The Causes of Alienation

Maajid Nawaz

 

“It is a religious duty to join Hizb ut-Tahrir. Those who refuse to do so are sinful, and thus lesser Muslims. All other Muslims groups and leaders have failed to understand Islam and are agents of the infidels, or kuffar in Arabic. Islam is a political ideology that must dominate the world, not a religious tradition that can coexists beside others. The caliphate, or Khilafah in Arabic, will replace slavery to man-made law with submission to God's law. Democracy is Kufr, or anti-Islamic. You are not British Muslims but Muslims in Britain, who are in transit and waiting to move to the coming Khilafah. It is Haram, or religiously forbidden to vote in U.K. elections. It is Haram to befriend the Kuffar, the disbelievers. The coming Khilafah will conquer the world with Jihad.”

The above is what large numbers of us, young British Muslims born and raised in these isles, were aggressively advocating in the mid-nineties as Hizb ut-Tahrir activists in mosques and universities across Britain. The authorities looked on bemused. Armed with these ideas, derived from Arab anger of the 1950s Middle East, we radicalised a whole generation of British Muslims in what was our period of exponential growth. Our call had an impact on Muslim groups and leaders that did not join us, but dared not reject the message of creating a totalitarian state in the Muslim world. Soon, other Muslim groups were struggling to compete with our zeal and utopian message. To our joy, they began adopting some of our slogans as their own and we revelled in our success.

As a third generation British Muslim I was raised in an integrated and well- established family; four of my mothers siblings are doctors. I had absolutely no problem making friends and was in the highest sets in school, later going on to study Law at university. How did I - at the tender age of seventeen - subscribe to and then devastatingly propagate the above ideas for 12 years of my life? Why was I prepared to abandon my degree for such a cause? Why was my passion so great that I was prepared to brave torture on behalf of these ideas in Egypt despite having been warned that I was being hunted by the Egyptian State Security? Why did I dedicate myself to the group so much that I rose to the level of a leadership committee member, a national speaker, and someone who was pivotal in exporting this ideology from the UK to the world? And finally, why did it take so long for me to unilaterally resign?

As a British-Asian teenager growing up in Essex I always had a sense of being different. In fairness, this was not due to the majority of people making me feel different, but because of the actions of a minority of organised racists who made life exceptionally difficult for all around me. By the age of 15, I found myself having to flee random and unprovoked knife attacks and witness my friends being stabbed before my eyes. There were arrests but no charges; apparently, they had 'friends' in the police.

Institutional racism was something I knew existed before the phrase itself was coined. The first time I was arrested in an armed raid was not in Egypt, but on the streets of Essex. I had been playing pool with friends till late and as I was being driven home we were shocked at being pursued by police helicopters shining spotlights on our car. The road had been blockaded and we found ourselves staring down the barrel of machine guns. At the age of 15, I had been arrested at gun-point for “suspicion of armed robbery”.

Unknown to me, earlier in the day my friends had been innocently playing with a plastic pellet gun. A poor old lady had decided that brown children playing with plastic pellet guns could only mean one thing: they intended to rob a bank. Somehow, the police took it seriously enough to a launch a full-scale surveillance operation. I still remember the look on my mother’s face as she came into the police station thinking that her 15-year-old son had been robbing banks. We were kept overnight and in the afternoon of the next day we were released without charge and with a sheepish apology. I asked if we had done anything at all wrong, and we were kindly told that we hadn't. It was a mistake. The plastic pellet gun was returned to us, broken.

I initially dealt with such incidents by associating with a counter-culture inspired by American rap music. In the 90s this was an underground scene that we felt provided a voice and identity to those who were not being seen or heard. This was the beginning of my politicisation, and by now I was already inclined to being anti-establishment.

As time passed, I became more aware of identity issues and world conflicts. The Bosnian genocide, however, struck a chord like no other. Up until that point I had mainly been concerned with racism at home. Bosnia was strikingly different. Here were white European Muslims being identified solely as Muslims and being slaughtered for it. This genocide coincided with an emerging trend in rap music, whereby American rappers began to identify explicitly as Muslims and mixed samples of Malcolm X's speeches into their music.

