Radical (10 page)

Hizb al-Tahrir saw “the
Khilafah,
” a Muslim superstate, as the answer to all the injustice meted out to the Muslim populations of the world. It would sweep across all national boundaries; HT's version of Islam would be the ruling philosophy. Apostates, adulterers, and minorities considered abhorrent, like homosexuals, would suffer the death sentence. Criminality would be met with tough justice; thieves would have their hands cut off. Rights such as free speech would be curtailed, because “God's law” must trump all.

It was surprising to some people how easy it felt to switch my mind-set to this new political viewpoint. I'd felt I'd found my connection with hip-hop culture, but it fell away with little argument, likely due to my particular set of circumstances and upbringing. The message of Islamism was almost tailor-made for someone like me: intellectually curious and brought up in a Western environment. I didn't have the family or religious background to counterbalance what Nasim was telling me. The HT way of analyzing things was, ironically enough, a modern, European, sociopolitical interpretation of religion. That was the way I'd been educated at school, so I understood the reasoning from the start.

Secondly, there was Nasim himself, an intellectually charismatic guy. The authority and confidence with which he spoke on any number of subjects made a huge impression on me at an age when I was easily influenced. And the subjects he talked about related directly to my life, something my father or the imam had been unable to do. He knew about politics, philosophy, theology—all the issues that bands like Public Enemy had raised—and took them further. The way he tied these different issues together was intellectually intoxicating. It felt revolutionary, and that's exactly what it was: advocating a revolution.

Thirdly, the political element of hip-hop was starting to peel away. What had originally excited me was the politics that bands like PE and N.W.A had brought to the table. PE had carried on without Professor Griff, but the whole anti-Semitic episode had dented their popularity. The vanguard of hip-hop was increasingly becoming gangsta rap: the new stars were people like Cypress Hill, and the underlying messages were less about anti-authority anthems and more to do with boasting about drugs, violence, and women.

The way hip-hop was changing reinforced what Nasim was telling me in the study circles. You related to their music, I was told, because you have been through similar experiences of racism and discrimination. “But Chuck D is not a Muslim. Flavor Flav is not a Muslim. Ice Cube is not a Muslim. They do not know the solution to the problems they rap about because the message has simply not reached them.” That is where Hizb al-Tahrir and Islamism came in. It seemed perfectly natural for hip-hop to go one way, and my thinking to go another. I stopped listening to the music and started listening to HT instead.

P
ART
T
WO

I
SLAMIST

To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.

To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.

—
HENRIK IBSEN,
PEER GYNT

CHAPTER EIGHT

An Islamist Takeover

At sixteen, recruited to HT's cause and now full of the zeal of the converted, I wanted to move to London to be where the action was. I told my parents that I wanted to attend Barking College in East London to do a specialist graphic design course. At this point they were unaware of the nature of my Islamist beliefs. My father, in particular, saw a son who had calmed down from the B-boy excesses of his earlier teens and appeared to be settling into the life of a traditional, hardworking Muslim. And so it was that I moved out of the family home to study.

Of course the graphic design course was just a front. HT was far bigger in the capital than in Southend, and I desperately wanted to be part of it. By this time Nasim was in charge of HT's activities in East London, and with his help I got a room in a flat there. This was known as the
da'wah
—or mission—house, a flat dedicated to planning HT and occupied solely by supporters. By now I was an HT
daris
—student—the stage before membership. This meant that I was committed to attending HT events and partaking in official activities. My roommates, all HT
dariseen,
were recruited at the university. They included a student called Saleem, a former body-builder and all-around friendly guy; Sohail, a student from Milton Keynes in his second year at Guildhall University; Yaseen, an intelligent man who went on to leave HT and became a teacher; Ali, who would pop in to stay occasionally, and whom at the time we revered because he was already a member; and Nas, my Greek friend from Southend who had converted and moved to London with me.

Ours was a student house, with all the mess that entailed, but it was fantastic to be in the thick of the action, surrounded by “brothers.” I loved it. From the get-go, the house was used for HT activities. We'd put up stickers and posters, hand out pamphlets and leaflets, and advertise talks. We would spend all night cutting up boxes to create our boards, sticking posters onto the cardboard, punching holes and running the string through them, ready to be tied up. Then we'd load the cargo into someone's car and blitz the local area, tying our posters to lampposts everywhere. People would drop in to the flat from all over London. After the typical town atmosphere of Southend, and the feeling of being part of a fractional minority, I now felt plugged into a far larger community, a thriving London network buzzing with ideas.

