Faisal Haque on ""The Islamist": a radical journey"

Faisal Haque — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 01:03:01 +0100

Mahbub (Ed) and I both attended HT activities in London back in the early 1990s. The book neatly fits the Government’s narrative and it is not surprising that it got such wide acclaim from the broadsheets. The government’s narrative is that there are ‘ordinary decent Muslims’ who are completely detached from concerns about foreign policy or the notion of Islam being at the centre of state and society in the Muslim world. Every one else is an ‘Islamist’ who are accused of exploiting the faith of their fellow Muslims for political ends. This explains the Government’s recent support for the Sufi Muslim Council and the British Muslim Forum. I don’t think his account adds anything about the Islamic ’scene’ in the UK. This is not surprising as he has not been part of it for over a decade. By his own admission, in the mid-1990s he ended his association with HT, before briefly moving on to associate with MB linked groups like ISB. He was never a ‘jihadi’ and never a ‘terrorist’, even though some in the media have described him as a former ‘jihadi’. Although many of us may have had bad experiences with some people from HT, Yusuf Smith hits the nail on the head when he says, “In calling for HT to be banned now, he ignores the reason why they are not: because the troublemakers left ten years ago. HT now are a quiet intellectual group, at least in the UK, and we do not ban parties in this country simply because we dislike their ideology.” There are some major errors in the book - I am not sure whether these are intentional or accidental - I know they are errors because I was with HT during the same period Mahbub was - for example there is the claim that HT never spoke out against Saddam Hussain. His suggestion that he parted company with HT for ideological reasons is also not true - it was more to do with his close personal relationship with Omar Bakri [he left when Bakri was kicked out], pressure from his father and other personal reasons which I don’t want to mention. The author does not answer some very important questions. What tips someone over from being a ‘radical’ to becoming violent? After all, he was a radical and never became violent and the overwhelming majority of radicals do not become violent. Why is it that ‘Islamists’ linked to HT and the MB have existed in the UK for decades, yet we have never seen violence on the streets of the UK until after the Iraq war? Mahbub dismisses the foreign policy angle as a cause for alienation and radicalisation, but I think the evidence is stacked up against him. If this is a battle of ideas between “traditional Islam” and “Islamism” then how can it be won by banning groups or silencing voices? Does Mahbub believe that ISB, JIMAS, etc, etc. must all be banned? Should East London Mosque and Regent’s Park Mosque and all the other mosques linked to MB and the Wahabbis be closed down? Surely, what is needed is more debate and argument between the groups in accordance with the Islamic etiquettes? We can’t just sweep the views of many Muslims under the carpet. Does Mahbub really believe that anyone who wants the caliphate or an Islamic state must believe in violence? After all, a recent poll by the University of Maryland found that over 70 per cent of the population in the Muslim world wanted Shariah and the caliphate but were opposed to violence. http://theislamist.wordpress.com

"The Islamist": a journey around faith and nation, Tahir Abbas

robert.cawston@opendemocracy.net — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:45:35 +0100

Ed Husain's autobiography The Islamist: why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left (Penguin, 2007) is a remarkably candid account of the life of a British-born Muslim who was initially seduced by radicalism but gradually came to his senses to return to the more spiritual and devotional Islam that had defined his early years. It is also an important work, in that it both carefully grounds the issue of radicalisation that has so dominated recent intellectual and political discussion of Muslim communities in Britain, and points to potential solutions.

Ed Husain grew up in a largely monocultural (though not overly poor or marginalised) Muslim setting in the east end of London in the early 1980s, where he developed early an acute sense of "identity politics". He recalls in melancholy fashion some inspirational interactions with (white) English schoolteachers whom he warmed to, but it was Islam that came to shape and characterise his very being. In adolescence he began to break away from the norms and traditions of his Sufi-orientated Bengali family, and sought expression for his emotions and intellect through a more hardened political-Islamic approach to life - one he had to hide from his parents.

At college, his vigour and popularity helped him become president of the Islamic society, a position that allowed him to share with fellow-students the ideas of some of his intellectual influences: Abul A'la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb and Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. Ed came to be convinced that a radical overhaul of Muslim minds and nations was required, and that a return to a stricter jihadi interpretation of Islam provided the vehicle.

Tahir Abbas is director of the study of ethnicity and culture, University of Birmingham.

