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An Insider's Exposé Of Islamist Extremism
Charles Moore reviews Radical by Maajid Nawaz.

To the white majority, who even now think of this country as a placid place, it will seem extraordinary that the author of this dramatic memoir was born in Southend. Maajid Nawaz is still only in his mid-thirties. He was brought up in a prosperous, middle-class, anglophile household of Pak origin. In his teens, he became an Essex ''b-boy'', and got into fights with Paki-bashing skinheads. In college in London, and later at its renowned School of Oriental and African Studies, he was an extreme Islamist activist. He was present when one of his fellow bully boyz stabbed an African student to death. He married at 21, and had a son.

Nawaz was a leading firebrand
...firebrands are noted more for audio volume and the quantity of spittle generated than for any actual logic in their arguments...
 in Hizb al-Tahrir (HT), the cut-thoat organization that wishes to overthrow all infidel regimes and establish a new Mohammedan Caliphate. Although it is not itself a terror organization, its ideology legitimises violence. The author traces what he calls its ''snail's trail'' all the way to al-Qaeda.

Nawaz did not agitate in Britannia alone. He went first to Denmark, and then to Pakistain, where HT was stirring up students and recruiting army officers of that newly nuclear nation to bring about an Islamist coup. Then he went to Mubarak's Egypt to spread the HT word there. He was jugged
Drop the rosco and step away witcher hands up!
, tortured and spent more than four years in prison. His arrest took place after September 11 2001. There is some suggestion that the British authorities were complicit.

When Nawaz was released in 2006, he returned to Britannia and a hero's welcome from the cut-thoats. But while he was in jail, a different story had been ''unfolding inside my own head''. Starting with his doubts about the motives of the HT leaders, he began to ask himself deeper questions. Despite his rhetorical devotion to Islam, he had been obsessively political, and knew little about the religion in whose name he had struggled and plotted. In jail, he studied. He also met lots of other people, including secularists, imprisoned for beliefs quite unlike his own. He found that he respected them. He concluded that his zealotry had not been truly religious, but a Mohammedan-coloured version of Western student revolt: ''We Islamists were the bastard children of colonialism.''

So Brother Maajid broke away from HT, even as he was being offered its British leadership, and even though the break brought his marriage to an end. Temporarily homeless, and sleeping at night in his Renault Clio parked in Tavistock Square, near the scene of the July 7 bombings of 2005, Nawaz conceived a mission to bring ''democratic awakening'' to Mohammedans here and abroad. He set up Quilliam, the first Mohammedan organization dedicated to confronting the bad boys. Nowadays, he is trying to create political pluralism in Pakistain, Egypt and Libya. He helped David Cameron
... has stated that he is certainly a big Thatcher fan, but I don't know whether that makes me a Thatcherite, which means he's not. Since he is not deeply ideological he lacks core principles and is easily led. He has been described as certainly not a Pitt, Elder or Younger, but he does wear a nice suit so maybe he's Beau Brummel ...
 with his important Munich speech on countering bad boy ideology.

It is a horrifying reflection on modern Britannia that a young man of Nawaz's talents and background should have had such a lurid life-history. It is clear from his story that this was not the result of bad parents or any personality disorder: thousands of able young Mohammedans were part of this fanaticism. (Many still are.) It is also clear that, at almost every turn, those in authority in white Britannia were grotesquely ignorant, overindulgent or just plain scared about what organizations like HT were up to. The liberal Left were particularly credulous: ''How we Islamists laughed at their naivety.''

In college, HT could easily turn the Islamic Society into its front organization, and students had no trouble carrying knives at all times. ''Hate speech'' which, Nawaz writes, would have been jumped on if it had come from the BNP, was indulged because it came from people with brown skin. In Pakistain, teaching English via the British Council was a recognised means of livelihood for HT agitators. Our host culture was so abject that it effectively incited attacks upon itself.

And yet, other, better things did rub off. At his grammar school in Essex, Nawaz records, he used to indulge in anti-homosexual rants in front of a teacher called Mr Moth who was, though young Maajid did not know it at the time, gay. By having faith in Maajid's academic ability, Mr Moth encouraged him to apply for the best at university. The author never forgot, and had "this overwhelming feeling that I didn't want to let Mr Moth down''. He also absorbed British ideas of freedom, justice and debate. Returning from prison in Egypt, Nawaz apostrophises London: ''How I despised you and loved you... head of the colonial snake that poisoned my people...yet also bastion of justice, the rule of law and fair play... I know that my boots are never safer than when resting in your green parks.''

Along with The Islamist, written by Nawaz's former colleague, Ed Husain, Radical does a huge public service in exposing how Islamism works, how terribly far it has got, and how it can be countered.

Because of its violent, continent-crossing story, this book seems quite out of the ordinary, but in its underlying tone, I find it reassuringly familiar. The author is brave, but he is not a prophet or a thinker. He is a bright, eloquent young man who wants to get on. It is one of the key tasks of a successful modern society to channel such people into beneficial or at least harmless directions. In the case of Maajid Mawaz, this seems to be working. On the final page, he reveals with bathetic pride that he has been approached to become a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament. How long before he is deputy prime minister?
Posted by: trailing wife 2012-07-31
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=349337