This setup accelerated my commitment to HT. Before, I'd been going to study groups once a week. Now I was
living
with other activists and talking about the cause every day. For the first time, I had a real sense of how the movement was a national and global phenomenon. All the major universities had recruitment drives: we were fast taking over. The 1990s in London was the decade of Islamism. As many women as men were joining the movement, and somewhere we were told was probably our future partner waiting to meet us. This movement would shape how my life unfolded.

There was also the fact that I was living in London for the first time. East Ham might not have been that far from Southend, but it felt like a different world. The diverse community of East Ham made racism less of an issue. And the rising strength of Islamism and Jihadism meant for the first time that you didn't mess with Muslims. With that knowledge, I could walk the streets with confidence.

When I arrived, Nasim appointed one of his protégés, Ed Husain, to help me settle in. Ed, a passionate HT
daris
, was studying at Newham College. We quickly became very close. Before term started Ed asked me which college I was enrolled in. Barking College, I told him.

“You don't want to be in Barking
ya akhi
, my brother, all the action's at Newham College. I'm at Newham's East Ham campus. That's where all the Muslims are, and that's where we could really kick things off together.”

Ed was in his final year and needed to hand over his HT drive to someone; I was the perfect replacement. Ed was a studious type: at seventeen he wore a blazer and shirt to class. He was a good public speaker and more devout than I had been, or ever would become. I liked his religious devotion, it helped to calm my wilder side, and we developed a deep, lasting friendship. I went to his house, got to know his parents, and spent Ramadan breaking my fasts with his family. It soon became apparent that Ed and I could work together as a strong team. We led a group of four core HT supporters: Sarfraz and Mustafa, two big guys who were dependable types; Shehzad, a sociable guy who knew a lot of people; and Rehan, lovingly called “Mr. Bean” by our adversaries due to his physical stature and his propensity to intellectually fall over himself.

When the opportunity to become president of the Student Union (SU) arose, Ed suggested that I run for the post, and that our HT group should stand on a single slate. Our desire was to become the dominant Muslim group in the college. When I joined, the Islamic Society (ISoc) at Newham was dominated by the Saudi-Salafists, or literalists. In those days, before the merger between some Salafists and Islamism, the Salafists hated HT and everything we stood for. In the UK, a group called JIMAS coordinated all Salafist activities. JIMAS were known rivals. They loathed us more than non-Muslims for what they saw as our twisting of the Islamic message. The Salafist philosophy was far more religious than the HT message: there was no political element to their thinking. They dismissed our views for not being religious enough, and we in turn dismissed them for providing religious cover for the Saudi king and other absolute rulers. The Salafists controlled the college ISoc and, consequently, Friday prayers. This allowed them to bring in big crowds to their events and perpetuate their control.

Before I had gone to Newham, HT had never really been in a position to challenge this hegemony. Now, we felt confident enough to give it a go. If I could become president of the Student Union, then I would be in charge of funding for organizations such as the ISoc. I could then reduce ISoc's money, and their influence, at a stroke. I could even find a way to divert the money toward HT and our own aims.

We put up candidates for all the various posts on the Student Union. The Salafists were completely thrown off by our tactics and soon found themselves adrift in the campaign. We were more people-savvy and culturally aware. I had my B-boy background; the Salafists were wearing traditional Arab robes and strained to be pious. We would be listening to music and wearing jeans, and they did not know how to handle that. For the Salafists, the emphasis of their message was purity. Their manifesto was about sitting in the prayer room, talking about how to fast, and the benefits of leaving the world behind. Their starting point was the scriptures, whereas ours was the real world. We would talk about Afghanistan and Bosnia in a way that made our message sound relevant, whereas theirs just felt out of touch.

The female Muslim vote, in particular, came across to our side, partly because we were seen as trendy young guys, and partly because of the Salafist attitude to women. Salafists would criticize women for not wearing headscarves, to which we'd say, “Do you think the Bosnian Muslim woman was wearing a headscarf when she was raped? How does that make her any less your sister?”

On a more basic level, we were more aggressive in argument. Nasim had taught us to come back at our opponents. I'd learned the answers to their questions and would fire back a response to whatever accusations they made. That's a powerful thing to do when you're debating in front of a crowd. It makes you strong and your ideas coherent. The Salafists didn't really have a response: their only resort was to their religious purity, which didn't have the same resonance with most people's lives. A few years later, this would change: Salafism and Islamism would fuse to form Jihadism, most famously seen in the eventual rise of al-Qaeda.