Among his books are (as editor) Muslim Britain: Communities under Pressure (Zed, 2005) and British Islam: The Road to Radicalism (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Also by Tahir Abbas in openDemocracy:

"Muslims in Britain after 7/7: the problem of the few"
(14 December 2005)

"The Trouble with Islam Today, Irshad Manji" (24 April 2006The book offers here an interesting portrait of the various organisations and individuals active around Muslim student circles at the time, and how they gradually remodelled themselves. Among them are Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), which has had a particular presence in Britain since the late 1970s, particularly through the work of the Islamic Foundation in Leicester; and Ghulam Sarwar, who published the first English textbook for madrasa students in Britain. But it was the Young Muslim Organisation (YMO), essentially a youth wing of the JI, that captured Ed's imagination.

But YMO proved only another stage of Ed's journey. Against the background of the assault on Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s, he gravitated towards the emerging Hizb-ut-Tahrir party and into the orbit of the charismatic Omar Bakri Mohammed. Hizb, which operated legally in Britain (as it still does, despite government threats to ban it) though nowhere else in western Europe or the middle east, was then refining its "entryist" tactics to gain a foothold among young Muslims by burrowing into Islamic societies at college and university campuses. In its utopian worldview, the force of radical Islam would overthrow puppet regimes in the middle east and (in Omar Bakri Mohammed's delusion) "raise the flag of Islam over Downing Street". Omar Bakri's desire to bring an Islamic revolution to Britain led eventually to his expulsion from Hizb and his formation (in 1996) of the more extreme al-Muhajiroun. This group's flamboyant rhetoric brought it media attention out of proportion to its true numbers, but it was Hizb-ut-Tahrir itself that had catalysed the process of radicalisation of many young Muslims.

Among those affected by this process were Asif Hanif, who died in a suicide-bomb mission in Tel Aviv in 2003, and Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the London bombings of 7 July 2005. For some of the young Muslims of this generation, the new life-routines that might include spending time in countries such as Syria and Yemen to learn Arabic or studying religion in Pakistan risked becoming staging-posts in a journey that led into a more sinister and violent game.

Among openDemocracy's many articles on British Muslim experience:

Mohammed Sajid, "The gap between us: British Muslims and 7/7"
(18 July 2005)

Maruf Khwaja, "Muslims in Britain: generations, experiences, futures" (2 August 2005)

Ehsan Masood, "British Muslims must stop the war"
(30 August 2005)

Ehsan Masood, "British Muslims: ends and beginnings"
(31 October 2006)

Mukul Devichand, "Telling Muslim tales" (29 December 2006The road back

A chance encounter at college with the woman who would become his life-partner was part of a new phase in which led Ed Husain began to find the Hizb-ut-Tahrir dogma controlling, insensitive and stifling. In an effort to find a way back from a political focus to a religious one - to get to the root of Qur'anic understanding - he spent time living in Saudi Arabia and Syria. In Saudi, the eyes of this British Muslim were further opened by a society he finds grossly unequal, rabidly racist, sexually frustrated, and Islamically blinkered.

In Syria, the social conditions are more relaxed and his experience is more positive, but he still missed the freedoms of a Britain whose social problems did not prevent him from living both as a good Muslim and a good citizen.

Soon after he and his wife returned to Britain, 7/7 happened. How could it have occurred; why had people been so blind to the radicalisation of young Muslims? These questions lead Ed to reflect on the inadequacy of leadership of Muslims in Britain. He argues that (for example) the main figures of the Muslim Council of Britain emerged from an assortment of groups with degrees of affiliation to the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, whose age and formation make them unsuitable to lead a young community shaped by very different social and political experiences. Many of the leaders of the British Muslim community are unaccountable, self-appointed Islamists whose indulgence by the New Labour government has been damaging.

The lesson Ed Husain draws from his trajectory, one I firmly share, is that a notion of British Islam must be developed that can provide a beacon to the rest of western Europe. Britain's model of multiculturalism is far more advanced than anywhere else in "old Europe", and it has many achievements and successes to its name. Yet multiculturalism has a double aspect: it is a space that society and its institutions have created to recognise and encourage diversity, and an invitation to communities to develop a healthy, forward-looking, holistic approach to define who they are and how they relate to others. The latter is the challenge now for British Muslims. A generational shift in the profile of political, cultural, intellectual and theological leadership is now underway, and this offers grounds for optimism.

The Islamist should be read and reflected on as part of the building work of the new generation of British Muslims. But it is not just for them. It has broader lessons about humility and humanity, forgiveness and fortitude, and it is unified by a pervading message of hope. All this continues to be needed to meet the intellectual and psychological influence of a radical Islam that still runs deep among a minority in Britain. Policy-makers, commentators, researchers, and educators: take note.

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Faisal Haque on ""The Islamist": a radical journey"

"The Islamist": a journey around faith and nation, Tahir Abbas