Radical (24 page)

Immediately Ian, Reza, and I launched a hunger strike. For eleven days and nights we didn't eat, insisting that the warden be investigated and charged with threatening to murder me. As the media attention piled on, the prison was plunged into tension. By the seventh day, with extremely low blood pressure, I became bedridden and unable to stand. But unlike the riot-that-wasn't, this time it was just the three of us involved, and we were determined not to give in. It often amazes me at how men in positions of authority so often underestimate the willpower of the desperate.

There is an old tradition ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, ‘
alayhi salam
—“The prayer of the oppressed is never rejected.” Whether by divine intervention or sheer determination, in my experience, eventually, the oppressed always manage to turn the tables. On the eleventh day the authorities cracked. The British ambassador to Egypt came to the prison personally and explained that our demands had been met. (The warden was investigated and ultimately removed.) It was a rare, sweet victory in those harshest of years. But our most common prayer in prison during those years, which we shared with tens of thousands of other interned detainees, was to see Hosni Mubarak face justice during our lifetimes. My Lord does not fail me.

P
ART
T
HREE

R
ADICAL

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah . . . it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.

—JALALUDDIN RUMI

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Where the Heart Leads, the Mind Can Follow

In some ways, the most interesting story from my days in Mazrah Tora was the one unfolding inside my own head. Many political prisoners, and criminals alike, harden their beliefs and skills while incarcerated, and come out more committed than ever. With its rich mix of prisoners, from the assassins of Sadat all the way through to the liberals and even homosexuals, Mazrah Tora became a political and social education
par excellence
for me. The studies, conversations, and experiences I gained in Mazrah Tora, over months and years, were crucial in overcoming my dogmatic allegiance to the Islamist ideology. Having entered prison as an extremely idealistic twenty-four-year-old, full of rage against society, and having nothing else to do but study over the course of four years, I came to reevaluate everything I stood for.

My change of views wasn't an overnight process. Ideological dogma doesn't work like that: it's not like a tap you can just switch off. So ingrained was HT's cause in my very being that it would be a process of years for me to work my way out of it. First emotionally, and then intellectually, then politically, and finally socially, until piece by piece I had to reconstruct my entire personality from the inside out. This is not an easy thing to do.

Although I'd started this process by the time I left prison, I would return to the UK still a member of HT. It would be another year before I announced my departure from the leadership of my group, and more time still before I finally dropped the remnants of my Islamist baggage. That's five years to overturn the ideological convictions that had defined me for over a decade. This was the prism, the mind-set from within which I had viewed the world: to unpick that, in descending order, until I questioned all my fundamental convictions was nothing less than a paradigm shift, and in those days there was no one to guide me.

The starting point of my leaving had probably occurred back in Pakistan. My treatment out there had given me pause for thought about HT: not the ideas themselves, but the people who were in charge of the organization. A similar moment occurred at the trial, with Jalaluddin's “supreme command” that we should be more “defiant.” I had plenty of time to think about these events, lying awake in my cell.

Each time, it had been me who had gone forward, sacrificed everything for the cause: in Pakistan, my degree and educational future, and in Egypt my body, yet each time there were idle hawks hounding me due to their own personal insecurities. This didn't challenge my faith in Islam, or initially my belief in the Islamist ideology, but it did make me question the capability, tactics, and strategy of these figures. This, I believe, is the beginning of the process of leaving an ideological movement, for those brave enough to see their thinking through to its logical conclusion. Like an onion, you have to continue to peel back each layer and expose the next one, no matter how painful that process may be. My disillusionment with HT leaders and their tactics meant that by the time I was sentenced, I was ready for some serious thinking about my ideology.

The behavior of HT members, though, was not the only factor that started me on this route. I believe that where the heart leads, the mind can follow. After our conviction, Amnesty International adopted us as “prisoners of conscience” and began campaigning openly and vigorously for our release. This came about through the tireless work of John Cornwall, who insisted at Amnesty that our case was worthy of the organization's support. Having been put away solely on the basis of our beliefs, we deserved to be adopted officially as prisoners of conscience. John, a frail Christian man in his eighties, campaigned for us with a passion not seen in most twenty-year-olds, and our story together eventually became the subject of an Amnesty video aired on television.

Not everyone within Amnesty agreed that they should be campaigning on our behalf. I later learned that the subject of whether the group should support us became quite a hot topic internally. The counterargument was that, although we had committed no crimes ourselves, the ideology that we preached advocated a gross invasion of human rights. Once our version of “the
Khilafah
” was formed, we advocated an aggressive policy of foreign invasion and expansion, the death penalty for apostates, “rebels,” and homosexuals, and a forced dress code for women. Thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off, and adulterous women would be stoned to death. Why should Amnesty campaign for our human rights, when given the opportunity we would deprive others of theirs?

There's no easy answer to this question. What if, prior to coming to power, Adolf Hitler had been detained for his not-yet-violent beliefs in national socialism? Or what if, closer to my own story, Mubarak came to be tortured as Gaddafi was? Amnesty resolved this controversy in the manner of Voltaire, best summarized using the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Biases aside, that's the only possible answer for me to arrive at. Any other stance makes a mockery of the universality of human rights. Even now, as I spend my life campaigning against extremism, I would still want Amnesty to protect prisoners in a similar position to the one I was in. And I will defend people's right to read
Mein Kampf,
or Qutb's
Milestones,
even as I fight both far-right fascists and Islamists equally. But the devil is in the details. Where I disagree with not just Amnesty but also many human-rights groups is in their failure to highlight a clear and obvious distinction between a victim of human-rights abuses and a champion of human-rights causes.