It was during this period of my life that a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir from my hometown, who had been recruited while studying at university in London, started explaining the Hizb’s ideas to me. I sometimes look back in amazement at how my transformation was dependant upon so many factors that all happened to come together at the right time. My premature, politicised mind was ripe to receive an ideology that advocated a black and white solution to the problems I had grown up with. The world seemed to care little for such problems and Mosque Imams were simply bemusing. Islamists delightfully filled the vacuum.

Up until that point, I had perceived Muslims as backward and inarticulate. Muslim leaders could not even speak English— but suddenly I was facing a new phenomenon. My rapper heroes were now talking about Islam. This young and educated Hizb ut-Tahrir activist was also professing Islam, yet he would mock the backward Mosque Imams to whom I could not relate. His was an ideology, not a fanciful spiritual religion. His was a global revolutionary call to empower downtrodden Muslims, not ritualistic tradition; and his ideology spoke English.

As I got more involved with Hizb ut-Tahrir activities, from attending secret cell structure meetings to distributing leaflets that called for jihad, I conflicted with Muslims at mosques and most worryingly, my own parents. I recall in horror my being chased out of a northern town by members of the mosque congregation and their imam for distributing Hizb leaflets outside the mosque. My own parents detested seeing those same leaflets in their home. But I was undeterred. For me Muslims, including my parents, had misunderstood their ideology.

This was an ideology like no other. Religion had been merged with politics is such a way that we worshipped God through our political activities. Where our minds could not grasp a certain idea, we were coaxed through scripture. Where scripture did not bolster a certain notion, we were convinced through rational argumentation. Intellectually we were prepared to debate with anyone on their terms to prove our politics. Spiritually we were prepared to sacrifice our lives to establish what we held as our religion. It was one and the same. The result was a potent mix of political and philosophical stances seemingly justified by religious scripture, with the aim to liberate the Muslim nation, or Ummah, whose minds had been colonised. The result was producing young men and women who were prepared to give up everything for the sake of a political ideology, and go to a religious paradise. I had finally discovered who I was. I was a sharp, ideological Muslim whose mission was to create a new world order.

I took on board this ideology as my own. Propagating it through campuses and across boarders till it consumed my life. Eventually my activities caught up with me in Egypt, where I was sent by my university for the language year of my Arabic and Law degree. For the second time in my life I was arrested at gun point, but this time it was not by mistake and there was no apology forthcoming. I was convicted to five years for membership to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.

It was during this time in prison that I began to utilise my time by studying as much as I could about the ideology that I professed to be working for. My aim was to study Islam to such a depth that once released I would be even more potent at propagandising than I was before. As I continued to study various branches of traditional Islamic sciences, however, I grew more and more surprised. The sheer breadth of scholastic disagreement that I found on issues that I had believed were so definitive in Islam, surprised me. Where we had been willing to challenge, even overthrow regimes, on certain issues, traditional jurists of Islam had treated as academic disagreements to be debated out through books.

It is a fact that Hizb ut-Tahrir is more popular in non-Arabic speaking countries than in the Arab world. Activists of the group state that this is due to oppression faced by members in the Arab world. The group, however, is also severely persecuted in Uzbekistan, and despite its members reportedly being boiled alive the organisation still has a large following there. I believe that this phenomenon is largely due to the inability of non-Arabic speakers to access the sources of Islamic learning. It is with such access, whilst imprisoned for being a Hizb ut-Tahrir member in Egypt, that it slowly dawned upon me that what I had been propagating was far from true Islam. I began slowly realising that what I had subscribed to was actually Islamism sold to me in the name of Islam. And it is with this realisation that I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

Now I am involved in trying to counter the black and white mindset I once so vehemently encouraged. Though I was young when I was recruited to Hizb ut-Tahrir, I take full responsibility for my actions. I made the decision that I did, and I am responsible for undoing them. With this in mind I hope to publish a series of papers re-evaluating certain core Islamist ideas that are essential to their message.

A version of this article appeared in The Times (16/09/2007) with the title
‘Why I joined the British jihad - and why I rejected it’