Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck byone thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at somepoint in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper ofjihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside thelibrary calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death toDemocracy."
In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young mentalk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistanto "resist." Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. Itshares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem.Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.
The East End is a cramped grey mazeof council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to oneside and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financialelites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump ofpoverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place hasalways been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like myfather – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to thecold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.
The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh,or India, or Somaliasay they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here towork and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No:these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslimpopulation, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslimsdisagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by youngEnglishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority ofthe minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.
But every attempt I have made up to now to get into theirheads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious Londonhub, Finsbury Parkmosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure.These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranicquotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government andthe freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – toask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombingtheir own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet moreopaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't dopsychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have thisparticular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right,and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.
But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movementthat could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now.A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as theirfriends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything theylearned on the inside, to stop the jihad.
Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out"in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tellme the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be thekey to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent threemonths exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their storysprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt'sdictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan– and back again.
I. The Imam
My journey began when, sitting in one of the grotty greasyspoon cafés that fill the East End, I heard a youngwoman in hijab mention that the imam of one of the local mosques was a jihadiwho had fought in Afghanistan,but is now facing death threats from the very men he once fought alongside. His"crime"? To renounce his past and call for "a secularIslam."
After a series of phone calls, Usama Hassan cautiouslyagrees to talk. I meet him outside his little mosque in Leyton. It sits in themiddle of a run-down sprawl of pound stores ("Everything only£1!!!"), halal kebab shops, and boarded-up windows at the edge of the East End.
Usama is a big, broad bear of a man in a black blazer andwire-rimmed glasses. He greets me with a hefty handshake; he has a rolled-upnewspaper under his arm. He takes me upstairs to a pale-green prayer room. Thisbuilding was once a factory, then a cinema; now, with Saudi money, it is aWahabi mosque. Men are kneeling silently towards Mecca,rising and bending in reverential waves. "On Fridays, there are Islamistswho stand outside and warn worshippers that their prayers won't count if theyare led by me," he says as we squat in the corner, "because I'msupposedly an apostate. A fake imam." He looks away. "I get phonecalls late at night. Threats. It's painful. You see, I was like themonce."
And so Usama begins to tell me his story. He arrived inTottenham in North London in the mid- 1970s, when he wasfive years old. His Pakistani father was sent here by the Saudi Ministry ofReligious Affairs, which aims to spread its puritan desert strain of Islam toevery nation. His family led a locked-down life, trying to adhere to Saudi principlesin a semi-detached house in the English suburbs. "We weren't allowed musicor TV or any contact with the opposite sex," he says. "We were verysheltered. I didn't go out a great deal." By the age of 10, he hadmemorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.
He had a strong sense of the Britain beyond his walls – theBritain where I was growing up – as a hostile, violent place. "You have tounderstand – it was the time of the Tottenham riots. It felt violent in thestreets," he says. "I got used to expecting white people to use thePaki word. We used to have a fear of skinheads the whole time."
But Usama was offered a scholarship to the heart of theEnglish elite – the City of London Boys' School, where he could practicecricket at Lord's. He bonded with the Jews at the school as outsiders andsupporters of Tottenham Hotspur football team. He still speaks like the publicschoolboy he was – in long, confident sentences.
Some berobed men are staring at us, so he takes me down tothe mosque's office. "At that time, being a Muslim meant being anIslamist. It was taken for granted," he says. So when he was 13, he joinedan Islamic fundamentalist organisation called Jimas. At big sociableconferences every weekend, they were told: you don't feel at home in Britain,but you can't go "home" to a country you have never visited. So wehave a third identity for you – a pan-national Islamism that knows noboundaries and can envelop you entirely.
It sounds familiar. This is the identity I hear shouted byyoung Islamists throughout the East End: I might sound like you, but I amnothing like you. I am Other. I belong elsewhere – in a place that does not yetexist, but that I will create, with my fists and my fury.
Jimas told their members they were part of a persecutedbillion, being blown up and locked down across the world. "It was a bitlike a gang," he says. "And we had a strong sense of being undersiege. It was all a conspiracy against Islam, and we were the guardians ofIslam. That's how we saw ourselves ... A lot of my friends would wear the armyboots, and carry knives." I realise now that for a nebbish intellectualboy, it must have felt intoxicating to be told he was part of a militarymovement that would inevitably conquer history.
