Authors: Maajid Nawaz
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Penguin Is Hit by Slippers
When we were finally charged, we came to hear about it second-hand. Some of the other prisoners had been listening to the radio, BBC Arabic, and they caught the announcement. Immediately they shouted the news over the wall, and the
shaweesh
guarding our cell told us what had happened. A few days later we received another visit from Gordon Brown, who confirmed the charges in detail. Hassan was not charged. He was released soon after and deported back to London. Reza, Ian, and I had been charged on two counts: first, for propagating in speech and writing the ideas of a banned organization called Hizb al-Tahrir; secondly, for possessing literature of said organization. Additionally, Reza also had a third charge: possession of a computer printer.
If our situation hadn't been so serious, the charges would have been laughable. Reza was facing a prison sentence for having a
printer.
None of us had been charged with what would have made sense, something that in our interviews we had all defiantly admitted to: being members of a banned organization. Instead, the charges were somehow more insidious: they were to do with discussing ideas and reading booksâthe right to free expression. This wasn't about HT or about Islamism; it was about something far more fundamental. It was about liberty, one of the basic tenets upon which civilized society is supposed to be based. Judge us by our Islam, and we will judge you by your freedoms.
The charges exposed Egypt, and the Emergency Laws of President Mubarak, for the police state that it was. We knew by now that our chances of getting off were nonexistentâthey could make stick whatever they wanted to. We were looking at years in prison. By charging us in this way, it stripped them of any sense of moral authority. It made us prisoners of conscience. It meant that Amnesty International could take up our cause. And for Western leaders, it created uncomfortable questions for their entire Middle East strategy; they were supporting a regime that was torturing and imprisoning British citizens for “speech and writing.”
Brown looked embarrassed as he discussed the charges with us. I could see him clearly for what he was: a career civil servant in an impossible position, the man in the bureaucratic chain who was seeing firsthand the human cost of the “price worth paying.” There was a war onâthe War on Terror. The first casualty, as the saying goes, is truth. I looked him in the eye and saw that he knew what we knew: Mubarak's Egypt was no great friend or ally. His state was built on the opposite of what the West was meant to hold most dear.
The trial, if one can call it something so legitimate, lasted the best part of two years. It would run for a week or two at a time, then there'd be a wait of another couple of months before the next session was called. There were twenty-six defendants being tried at the same time. In the courtroom, all dressed in white because we had not yet been convicted, we were held in a cage in the corner, like animals. The cage was so cramped that we would have to take turns sitting on the few benches provided, while the rest of us stood squashed round the sides.
Our group was taken to the courtroom each day in a convoy of blue police vans; the other defendants, all Egyptians, were being held in a mixture of other prisons. Each of us would be handcuffed to a guard for the journey. But rather than go in silence, we wanted to show Mubarak and his acolytes that he had not defeated us. We would not go quietly, we wanted the world to see us, and the world was watching. Each time we went in and out of that courtroom, we let off a huge cacophony of chants, rallying, and sloganizing. The TV cameras, BBC, al-Jazeera, and others, all of them loved the spectacle we were creating.
“
Usqut, usqut Mubarak!
”â“Down, down Mubarak!”
“
Laa nakhafu lawmata laa'im, al-Khilafatu fardun da'im
”
â
“We don't fear those who blame us, the
Khilafah
will forever be an obligation!”
We would shout these slogans in Arabic, all around Cairo's streets, as we were transported in those blue metal police vans in the scorching heat of summer, drenched in sweat. To speak so openly against Mubarak while under arrest was a shocking thing for Egyptians to hear at the time. Most would stand open-mouthed and gape as we passed, some would raise their fists in salute. Many broke down in tears of sympathy right there in the middle of the street. Anyone who caught a glimpse of our regular convoys in the streets of Cairo in 2002 will remember the sheer pandemonium we caused. After the total defeat of the jihadists in 1999, no one dared denounce Mubarak in public the way we did. Several years before the Egyptian people found the confidence to stand together in Tahrir Square, we were hoping to inspire the courage and confidence it would take for them to do exactly that. We wanted people in the streets to think: if they can do it from their prison vans, we can do it from our streets.