The election was a runaway success. I didn't only become student president: all the other HT candidates won as well. Overnight we had completely outmaneuvered the Salafists. We were now the most senior students on campus, with authority to override the ISoc, to represent students in front of management, and to control student funds. At the same time, we set up the Debating Society to arrange events and bring in external speakers. On the forms, we claimed to have been inspired by Gladstone and Disraeli, and by parliamentary debates. We managed to hoodwink the management into letting us set up an HT front group. Such takeovers were happening across UK campuses. Islamism was firmly on the rise.

CHAPTER NINE

12,000 Muslims Screaming “
Khilafah
”

The ISoc Salafists were not the only ones incapable of dealing with us. The same was true of the college authorities, who had been caught completely off guard.

The student-affairs manager, Dave Gomer, was the point of contact between the college authorities and students. A friendly, well-meaning guy, his politics were forged in an earlier era, a time when student protests were about sit-ins and strikes and occupying the Student Union. To someone of Dave's generation, student protest was “kids being kids” and a healthy part of someone's political education. We ran circles around him.

We disguised our political demands behind religion and multiculturalism, and deliberately labeled any objection to our demands as racism. Even worse, we did this to the very generation who had been socialist sympathizers in their youth, people sympathetic to charges of racism, who like Dave Gomer were now in middle-career management posts. It is no wonder then that the authorities were unprepared to deal with politicized religion as ideological agitation; they felt racist if they tried to stop us.

The nearest comparison to our plans was, in a curious way, that of communism. The Cold War had not just been a battle between two military superpowers and their satellite states, but between two competing ideological systems. The West understood that communism was a direct threat to its way of doing business—the Soviet Union was both a physical and existential threat. This explains the McCarthy witch-hunt in the 1950s and “reds under the bed” paranoia.

Islamism demanded no less of a root-and-branch overhaul of society. But because it was cloaked in religious garb, no one quite knew what to do with it, and people were desperate not to offend. There was confusion over whether to define our activism as a cultural identity, an ideology, or a faith. To top it off, Islamism went through a decade of being embraced by both the left and right wings. The default liberal position was to embrace the movement as part of multicultural sensitivity: to tell people to stop practicing their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicized youth. Curiously, the default position on the right was to embrace us too, because it had been the Afghan Mujahideen, backed by the CIA, who fought the Soviet Union. This was when Hollywood films such as Stallone's
Rambo III
portrayed the Afghan Mujahideen as heroes.

In fact, the only groups who were speaking out against HT at this stage were people like Jeremy Newmark—now of the Jewish Leadership Council—and gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. This was fantastic propaganda for HT: the opposition of pro-Israeli and pro gay rights voices only reinforced the message we were trying to get across to Muslims. “The most dangerous of the Islamic fundamentalists is Hizb al-Tahrir,” Tatchell wrote at the time. His views and warnings were ignored, and we were left laughing at people's ignorance.

In fact, as president of Newham Student Union, I remember an occasion when Ed and I received a press pack from the Union of Jewish Students, warning all unions about HT activities on campus. They had arranged a training and awareness day. As Newham College's Student Union, we decided to attend. That day we learned all they intended to do to thwart us, and we simply returned to Newham to use it against them.

Our victory in the student elections felt as though it was part of a bigger picture. A few months before, HT had held a global “
Khilafah
Conference” at Wembley Arena and it was packed. I was one of 12,000 people attending from across the world. This was an astonishing sight and a huge boost to my belief in the cause. I still remember the roar of the crowd as it reached fever pitch, all 12,000 chanting
Allahu akbar
, God is Great! I recall how the thunder of their stomping feet shook the arena, and the world's media finally paid attention. It was hard not to come away without thinking that the momentum of historical change was behind us.

Becoming Student Union president felt like an extension of this momentum. Newham was the first college where HT had succeeded in gaining control of the union, which meant that the HT leadership noticed us. So I persuaded the UK leader at the time, Omar Bakri Muhammad, to come down to speak at the college—another feather in my cap.

Omar Bakri Muhammad was a Syrian in the UK on political asylum; in those days he was a rather charismatic figure. Under Omar Bakri's leadership HT swept across the UK. This would not have been possible without his group of influential, rhetorically gifted lieutenants. The most outstanding of these was Farid Kasim, a former socialist, who converted back to Islam when he joined HT. Extremely articulate and intellectual, Kasim led the drive to recruit the student population into HT and used his former socialist tactics to do so. Kasim successfully targeted universities and got the organization to the point where it could gather 12,000 supporters for the international conference at Wembley.