For his summer vacation in 1990 – as a break from studyingphysics at Cambridge University – he went to wage jihad on the battlefields ofAfghanistan. He arrived with two friends from Jimas at an Arab-run trainingcamp in the mountains of Kunar in Eastern Afghanistan. It was a sparsecollection of tents and weapons left behind by the CIA in the snow and blood.They spent the days running up and down mountains learning how to fireKalashnikovs and rocket launchers. "When you fire a Kalashnikov, it echoesall around the mountain," he says. "After this boring life, you feelthe adrenaline pumping."
The Arab fighters wore four layers of clothes and stillshivered. They had never seen snow before, so every now and then, they wouldlay down their weapons to have a long, gleeful snow-fight. Once they had alllearned how to kill, they were taken to the front line to shell the communisthold-outs. "One of the shells landed very close to us, about 100ftaway." He fired in retaliation. "I hope we never killed anybody,"he says quickly.
Usama tells his story fluently and fast, and rides overthese difficult moments – a killing – like a speed-bump. He thought an earthlyparadise would rise from the rubble he was creating – and remake the world inits image. "The expectation was that Afghanistan would become this dreamIslamic state," he adds, "which would then spread all over theworld." He returned to Cambridge University determined to convert as manyof his fellow Muslim students as possible to Wahabism. "It was relativelyeasy to persuade them," he says. "People were looking for groupidentity. They were very confused: what does it mean to live as a Muslim insociety like this? We had easy answers. Go back to the original sources, and[follow it] literally."
At the centre of this vision was the need to rebuild thecaliphate – the Islamic state under sharia law persisted from the time ofMohamed until 1924. "It was a very dreamy, romantic idea," he says."If anybody asked questions about how it would work, we would just say –the people that will make it happen will be so saintly, they will make theright decisions." It was the old promise of the revolutionary down theages: there would be a single revolutionary heave in which all politicalconflict would dissolve forever, and a conflict-free paradise would be born.
Usama's job was to persuade people to go to fight inAfghanistan and, from the mid-1990s, Bosnia. He was one of the best – and hesays, again very fast, that one of his successes was to radicalise Omar Sheikh,the man now on death row in Pakistan for beheading Daniel Pearl. "I sethim off on his path to Jihad," he says. He looks a little excited, and alittle appalled. The first thing he remembers about Sheikh – who he met at aJimas study circle – is the fresh lemonade he made in his university rooms."It was delicious. And we drank and drank. My first impression of him wasthat he was a clean-shaven, well-educated British public schoolboy. A lovelybloke."
Sheikh was furious about the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia,and demanded the study group lay down their Koranic debates and act. Usama toldhim: "If you're really serious, you can go and fight. I know people whohave gone and fought. I can introduce you to them." And so his journey totorturing and murdering a Jewish journalist – simply because he was a Jew –began.
Usama doesn't want to talk about him any more: he changesthe subject, and I have to bring him back to it. "Nothing is provedagainst him. He's fighting extradition," he says, after a long pause."But ... " He has an awkward smile. An embarrassed smile. He quicklycarries on speaking, ushering us away from Daniel Pearl.
People come in and out of the mosque office, and Usamalowers his voice a little. He says that as he was persuading young men to goand kill, he noticed something disconcerting: the Afghan mujahedin he hadfought for were not building a paradise on earth after all. Instead, they weremerrily slaying each other. "This great, glorious Islamic revolution – itdidn't happen, at all ... they just killed each other."
As he watched the news of the Luxor massacre in Egypt orHamas suicide-bombings of pizzerias in Tel Aviv, "It just became more andmore difficult to justify that." He found himself thinking about theJewish friends he had made at school. "They were just like me – humanbeings. And we had a lot in common. The dietary laws, and the identity issues,and the fear of racism." As he heard the growing Islamist chants atdemonstrations – "The Jews are the enemy of God," they yelled –something, he says, began to sag inside him.
The stifled language Usama is using to describe his pastreminds me of a recovering alcoholic trying to piece together his fragmentedmemories and understand who he was. When he talks about anti-Semitism, he isclearly ashamed; he giggles almost randomly, looks away, and looks back at mewith a puckered, disgusted look.
