Radical (23 page)

Ash explained how he had become disillusioned with HT members, then with the group itself, and eventually with the ideology. Instead, he had become interested in Sufi mysticism.

“You're a bright person, Maajid,” he said. “I know for a fact that you'll work all of this out and come to the same conclusions that I did.”

My reaction was to laugh this off.

Ash was insistent though. “In Sufism, you have a sheikh, a spiritual guide,” he continued. “My sheikh told me before I came here that he'd had a dream about you. He told me that not only are you going to leave Hizb al-Tahrir, but that you're going to become a great leader for Muslims.”

“
Subhan Allah—
can you hear yourself, bro?” I said and laughed.

“It's true,” Ash said, shaking his head. “That's what I came to tell you, and that's why I came.”

I dismissed Ash's flattery as that of a friend overcome by emotion on seeing his one-time mentor in prison. But even so, there was something about the confidence with which Ash spoke that struck me.

Life doesn't stand still just because you are in prison. During those years my parents' relationship finally cracked, and they divorced. By the time Abi came to see me she had met a friend, who accompanied her to Egypt on prison visits. He was an Englishman, a non-Muslim, and they were not married. For the first time since my incarceration, my liberal upbringing was on public display in front of the top cadre of Egypt's hard-core jihadist scene, and I was torn: they're not married, he's a
kafir,
this is
haram,
prohibited. But he's come all this way to look after Abi, he's waiting outside the prison in the desert heat, from fear of offending me. This is a noble man, like Dave Gomer, like Mr. Moth. And so I found a solution.

“Can I conduct an Islamic rite, the
nikah
ceremony, to legitimize your relationship before Allah? It's just some prayers before two witnesses,” I asked Abi.

“If it makes you happy.”

“But he'll need to embrace Islam first—pronounce his
shahadah,
the testimony of faith. I can teach him what to say,” I said.

“I just want you to be happy.”

In this way, right there in the visiting area of Mazrah Tora prison, I supervised the conversion and Islamic
nikah
ceremony for Abi and her partner. I asked him to repeat after me, “
Laa ilaaha illa Allah
. . . There is no God but the One God,
Muhammad ar-rasool Allah
. . . and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” As my two witnesses I called over two of my prison friends, Omar, a Dagestani, and Hisham, a Dutch-Egyptian jihadist, famous for flying into momentous fits of rage against the prison authorities. I don't think Abi or her partner quite understood what the witnesses to their
nikah
were in jail for. Equally, I don't think Omar and Hisham quite understood Abi's and her partner's views. As far as my jihadist friends were concerned, I had just successfully converted someone to the Islamist cause. They were overjoyed, sharing a few sweets around the visiting area.

“Maajid's mother and her partner have just embraced Islam,” they announced with warm smiles across the room. The implication being, of course, that, by virtue of being in this relationship, Abi had not already been a Muslim. Hisham, the Dutch-Egyptian jihadist, embraced Abi's partner in a long, tight hug. Hisham then explained how he must never compromise on his new faith, to always remain strong, and to remember to fight the enemies of Allah wherever he finds them. The Englishman nodded in sincere agreement, and Hisham hugged him again, believing he had just witnessed the creation of another martyr for Islam.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Monocracy”

Mazrah Tora, where we would serve out the remainder of our sentence, was no ordinary prison. Originally built by the British in the days of the protectorate in order to hold political prisoners, it stayed ever true to its purpose. Over the years Mazrah Tora has held some of Islamism's most well-known ideologues. This was the prison where Sayyid Qutb, the ideological godfather of modern-day Jihadism, was held. It was at Mazrah Tora that Qutb wrote his seminal
Ma'alim fi al-Tariq
or
Milestones,
which led to his execution in 1966, instantly turning him into a flame that would light the sky for thousands of future Islamists.

The manuscript for
Milestones
was smuggled out of this prison by Mohammed al-Badei, a young devotee of Qutb's at the time and a member of Egypt's largest Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. By the time I got to Mazrah Tora, Dr. Badei had again been imprisoned along with many of the Brotherhood's leadership in the case known as “The Professors,”
Qadiyat al-Asaatiza.
By now he was a member of the leadership of the Brotherhood, serving on their Office of Guidance—
Maktab al-Irshad.
During those days we became close, exchanging many stories about his friendship with Qutb.

Badei would go on to become
Murshid al-‘aam,
the Supreme Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. After Mubarak's removal in 2011, the new Egypt is practically ruled by his group. Among other Muslim Brotherhood prisoners there were Dr. Essam el-Aryan, their spokesman at the time; and Abdul Monim Abul Fatouh, an Islamist presidential hopeful. The Brotherhood was not revolutionary or militant Islamists, and as such their members usually attracted shorter sentences, typically two or three years.