However, as well as growing in numbers, the UK section of HT was also growing in notoriety, which alarmed the
qiyadah
, HT's global leadership. Founded in Jerusalem in 1953, HT had chapters in almost every country in the world. Their sole purpose was to use their global presence to reestablish “the
Khilafah
” in a Muslim-majority country. HT in the UK, however, was directly pitching the group's struggle against British society. Under Omar Bakri's leadership, they wrote pamphlets describing how they would conquer the political establishment. Other pamphlets were overtly anti-Semitic. These tactics were provocative and began to get the group noticed. The
qiyadah
didn't like that: it wanted to use the UK as a base for fund-raising, for recruitment, media, and diplomatic cover. It didn't want the British wing of the organization to rock this carefully balanced, money-providing boat.

In Newham, rather than keeping a low profile, we continued to ratchet things up.

Our campaigns became increasingly provocative and difficult to ignore. We put up a series of posters with a picture of a Muslim woman wearing a face veil, an AK-47 by her side. The title of the poster, advertising a talk we were hosting, was “Women of the West—Cover Up or Shut Up.” That poster drew a response from both students and staff. It was the first time that people started complaining about the Student Union, and we got called in to see Dave Gomer. We were completely unrepentant, and I justified our stance to the end.

“All I'm asking for is for people to leave us alone,” I argued, somewhat disingenuously. “This is how we believe women should dress: if you don't want to dress like this, that's your decision, but don't criticize our women for doing so!”

Into this atmosphere, we arranged for Omar Bakri Muhammad to come and address the students. We wanted to make a good impression on the leadership and spent the week before creating a buzz about his visit. On the day of his talk, the hall was packed; even the Salafists were there. They turned up in the hope of heckling him, but Omar Bakri rebutted them with his usual flair. Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied
shari'ah
(Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University. By demonstrating that we could argue not just in terms of politics but also religion, we began to overshadow the Salafists. The talk became a hugely successful coup for us.

Omar Bakri's appearance came amidst rising tension within the college. The conflict between HT and the Salafists was only one of the battles raging across campus. More serious, in some ways, were the racial tensions that had built up between Pakistani students and African students. For a long time the African students had been the dominant, threatening force within the college. They would intimidate the Pakistani students, and were also responsible for a wave of muggings. They demanded that students hand over their money and got into fights over women. They did all this knowing that the Pakistani students were unlikely to fight back.

I saw myself in these Pakistani students, the younger me who'd been punched and kicked in the stomach. I understood instinctively that what these students needed was a cause. There were more of them; if they had a reason to stand up to these bullies, the tables would turn.

I took it upon myself to turn the Pakistani students into a force to be reckoned with. I immediately knew what would inspire the Pakistanis; I needed to re-create that backpack moment between Osman and Mickey right here in the college. I had to inject them with the fever of Muslim jingoism. And so, unannounced, we walked into the student canteen, stood on the tables, and just addressed all the students in full view. We blatantly challenged the non-Muslim Africans in front of everyone. And dared them to step up to the power of Islam, and warned them of Allah's wrath if they messed with Muslims.

We were grossly outnumbered, yet we faced them unflinchingly, with a fire raging in our chests and the sort of conviction that animates one's expression. The African students didn't know what to do. Our brazen confidence threw them, and they just stood there gaping. Ours was a calculated conflation of the HT message and self-defense: galvanizing the students with the HT narrative and getting them interested in the group's activities at the same time.

We'd inspire the students with tales of jihad, assure them of backup through our networks, but most of all, we led by example. In the middle of such confrontations, which would often spill out into the college courtyard, we would suddenly drop into coordinated prayers, right there in the open in front of our adversaries. And after our prayers, we'd stand back up and shout, “
Allahu akbar,
” at the tops of our voices in unison, like a war cry. The African students all had knives; some of them were carrying machetes. But after everything I'd been through in Southend, that sort of weaponry didn't faze me. By this point, I'd been going around with my knife strapped to my back for years. It was second nature to me. I was so desensitized to the threat of violence that I could stand up to the African students without thinking twice. Imbued by my Islamist beliefs and the confidence of my election victory, I stoked the acrid atmosphere still further. Our display did the trick: it galvanized the Pakistani youth, and it made them stand as Muslims.

But it was only a matter of time before someone got badly hurt.