"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 lot has changed in the years since 9/11. The date itself has become emblematic of a change in attitudes towards Islam, perhaps most notably in the country which bore witness to the infamous attacks that day. Popular opinion has shifted, and the land of the free has become an increasingly hostile environment for Muslims. American Muslim: Freedom, Faith and Fear examines what it means to be a Muslim in America today and the consequences of the fact that, for many, the words Islam and terrorism are now permanently intertwined.
The documentary, featuring Karen Zarindast from BBC Persian and Samir Farah from BBC Arabic TV, was screened at the Frontline Club. The team travelled across the length and breadth of the United States in order to examine the lives and experiences of a vast range of American Muslims. They discovered a country in which fear and confusion surrounds Islam, and where politicians and the media often foment unrest in order to further their own objectives. What was once a thriving cultural melting pot where Muslims were welcomed has now developed into a nation over which a sinister and pervasive Islamaphobia has taken hold in the last decade.
A question and answer session followed, during which Darius Bazargan, the film’s producer, Azadeh Moaveni, the author of Lipstick Jihad, and Zarindast discussed the film and some of the key themes that emerged. One of the most important issues was the impact of American foreign policy, as Bazargan suggested in response to the question of whether or not American Muslims will ever be able to escape the dogma associated with 9/11:
“I don’t think there’s any chance of going back to the quiet life, especially because of the impact of American foreign policy in Islamic countries; either through the involvement with Israel or elsewhere. It will be less resonant if there are fewer coffins coming home, and there will be fewer coffins coming home if American foreign policy changes.”
The panel also talked about some of the difficulties faced when filming, including budgetary and time constraints, as Bazargan made clear:
“We had editorial difficulties, you’re a slave to the road in these kinds of documentaries. There were lots of interesting people we had to drop from the final cut simply because they popped up at the wrong point in our journey and didn’t fit the arc of discovery."
As the evening ended somewhat acrimoniously, with conflicting views being raised from the floor over what is clearly an emotive issue to many, Zarindast did offer a consolatory take on her experience:
]]>“I asked people if they would leave the country. They said no. I think it was fascinating, because I spoke to people in Birmingham after some of the recent trouble and they had never been to Pakistan or Bangladesh but they said that they would leave England in an instant. Nearly everybody I spoke to in America said no… this is their country.”