We have talked enough; we arrange to meet again. The secondtime I see him, in a café, he seems more guarded, as if he revealed too much.He shifts the conversation onto theology – the area where, I discover, everyex-jihadi feels happiest. He says the 7/7 bombings detonated a theological bombin his mind: "How could this be justified? I began to wonder if parts ofthe Koran are actually metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually justrevealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia."
Once the foundation stone of literalism was broken, he hadto remake the concepts that had led him to Islamism one-by-one. "Jihad hasmany levels in Islam – you have the internal struggle to be the best person youcan be. But all we had been taught is military jihad. Today I regard any kindof campaigning for truth, for justice, as a type of Jihad." He signed upto the pacifist Movement for the Abolition of War. He redefined martyrdom asanybody who died in an honourable cause. "There were martyrs on9/11," he says. "They were the firefighters – not thehijackers."
He says he found himself making arguments he once thoughtunthinkable – like arguing that women should be allowed to show their hair inpublic. Jihadi websites run by his old friends started to declare him anapostate, a crime that under their interpretation of sharia is punishable bydeath.
There have been demands that he should be ousted from themosque, but his father is its founder and chief imam, so he is protected fornow. He says – leaning forward, his voice losing its public school composure –that the threats have only made him more sure of the need for reform. He hasstarted to call for Muslims to abandon the "medieval interpretation of thesharia" that calls for the killing of apostates and homosexuals. He hassaid there should be a two-state solution in the Middle East. He has reachedthe conclusion that evolution is "a scientific fact".
And for the first time in his life, Usama has begun to allowhimself to listen to music. "I was taught to believe it shouldn't beallowed. But now, I listen on the car radio." I ask him what music helikes, and he lets out a high-pitched giggle. "You'll get me killed!"he says. "Everything in the charts." He gives me some names, but thencalls later and asks me not to print them: "That would be a step toofar."
As the threats against him rattle across the internet, Ilike to think of this as my last image of Usama – a 39-year-old man slowlyslipping off the Puritan chains in which he has been bound and finally, in hisfourth decade, beginning to dance, as he is circled by the angry ghosts of hisyounger self.
II. The Prisoner
The most famous former Islamist fanatic in Britain is MaajidNawaz – a high-cheekboned 31-year-old who walks with a self-confident strut. Imake an appointment with him through his personal assistant, and he stridesinto the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet in an immaculate andexpensive suit. He seems to blend perfectly into the multi-ethnic overclass whouse expensive hotels like this as their base; I have to remind myself with ajolt that, not so long ago, he was caught up in a murder in London, helped to plota coup in nuclear-tipped Pakistan, and served three years in the most notoriousprison in Egypt.
Maajid begins to tell me his story as if he is delivering aPowerPoint presentation. He has offered it before, and he will offer it again;it is his job now. He has distilled it into a script. When I try to pokebeneath it with questions, he seems irritated, and returns to the comfortableform of words he has established as soon as he can.
His journey towards Islamism began, he says, at the sandyedge of Essex, in the dilapidated coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. It is anold, elegant Victorian resort town drooping under a century of disrepair,reduced to a smattering of tatty arcades and a long, neglected pier thatreaches into a filthy sea. Maajid's parents were mildly prosperousfirst-generation immigrants from Pakistan. "My upbringing was completelyliberal from the start," he says. "In fact, I didn't even have aMuslim identity." He went to mosque only once, when he was 11, and an imamhit him with a stick for speaking too loudly.
Asian families were a rarity there in the 1980s, but he hada large group of white friends and felt no different to them. Yet when Maajidturned 14, a strange political shift was taking place in Southend. It began –for him, at least – one evening when Maajid, his brother and his friends wereat the funfair, leaping on and off the rides and eating candy floss. A group ofyoung skinheads spotted them and started making Nazi salutes and shouting"Seig Heil".
Maajid and his mates "ran the hell out of there",but a white van pulled up and seven skinheads piled out, wielding machetes.They cornered Maajid and one of his white friends. To his astonishment, theyturned to the friend and stabbed him repeatedly with a carving knife, shrieking:"Traitor! Traitor! Race traitor!" They drove off, leaving Maajidcovered in his friend's blood.
