A Radical's Road out of Islamist Extremism
Radical, by Maajid Nawaz, brings the reader inside the individual human dynamics of one young man's transition into extremist Islamism and his eventual departure from it.
News stories about Westerners recruited into radical Islamist movements are all too plentiful. Questions regarding what to do about this trend are even more abundant. Insights into the heart of the problem remain disturbingly rare.
Shedding some light in this dark void is an extraordinary new autobiography, Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism, by Maajid Nawaz. Radical offers readers an insider's view of recruitment into an Islamist organization, hardcore activism, and ultimately what makes departure from such a movement possible. Nawaz uses the term "Islamism" to describe a political movement. Islam, by contrast, serves as an influence which ultimately leads Nawaz out of extremism.
Maajid Nawaz was born in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex, England to parents of Pakistani descent. He grew up in a middle-class family in a region of England where the vast majority of the population is white. During his youth, some portion of that white population wanted no part of anyone with darker skin in their midst. Racist, brutish kids in his town aggressively harassed kids with darker skin, Nawaz included.
In Nawaz's account of his childhood, I was struck by how the lack of religious formation he had as a child seems to have contributed to his vulnerability when Islamist recruiters swooped into his life, claiming to explain to him what Islam really is. His parents were largely secular, and the local mosque did not seem to have any serious interest in raising children in the Islamic faith. As Nawaz describes, "The few times I'd been to the mosque it had been a disaster. The imam didn't speak English, and . . . I told my parents I wasn't going back because he used to hit children."
By age 16, Nawaz was "angry and disenfranchised." And he knew very little about the teachings of Islam. His was a context ripe for the Islamist political radicals who began to introduce him to a world of "grievances, identity crises, charismatic recruiters, and compelling narratives."
These radicals were from an international movement that calls itself "Hizb al-Tahrir," Arabic for The Party of Liberation. Hizb al-Tahrir, aka HT, aims to establish a world-wide government serving, and imposing, its own interpretation of Islam. These HT activists offered their plans for global governance to Nawaz as a ready-made solution for everything ranging from his own problems of racist harassment to the rest of the world's problems too.
Later in life, Nawaz realized "what Islamism is all about: it isn't a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences." As a fundamentally political movement, religion was important only in so far as it served HT's political aims. Thus the relevance of the Quran and other texts of the Islamic tradition was reduced to their support for HT. Nawaz describes the selective reading of Islamic texts for HT's self-justification: "The element," writes Nawaz, "that supported the story was mentioned; the part that complicated the issue was ignored."
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