There were also many members of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, which until its ceasefire in 1999 had been Egypt's largest terrorist organization. This was the larger faction that broke away from Salim al-Rahhal's Tanzim al-Jihad
after the assassination of President Sadat. Following their ceasefire, the majority of Gama'a's members signed up to what became known as the
muraja'aat
or “revisions,” essentially renouncing their former militancy. However, they remained Salafists in doctrine and nonviolent Islamists in ideology. Among their number, with us throughout the holy month of Ramadan, was one of their founders, Sheikh Salah Hashim.

There were still prisoners at Mazrah Tora who had been involved in the assassination of Sadat back in 1981. The main assassins had been executed, but those involved in the plot who were still incarcerated included former Egyptian military intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Aboud al-Zommor and his cousin Tareq al-Zommor, who were held in our wider prison complex, and Dr. Tariq and Salah Bayoumi, who were held in our block.

Some of those executed in this case had been sent to their deaths back in 1982 by Maher el-Guindi, who was then the public prosecutor. As the years progressed, el-Guindi had gone on to become the governor of the province of Giza. One day the prison was alive with commotion. “What is it, what's going on?” I asked. Maher el-Guindi has been convicted for bribery and corruption, I was told. He would be joining us here in Mazrah Tora, to live among the remainder of the Sadat case, those still left alive after he sent their colleagues to the gallows. An extremely odd scenario unfolded that week in Mazrah, as some of the assassins of Sadat sat in conversation with the public prosecutor who had led the case for their convictions twenty-two years earlier.

“That man was a bloodhound, supervising interrogations over brutal torture, and I never stopped my
du'a,
my prayers, that one day he too would see justice as we have,” Salah Bayoumi said to me that day. “Allah never raises anyone high except that he brings them down again. You watch, Maagid, one day my Lord will place Mubarak in here too,
bi iznillah,
with God's permission.”

There were other jihadists too, like Akram, a British-Egyptian accused of supporting Islamic Jihad, Ayman Zawahiri's group before he joined bin Laden and started al-Qaeda. We befriended Akram and helped him to make consular contact after he told us tales of his brutal torture. Soon, a number of new foreign nationals began to arrive. They had all been convicted in the case known as
Qadiyat al-wa'ad.
These were a new breed of global jihadists, raised under the shadow of al-Qaeda. International, extreme, fully trained, and dangerous, they cut an intimidating specter. There were two Dagestanis, built like Russian bears: Omar Hajiyev and Ahmed. Omar was a professional bomb-maker. Having learned his trade in Chechnya and Afghanistan, he had been making his way to Gaza in an effort to train Hamas in his deadly skill. He had been sentenced to seventeen years in jail, but I often wonder what became of him after the mass prison breakouts during Egypt's uprising a few years ago.

Finally, at the other end of the political spectrum, there were leading liberal political prisoners and even those accused of homosexuality from Egypt's infamous “Queen Boat” case—where fifty-two men were arrested for being on a floating gay nightclub. A blue-eyed, well-off Egyptian named Sharif was the most visible prisoner accused in that case. Imagine if you can the dynamics between the jihadists and those from the Queen Boat case, being held in the same prison block.

Two of President Mubarak's more high-profile liberal rivals, heads of the Tomorrow Party, were there as well: presidential candidate Ayman Nour and sociology lecturer Sa'ad el-Din Ibrahim. Nour had stood against Mubarak for the presidency in 2005, finishing second. In other words, he won. As his reward, he was duly accused of fraudulently acquiring signatures to register his party, all one hundred of them, and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. His criminal conviction meant that he was barred from standing for president again.

Dr. Ibrahim had written an article denouncing Mubarak's plans to groom his son Gemal as his successor. In the article, Ibrahim argued that Egypt must not become a “monocracy,” a
jumlukia
, a hybrid phrase from the Arabic word
jumhouriya,
a republic, and
mulkiyya,
a monarchy. Ibrahim's was a seminal piece that shifted the liberal mood in Egypt against Gemal Mubarak ever taking the reins of power after his father. This infuriated Hosni Mubarak. Ibrahim's eventual conviction for “bringing Egypt into disrepute abroad” shocked the world, especially the Americans, and was crucial in shifting US policy toward pushing Egypt for more and faster reform.

Together with Ayman Nour's, the injustice Ibrahim faced went on to feed the growing liberal discontent that eventually led to Egypt's uprising, and Sa'ad el-Din Ibrahim became recognized as one of the liberal intellectual godfathers of this uprising. Many years later, as I addressed former president George W. Bush's conference in Dallas, I was to be reunited with Sa'ad el-Din over a video link; as the conference looked on, we conversed for the first time about our days together at Mazrah Tora prison.