The story of what happened next is buried in yellowing cutsfrom the local newspapers. A pack of unemployed young men who had been kickingaround on Southend's beaches had joined the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18, namedafter Adolf Hitler's initials: A is "1" in the alphabet, H is"8". They targeted Maajid's friends one by one for befriending a"Paki". Over the next two years, three of his friends were stabbed,and one was smashed up with a hammer. Maajid began to distance himself from hiswhite friends, out of guilt. He drifted instead towards a group of young blackpeople who were also being terrorised by Combat 18. They would meet at houseparties and marinate themselves in hip-hop, Public Enemy, and cannabis fumes.He says: "Feeling totally rejected by mainstream society, we were lookingfor an alternative identity, and we found the perfect, cool, fashionableidentity through listening to hip-hop and speeches by Malcolm X."
One day, his brother came home bearing a sheath of leafletssaying Muslims were being massacred all over the world, from India to Bosnia toSouthend. He had stumbled on a stall in the High Street manned by a groupcalled Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). They said he would never be accepted in irreparablycorrupt, decadent and racist Britain: Combat 18 were the snarl hidden behindevery net curtain. Western society was merely a purgatory for Muslims, and theonly escape could be to migrate to a renewed and perfect caliphate somewhere inArabia. He joined up that day.
Maajid climbed the ranks of HT fast, because – with his easyeloquence – he was especially good at recruiting new members. After a year,they sent him to live in London and conquer a sixth form college. NewhamCollege is a sprawling glass-and-concrete school for 16- to 19-year-olds in themost depressed slab of London. There, Maajid found himself in a majority-Muslimenvironment for the first time. "I was like somebody who has been craving chocolatefor a long time who ends up in Belgium. I thought: these are my people. I knewexactly how to manipulate their grievances. And I did it. We took over thatcollege."
We are served tea by the kind of effusive waitress who worksin high-end London hotels. Maajid does not acknowledge her. He says it was"unbelievably easy" to recruit young Muslims to Islamism at thattime. He would start with lectures that "broke down the concepts they hadbeen told they should hold dear – like freedom and democracy", he says. Itwas only in the second or third talk, once humanism lay in rhetorical rubble,that he would announce: "God is in a better position to set those limitsthan you are, because you'd always contradict yourself, being an imperfecthuman." So then he would announce: "Let me tell you what Godsays."
When Maajid enrolled, there were hardly any girls wearingheadscarves; by the time he was thrown out a year later, most of them were. Thestand-alones were jeered at and harassed.
Maajid was elected President of the college's student unionand he was prickling with a Messianic sense of mission. He saw Newham Collegeas a microcosm of the changes that were swelling in the world. "Itliterally felt revolutionary. We had taken over the campus, and that we weresoon to take over the world ... We really believed the caliphate would beestablished any day soon." On the school's open day for prospective pupilsand parents, they staged a massive prayer demonstration. Dozens of them stoodin the main hall, yelling to Allah for vengeance. "We wanted to show theparents that if you're sending your kids here, these are the people incharge," he says.
I ask if anybody was arguing for a more liberal form ofIslam. Maajid laughs. "Absolutely not. No way. In fact, the only peoplewho were young that were articulating any form of Islam were theIslamists."
The only substantial push-back came from rival religiousgroups – especially students with a Nigerian Christian background, knownuniversally as "the blacks." There was a racist hysteria that theywere muggers and rapists and "somebody had to stand up to them,"Maajid says. "Along came us, these crusading Islamists, who didn't give ashit. We'd stand in front of them and say – we don't fear death, we don't fearyou, we only fear God." Allah was in their gang, and they were invincible.Young jihadis from outside the college started to hang around there, to defendthe Muslims from "the Christian niggers." A tall, aggressive recruitfrom Brixton called Saeed Nur was appointed as their "bodyguard". Heintimidated everyone into silence.
The news reports from the time confirm what happened next.One afternoon, a row broke over the use of the college pool table, as Maajidstood watching. A Nigerian student wanted to push the Muslims off it, and beganmaking derogatory remarks about Islam. Somebody called Saeed to "sort himout." As soon as he arrived, the Nigerian student pulled out a knife – andSaeed produced a Samurai blade and thrust it straight into the boy's chest. Ashe fell, the other Muslim students set on him with hammers and knives and poolcues. They beat him to death.
How did he feel about the victim? Did he think about hisfamily? He prods the questions away with a grunt. Maajid says he felt"indifferent" to the victim, but was pleased "the Muslimsprevailed in the end." He adds: "We were heroes in HT ranks."And he is back to his story. He doesn't want to retrieve his emotions.