Any prisoner held solely for the nonviolent expression of their beliefs has an unconditional right to our support as a fellow human being. However, not every former prisoner should be automatically hailed as a champion of human rights and placed on platforms as a spokesperson for human-rights causes. I will campaign against anyone who would want to torture Mubarak, for he remains a human being, but I would never extend to any one of the Mubarak regime's men a human-rights platform from which to address an impressionable crowd of students. He may have been mistreated after the uprising, but he is not now some great champion of human rights. A human-rights platform, by virtue of what it is, must necessarily have a stricter tolerance threshold.

Many human-rights groups blur this distinction when it comes to propping up Islamist and jihadist speakers on their platforms. Life is more complicated than that. Islam, Islamism, and jihadists are more complicated than that. Just as the world is not a binary between Muslims against all others, it is also not a binary between America against all others. The long-term credibility of human-rights causes rests on the perception of principle, a perception damaged if populist causes are reduced to campaign binaries, whether during the War on Terror or recently during the Arab uprisings. In this, I gently agree with Gita Sahgal's principled critique from inside Amnesty's International Secretariat, for which she was suspended from Amnesty.

As a former Amnesty prisoner of conscience, and as someone forever indebted to the organization, my advice comes from someone who discovered Amnesty's principles the hard way. Amnesty's support was a fundamental part of my political journey. I am, in part, the person I am today because of their decision to campaign for me. It's because of this that I do not want to see anything dilute that message; their work on human rights is too important for that.

It was the unconditional nature of Amnesty's support that humbled me:
you're a human being, so you deserve our support.
There was something very powerful and very pure about that premise. Like many ideologies, Islamism derives part of its power from its dehumanization of “the other.” It is easier to dismiss and do things to “the other” if you consider them as unworthy: the Nazis and the Jews; the jihadists and the infidels. Throughout my teenage and young adult life, I had been dehumanized by others and desensitized to violence. As I got sucked into the Islamist ideology, I in turn began to dehumanize others.

Amnesty's support challenged all that: instead of dehumanizing people, it
rehumanized
them. I thought now of Sav and Marc, of Matt and Dan—stabbed for their association with me, of Dave Gomer and Mr. Moth, of my mother's partner, bonds that were forged with non-Muslims who cared about my well-being. And instead of being fascinated with the afterlife and death, for the first time in many years I began to reconnect with life itself, and with humanity. This is not something you can teach; it is something you must live and feel. Where the heart leads, the mind can follow.

I began to see the other human interventions around me in a different light, too. At 8:50 on the morning of July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded on London Underground trains in a coordinated terrorist attack. Just under an hour later, a fourth bomb was detonated on the back of a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, right by my university, SOAS. In total, fifty-two people were killed and many hundreds injured. Sa'eed Nur had become many Sa'eed Nurs. Jihadism had finally struck London. From the distant vantage point of Mazrah Tora at the time, I felt revulsion when I heard the news. In contrast to my reaction to 9/11, I immediately thought of the human cost involved. Gone were my ideological acrobatics and Machiavellian justifications. This time I saw the plain and simple death of innocents.

That wasn't the view of everyone in the prison. Many, including Omar Hajiyev, my Dagestani bomb-maker friend, were initially proud of the terrorists' action. Omar was still at war, and London was a legitimate target. Britain had taken part in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, where they had bombed and killed thousands of “our” civilians and occupied “our” lands. The government that led that action had been voted in by popular vote. Politically and theologically, Omar was convinced that “an eye for an eye” was the appropriate deterrent for these infidel
kuffar.
It was his job, after all, to train young jihadists in the fine arts of doing exactly that. Omar felt satisfaction that we Muslims were finally prepared and able to strike back. Here was a man fully and operationally capable of preparing such attacks himself.

Whereas before I would have either quietly scoffed at
kuffar
suffering as not my affair, or toed the HT line that such acts were simply a distraction from our real goal, this time I actually felt the human cost involved. Compassion now moved me where once only anger had. I turned to Omar and asked him: Do you know where the biggest demonstrations against the Iraq War took place? From news clippings in old newspapers, I showed him pictures of the million-strong march of February 15, 2003, in London. The fact that the largest demonstration against the Iraq War was not in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan, but in the UK, touched me. These were human beings in London, campaigning for other human beings in Iraq.
Rehumanization. Where the heart leads, the mind can follow.

I explained to Omar that just because a government goes to war doesn't mean that everyone supports it. Democracy is not the same as a referendum, and there was no referendum on Iraq. And even if there had been, it would not have endorsed willingly killing Iraqi civilians. “By your argument,” I continued, “you should blow up Turkey before you detonate a bomb in London. Turkey's a member of NATO, which supported the war as well. Turkey's a democracy, too, and the protests there were nothing on the scale of those in London, so surely by your logic the Turks must have been more supportive of the war than the British.”

Omar shook his head: “But the Turkish people are Muslims; we can't be killing our own people.”

And I continued to push: “So whom you kill is less about principle and more about expediency? Human life for you is about political point-scoring? Then how is what you're fighting for any better than what you are fighting against? How can you feign disgust at Bush's war games when this is just a game to you, too? Don't you see, if the Turkish people aren't a legitimate target for attack, then neither are the British people. Look,” I pointed to the placards being waved on the march, “here are Christian groups, Muslim groups, political groups, students, old-age pensioners, just people.
Ittaqillah, akhi,
fear Allah's judgment.”