The miniature Qur'an I took from my flat, the last thing I took before leaving Ammar and Rabia behind, had somehow remained with me throughout my time in the torture cells. I would hold it up and wave it in full view while I shouted my slogans. It gave me strength and built my
eeman.
We were not criminals. We were proud political prisoners. We stood for Allah and His messenger, we stood for justice against tyranny and we were blessed to be chosen by Allah, as the ambassadors of
eeman.
Sure enough, our actions reached the world's mediaâTV, radio, print, and the rising Internet. The whole world was talking about the British political prisoners who claimed they had been tortured in Mubarak's dungeons.
The courtroom was packed. This was the first time that foreign nationals had been tried in a case involving torture. This created somewhat of a media frenzy. And it was in the courtroom that I discovered just how badly some of the other brothers had been treated. One of the brothers, Ahmed, described how his wife had been stripped and tortured before his eyes in order to force him to confess. Sadly his story was far from unique. We quickly used those moments in the cage to announce to the world how we had been treated. Journalists became fascinated with our case: liberals, Islamists, socialists, all began to sympathize with what had happened to us; news of our plight was spreading far and wide.
Everyone in that cage pleaded not guilty to the charges. But unlike our Egyptian brothers, we three Britons also admitted to our membership of Hizb al-Tahrir in the UK. As HT was legal there, we felt there was nothing to hide. In one of the subsequent court sessions, a letter was delivered from Jalaluddin Patel, the young HT leader in the UK who had tried to marginalize me after my return from Pakistan. The letter felt like a sofa-critique of how we had all carried ourselves. According to him we should have pleaded guilty, shown more defiance, and the Egyptian members should never have denied their affiliation to HT. We were disgusted. Jalaluddin, sitting in London, had the nerve to tell these men how to behave?
We wrote back immediately: you are no longer in our chain of command; we fall under the jurisdiction of HT Egypt. Its leader is in this very cage with us, having been tortured nonstop for three and a half months. These brothers have watched their wives tortured in front of them. You have not the right or moral claim to tell us what to do, and in doing so you presume to violate our channels of communication. Do not write to us again. Thankfully, he never did.
Right away, you could sense just how much the system was stacked against us. The judge, whose name was Ashmawi, would sit at the top of the bench, right next to the leading prosecutor, Walid Minshawi. As the case was to be tried under Emergency Law, both the judge and prosecutor were appointed by Aman al-Dawlah. The defense lawyers, meanwhile, were seated at the opposite end of the courtroom with the accused.
The three of us chose a brave man called Ahmed Saif as our lawyer. Saif's political views couldn't have been more different from ours. Saif was a communist, which under normal circumstances would have been anathema to our Islamism, but he had our respect. Saif had been imprisoned many times under Mubarak's regime, and yet he still continued to speak out fearlessly. We might have held different political views, but Saif was every bit as anti-regime as we were.
*
* A couple of years later, Ahmed Saif would go on to become a key founding member of the
Kifayah
, or “Enough,” movement, a liberal collective that decided to break the taboo of openly challenging Mubarak's authority in public. In those days, in Egypt, this was an absolute red line. Later on, while serving my sentence, I would read of Kifayah's brave anti-Mubarak protests. They would gather openly in the streets, attracting only around ten or twenty brave souls, surrounded by hundreds of riot police, and most people would laugh at their delusions of change. But Kifayah became the collective that ultimately snowballed into the Egypt uprising, led by liberal youth, in 2011. History, it would turn out, was on Ahmed Saif's side.
Almost two years after our arrest, on the day before we were due to be sentenced, Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, was on a state visit to Jerusalemâ
al-Quds.