He was expelled, and spent the next few years ascending theranks of HT, while pretending to study at various colleges. But he wanted to beat the heart of the jihad – and in 1999 he found a way. Abdel Kalim Zaloom, theglobal leader of HT, issued a command from his hidden base somewhere in theMiddle East. Pakistan had just unveiled its nuclear weapons to the world.Zaloom wanted them to seize Pakistan, so when the caliphate came it would benuclear-tipped. Maajid enrolled at Punjab University as a cover – and jettedoff to the country his parents had left a lifetime ago.
In the sprawling slum-strewn chaos of Karachi, Maajid found"the first crack in my ideological armour ... I thought – oh, my God. Ihad idealised Muslim societies, but the people here know less about Islam thanwe do. And look at how disorganised it is."
He met with a slew of junior Pakistani army officers who hadbeen training at Sandhurst, Britain's elite officer training academy."They seemed like quite decent, amiable chaps, who believed in ourideology," he says. They had been recruited by other members to HT,"and I told them to rise up the ranks of the army, and when we had anopportunity, to mount a coup and declare the caliphate in Pakistan."
And then, in the strangely bland CEO-speak theseex-Islamists often lapse into, he adds enthusiastically: "It was a veryexciting project. We thought it would happen in the medium-term."
Maajid won't be drawn – not now, and not in our laterconversations – on the details of this coup plot. Perhaps this is because he isworried about compromising his ability to visit Pakistan. The Pakistanimilitary spokesmen say it's a lie. The officers were, Maajid says, quietlyarrested by Pervez Musharraf's government in 2003, and are currently in prison.Maajid decided to move on to Egypt, and arrived to study in Alexandria on 10September 2001. When he saw the news from New York City, he felt – that wordagain – "indifferent." HT technically opposed the attacks, on thegrounds they were carried out by private individuals rather than by the army ofa renewed caliphate. But Maajid says "There was a huge wave of internalsympathy for [Bin Laden], because he's an ideological comrade, isn't he?"
He started to recruit other students, as he had done so manytimes before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected]government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. Butthere was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bushadministration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That madeit much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."
Then, at 3am one morning, a cadre of soldiers smashed intoMaajid's bedroom bearing machine guns and grenades. He was taken, blindfoldedand bound, to an underground bunker below the state security offices in Cairo.There were around 50 other men penned in. For three days, he kneeled, and heardthe men around him being tortured with electric cattle prods.
"I thought, 'This is something I have been mentallypreparing for, for a long time. I knew this day would come,'" he says. Onthe third day, the guards dragged him into an interrogation room with anotherBritish HT member. They punched him in the face and whacked him with batons.They produced the cattle prod. Maajid told them they wouldn't dare to torture aBritish citizen. "So they took the cattle prod and began electrocuting myfriend in front of my eyes."
The British Embassy called looking for its citizens. Theinterrogation stopped suddenly, and transferred them to prison. Maajid felt nogratitude. "All I thought was – why did it take them three days to findus? They obviously didn't care about the rights of Muslims." He laughs now– a cold laugh, at his former self.
In Mazratora Prison, Maajid was held in solitary confinementfor thee months. It was a bare cell with no bed, no light, and no toilet: justa concrete box. Then he was taken out suddenly and told his trial for"propagation by speech and writing for any banned organisation" wasbeginning in the Supreme State Emergency Court. But Maajid's Islamistconvictions were about to be challenged from two unexpected directions – themen who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Amnesty International.
HT abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" andbarely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed tosee him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred hispolitical views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech andto peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.
"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'dalways seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty,despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democraticvalues aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... itwas the beginning of my serious doubts."
For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a crampedcell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row afterrow of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid wasthrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat –Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah – had recently been moved to this dankcell. "This is like meeting Che Guevara – these great forerunners andideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from," he says. But"they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these yearsstudying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong."
After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsideredtheir views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive,literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there weremany differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yetthere had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced bya central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It wasalways left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation theywanted to follow," he says.
These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea ofusing state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a newand un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had madethe mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as aspiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended tobe specific to their time and place.
