim community."
Nawaz built HT branches in Britain, Denmark, Egypt and Pakistan. The aim of HT being to reestablish a Muslim caliphate like the Ottoman Empire, whose "armies would protect Muslims across the world just as the American army protects American citizens."
After 9/11 he was imprisoned in Egypt and there he experienced a change in thinking, coming to believe that Islam as a faith had nothing to do with the political project of Islamism. Islamism, he came to feel,
"was a stifling, totalitarian, victimhood ideology that prevented independent thought, and all it ever did was breed more extremism, more discrimination, more racism, and more division."
At Quilliam, Nawaz seeks to address the grievances of Muslims and to reverse radicalisation by taking on the arguments of Islamism and countering them.
Nawaz does not agree with the line of thought from the right or the left. The left, he says, must challenge the injustice not only of racism but of Islamism as well. The right, he says, must show care for Muslims’ grievances at the hands of racism and Western foreign policy.
Muslims, meanwhile, must question their own narrative. Nawaz explained,
"sadly…the victimhood narrative has become popular. And it’s part of the story, but it’s not the whole story."
He put particular focus on Muslims’ ideological narrative, without which,
"the 7/7 bombers wouldn’t have said, in their thick Yorkshire accents by the way, that your people have attacked my people. Here’s a British Pakistani talking about the Iraqis as his people, in a Yorkshire accent… So the recalibration of identity…is what I call the ideological narrative […]
What we’re trying to do [is] engage the young, angry British Muslims with counter-narratives. Those young angry Muslims aren’t engaged in faith […] They’re people like me who weren’t particularly religious, and then get politiciised. […]
Crucially, Nawaz emphasized that the title of his book, Radical, doesn’t refer to his days spreading Islamism. "[It’s] describing me now," he said.
"I’m trying to reclaim the word, and to say that what’s truly radical in majority Muslim societies is to advocate democratic culture on the grass roots. [If that] can be entrenched… then we can secure the future, the democratic future."
Watch the full video here:
A 33-year-old British Pakistani who grew up in Essex, Maajid Nawaz was recruited into political Islam as a teenager. He joined Hizb al-Tahrir (the Liberation Party) where he played a central role in the shaping and dissemination of an aggressive anti-West narrative.
Having journeyed into and out of Islamic extremism, Maajid Nawaz remains a Muslim but is a leading critic of his former Islamist ideological dogma. He will be joining us to discuss this journey told in his new book and the work he now does undermining the beliefs he had once been prepared to die for.
After travelling to Pakistan, where he hoped to bring about an Islamist coup, Nawaz then went to Egypt, arriving the day before the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. Adopted by Amnesty International as a Prisoner of Conscience, he underwent an intellectual transformation and upon his release renounced political Islamism.
Maajid Nawaz is co-founder and chairman of Quilliam, a globally active civic-intervention organisation that focuses on matters of Integration, Citizenship & Identity, Religious Freedom, Extremism and Immigration. He is also the Founder of Khudi, a Pakistan based social movement campaigning to entrench democratic culture among the nation’s youth.
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