Maher was a short, fat man with a huge bald head and a pointed nose. He looked like the Penguin from
Batman
, and we found this image of him comforting. As part of Maher's visit to al-Quds, he went to pray in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the very same mosque where I had met all the HT brothers, and where I agreed with Issam Amireh that I would one day return. HT was founded in al-Quds, and we had a strong force of brothers all over Palestine. When Maher entered the mosque, to his utter horror, and the TV cameras' delight, he was met by a large group of HT protesters. They greeted him with a barrage of shoes and slippers hurled at him with abandon.
“Get out, you
kha'in
âtraitor!” they shouted at him, as slippers rained down.
“
Zalim
âdespot! Agent of America! You torture our brothers in Egypt, and think you can come into our mosque and pray?
La ahlan wa la sahlan
âyou are not welcome in this mosque, out!”
Back at our prison, as the radio announced the humiliation of untouchable Ahmed Maher, the brothers, young and old, Islamist, jihadist, liberal, all whooped and rejoiced in spontaneous celebration.
Allahu akbar!
Taste a fraction of what you have put us through, and see how you like it!
The next day, Egypt's national papers were full of images of the Penguin being hit by slippers. It was a real day of victory for us. The Egyptian state would not let this one go, and sure enough, they took their revenge. In the wake of the assault, our sentencing date was delayed by another three months. When we were finally taken to court, the judge announced that he was dropping all the original charges against us, only to replace them with a single, new charge:
intimaa
âmembership of a banned organization. After two years of a painfully slow trial, this time around there was to be no new discussion, no new defense. There and then, we were charged anew, convicted, and found guilty within the same session, on the same day.
“
Intimaa
” was a far more serious charge. Reza, Ian, and I were all sentenced to five years in prison: the other defendants got a mixture of between five and ten years for their membership of HT. As these sentences were read aloud in court, families began to cry, journalists began scurrying, and we rose up in defiance. Like lions roaring with pride, the courtroom was ablaze with our chants and slogans.
“
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!
We will never surrender!”
We began congratulating and embracing one another in the cage, and chanting and praying and prostrating in thanks to Allah for this opportunity to present our sacrifice for His cause. The judge rushed out of the courtroom in fear, and Walid Minshawi looked on in utter confusion:
How can they be celebrating? If I were in their place, I'd be crying.
And we did cry, tears of devotion to Allah, tears of love, tears of piety, the romanticism of struggle, and we knew we would go down in history. People would look to us and be inspired.
After two years, once the verdict was finally passed, in between frequent letters, we began receiving occasional family visits. How can I forget that day, Ammar, when you first came plodding along, by now a three-year-old, not knowing your
Abu
except for seeing him in chains on television screens? It's been two and a half years, my son. Two and a half years since these
zalimun
first tore you crying from my arms. And you came dressed in trousers, shirt, and tie, and extended your hand out to greet me, “
assalaamu alaykum, Abu,
” unsure of how formal I expected you to be. And I swept you up in my arms, not wanting you to see the tears welling in my eyes, and I held you close for all the years I was unable to hold you, for the days in the dungeons when I thought I might never see you again. I was so proud of your mother who had kept the memory of me alive within you.
Your mother approached me that day, her radiant face so happy, so proud and smiling at the visage of her man who had proven his sincerity to Allah's cause. And instantly, just by holding her in my embrace for the first time since my arrest, all my pain melted away, nothing mattered any more. My
ghimamah
of darkness had been lifted, and all I could see was the glow of your countenance. How happy I was on that day.
When Ash, my trusty HT protégé in SOAS days, came to visit me in Mazrah Tora, I was naturally excited.
“Ash, what's wrong?” I asked.
“I don't know how to tell you this,” he said, “but I've left the group. I've left HT.”
“Why, what happened?” I asked disappointedly.
“I don't believe in it anymore,” he answered; and then in his typically irreverent way, “It's all bullshit, bro, the whole damn thing, they're a bunch of Muppets, clueless thick idiots, they're an embarrassment to Islam and Muslims.”