Maajid's ideology crumbled. "I realised that the ideaof enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised fromthe beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had beentotally ignorant of the fact." But he says he found this epiphanyexcruciating. "I knew if I followed these thoughts wherever they wouldlead," he says, "I would go from being HT's poster boy to being theirfallen angel."
His trial was finally ending with the inevitable verdict:guilty. When he emerged from Mazratora Prison into the damp half-light ofBritain, he was dazed. HT hailed him as a hero. "After four years ofignoring me, they wanted me to be their rock star ... I was asked if I wantedto be the leader." But in March 2007, he sent out a mass email saying hewas resigning from HT, threw away his mobile, and went home to Southend.
He spent a long summer eating his mother's cooking, watchingtelevision, and seeing the school friends he had shunned more than a decadebefore. "It amazed me. These were ordinary British guys and they knew whatI had become – that I had hated Britain. And yet when they saw me, they showedme such warmth," he says. "They remembered me as I was. They didn'tcare what I had done. They had time for me."
In September 2007, Maajid appeared on Newsnight – the BBC'sflagship current affairs show – to announce that he recanted not just HT, butIslamism itself. "What I taught has not only damaged British society, ithas damaged the world," he said.
With a small band of other ex-Islamists, Maajid decided toset up an organisation dedicated to promoting liberal Islam and rebuttingIslamism. They named in the Quilliam Foundation after William AbdullahQuilliam, an English businessman who converted to Islam in the late 19thcentury and set up the first British mosque. They are taking the organisationalskills and evangelical fervour of HT, and turning it against them. They arealso taking nearly £1m from the British government – the only way, Maajid says,to do their work effectively.
The last time I speak to Maajid he is on the refugee-strewnNorth-West frontier of Pakistan, touring the country's universities. He islecturing to huge audiences about his own experiences, and arguing againstliteralism in Islam. The massed ranks of the neo-Taliban are not far away."People here and in Britain keep saying – we've been waiting for somethinglike this for such a long time," he says over the telephone. "They'reso happy people are starting to speak out. They're terrified to do itthemselves, but this emboldens them."
A large audience of young Muslims is waiting for him. Maajidsays assertively: "You know, back when I was an Islamist, I thought ourideology was like communism – and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Becausewhat happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. Who joinsthe Communist Party today?" I can hear the audience applaud him as hewalks onto the stage, and with that, Maajid hangs up.
III. Lost in liberalism
As the summer arrives and London begins to swelter, I sitwith most of the "out" ex-jihadis in a slew of Starbucks across thecity. We sip iced lattes and discuss how, not long ago, they tried to destroyWestern civilisation.
They have different backgrounds: one is a Yorkshire girlwith Hindu parents, another is a Northern boy whose father was a Conservativeultra-Thatcherite. Yet they are startlingly similar: they have all retained thehumourless intensity of their pasts. And when they describe their Islamistformer selves, they are distant and cold, as if describing a rather unpleasantacquaintance they did not entirely understand.
They wreath their stories in clouds of pointless detail:they talk for hours about the intricacies of seventh-century Meccan society, orthe fine distinctions in the hierarchy of HT, willing you to understand it.It's a way of avoiding answering the hardest question – why? But from theirscattered stories, I can trace something that seems genuinely new: an ex-jihadiway of looking at the world, that carries lessons about how to stop WesternMuslims sinking into jihadism.
As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was avalueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.
Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basiclevel, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of agroup – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beachedbetween two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. Theyknew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they wereconstantly told to "go home" to by racists.
Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democraticidentity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go backwhere you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: agooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic valuesand should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at schoolthey were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to"explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them intoalienation.
"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one ofus, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobodyhad the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When peoplelike us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gaypeople, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"
Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierceand pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.
To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Westernforeign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after theiridentity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story ofoppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressivedisorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxerwho begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Yourinner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you'retold by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat.It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazingrelief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in theworld."
But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma –the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreignpolicy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11– from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accuratedescription of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser,tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps andbombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are wemeant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"
But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When theysaw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began tostutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they sawa million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How couldwe demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asksHadiya.
Britain's foreign policy also helped tug them towardsIslamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for aharder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machinewaiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: "Saudi literature is everywhere inBritain, and it's free. When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I waslooking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in thelibraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car,open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis,saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?"