All of these figures, like me, were imprisoned on one side of Mazrah Tora. In the same way that Egypt had a parallel judicial system—the official one, and the Aman al-Dawlah one—so this prison was split down the middle. On the opposite side of us was the criminal block, separated by guards. The split personality of the prison was emphasized by the dual command of the place: besides the prison governor, there was an Aman al-Dawlah
zaabit
assigned to our side. The name he used, probably fake, was Mohammed ‘Ashwawi.

From time to time, Aman al-Dawlah would embark upon sporadic crackdowns against the Muslim Brotherhood, and because there were so many of them, the criminal blocks on the other side of the jail would have to be cleared out. We were all then stuffed, thirty or more at a time, into these group cells to make space. There'd just be row after row of beds with inches of space in between. These crackdowns would last for months, and while they went on, all the hard-fought-for privileges we'd gained would disappear.

The more people they shoved into those cells, the more the tension ramped up. Two or three prisoners had recently died before us in custody; one was Hisham, my cell-neighbor for a while. Whenever that happened, we would take to banging our cell doors all night in mourning. It was a macabre and eerie spectacle: loud metal clanging would echo throughout the prison, punctured sometimes by wailing and cries of mourning, tempered other times by the murmured sounds of desperate prayer.

Now, as the air was already thick with pent-up anger and the cells already overflowing, Aman al-Dawlah announced the arrival of yet more prisoners. Tempers boiled over. Over-crammed and frustrated, all of us swarmed out of our cells in a rage and, in a direct challenge to Aman al-Dawlah, refused to go back in. The prison sent in the riot police. The brothers, well-versed in prison rebellion, were skilled at causing a commotion, and had everyone whipped up into fervor. When they arrived, the riot police were an intimidating sight. Fully armored, they banged out a warning rhythm on their shields with their batons as they marched toward us in rows.

Focused fully on the approaching batons and shields, determined to stand my ground, I was too enraged to turn around and look at what was unfolding behind me.

“Enough!
Kifayah!
We've had enough! We're not animals, you cannot stuff more people into these cells!” I was shouting at the top of my voice.

But as I turned, to my surprise, I saw that all the Egyptian prisoners had retreated back into the cells! Their fervor had been nothing more than hot air. Or maybe it was experience: they'd been there before and didn't want to go there again. And now, outside alone, enraged, desperate, and just plain fatigued, I turned my anger away from the approaching batons and drumming shields and began shouting at the prisoners instead.

“Traitors, cowards! Where have you run to? Come and fight, you cowards!”

The brothers looked upon me pitifully. They saw me for what I was: a desperate and tired young man who just wanted to go home. Some of my friends came back out then, and gently held me close to calm me down, and guided me back to my cell before I was beaten black and blue.

“
Akhi
Maagid, there's no point. It's going to achieve nothing, we just have to exercise
sabr
—be patient. You cannot defeat Aman al-Dawlah like this.”

Except for when we forced their hand, we didn't benefit from much British government intervention in that prison. In fact, “liberating” Iraq, rather than liberating tortured British prisoners in Egypt, seemed more of a priority for British politicians. Back in the UK, our local representatives David Amess and Stephen Timms kept the issue alive in Parliament, and our lawyer Sadiq Khan did whatever he could, including visiting us once in Mazrah Tora, but polite condemnations don't carry well across the oceans. These years marked the height of Bush's War on Terror: the Iraq War was unfolding during my incarceration, and the West needed Mubarak's support. Indeed, Prime Minister Tony Blair had accepted a succession of free holidays from Mubarak at the exclusive Sharm el-Sheikh resort while we Britons were tortured in Mubarak's jails. (Blair later stated he had made a charitable donation equal to the cost.)

But now and then, through acts of pure desperation, we were able to influence events. On one occasion, Ian got into an altercation with a prison guard. The guard complained to the warden, and Ian was duly thrown into solitary confinement. As the main conduit between us three and the warden, I went to see him to try to mediate on Ian's behalf.

“If I say Ian is in solitary, he's in solitary,” the warden snarled. “And I suggest you back down immediately, Maagid. If you don't, I'll have you deported to another prison. I can set you up, have you killed by another prisoner, and no one will ever know. It's as easy as that.”

This was simply too much.
You're threatening to kill me? You're threatening to do to me what Combat 18 never did, what Aman al-Dawlah never got round to? You, a prison warden in Mazrah Tora, are threatening to kill me?

You obviously do not know my Lord, Creator of the universe, Master of the heavens and earth, for he has shielded me in the harshest of battles, and against the worst of all odds, and I would be grossly ungrateful to Him if I now cowered before your threat.

So I will resist you, like I resisted all those before you who tried to force me down, and I will win. Unified, we will all stand against you
bi iznillah,
and we will fight you with all our might and all our bodies, and our Lord will see you fall. Mr. Warden, your time is up.