He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting todisorientated young Muslims in the West. "It tells you – you're in thisstate of sin. But the sin doesn't belong to you, it's not your fault – it'sWestern society's fault. It isn't your fault that you're sinning, because thegirl had the miniskirt on. It wasn't you. It's not your fault that you're drugdealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it's their fault."
Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikinglysimilar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep inbecause they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The firstand plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hatingcardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stoppedwanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.
Usman's mother had moved in next door to an elderly mancalled Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. Oneday, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticedthe old man watching him from across the fence. "I used to box when I wasin the Navy," he said. He started to give them tips and before long, hewas building a boxing ring in their shed.
Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to helpclear out his belongings. In Tony's closet, he found a present wrapped andready for his little brother's birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. "And Ithought – that is humanity right there. That's an aspect of the divine that'sin every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I callhim kaffir?"
Many of the ex-Islamists discovered they couldn't ignore thefact that whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build aparadise, but hell.
At the same time, they began to balk at the mechanisticnature of Wahabism. Usman says he had become a "papier-mâché Muslim",defining his faith entirely by his actions, while being empty inside."Wahabis are great at painting themselves [an Islamic] green on theoutside, but when it comes to that internal aspect, it's not there. You prayfive times a day, but why? Because God's told you to pray five times a day. Youpay your charity – why? Because God's told you to pay your charity. This God ofyours is telling you a lot. And why does he tell you to do that? Because if youdon't do it, you'll end up in a fire. It's all based on being frightened.There's nothing to nourish you."
They had to go looking for other Islams – and often theyfound it in the more mystical school of the Sufis. "Wahabi Islam istotally sensory: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," Usman says. "Itlays out a strict set of rules to be followed here on earth, every moment ofthe day. Sufi Islam teaches instead that the realm of Allah is wholly separateand spiritual and nothing to do with the shadow-play of mere mortals. It isaccessible only through a sense of mystery and transcendence." In this newSufi Islam, Usman found something he had never known before: a sense of calm.
Ed Husain insists: "There are a lot of Muslims whoagree with us. A lot. But they're frightened. They see what's happened to us –the hassle, the slander, the death threats – and they think: it's not worth it.But you know what? When I first spoke out, I was alone. I had no idea that, ayear on, there would be this number of people speaking out, and many more whoare just offering resources and support. Once a truth is spoken, it takes onits own life."
IV. Not Strawberry Season
Anjem Choudhary waves his hand angrily through the air, andsays that in the world he wants to create, the people I have been interviewingwill be put to death. "They are apostates. I don't consider [them] to beMuslim in any sense of the word," he says. "Everybody knows the punishmentfor apostasy." My facial muscles must involuntarily react, because heleans forward and asks suspiciously: "Are you Jewish?"
Anjem is one of the last of the famous Islamists from the1990s still walking London's streets, free and furious. A decade ago, this cityhosted a stream of fanatical Muslims who kept cropping up in the tabloid pressas semi-comic pantomime villains. But gradually, one by one, they have beendeported or arrested, leaving Anjem as their final public face. He has said thePope and the Mohamed cartoonists should be executed, and has lauded the 7/7bombers as "the Fantastic Four".
I wanted to see what the people the ex-jihadis have leftbehind make of them – and to sense if they are seen as a real threat. Anjemsuggests meeting me in the Desert Rose Café in Leyton, not far from Usama'smosque. The 41-year-old lives here on social security benefits, paid for by apopulace he believes should – in large measure – be lashed, stoned or burned inthe hellfires. A long beard covers his chubby face, and long white robes coverhis swollen form. I was surprised he agreed to meet me. He rarely speaks toprint journalists. The last time he did, he stormed out, accusing the reporterof being a paedophile.
He immediately launches into a lecture about how theex-Islamists are all liars and charlatans. They are "government bandits,set up by them and funded by them to do their dirty work within the [Muslim]community ... They were never actually practising! They were ignorant ofIslam."
When I read him statements by ex-Islamists, he spits:"This is heresy ... The Muslim must submit to the sharia in all of hislife. If I start to say things like, 'I don't believe the sharia needs to beimplemented,' then that's tantamount to denying the message of Mohamed ... Tosay that any part of the Koran is not relevant nowadays is a clear statement ofapostasy."
Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, he warns,cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. "I can't pick and choosewhat I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you canpick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the finalrevelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there's something that youdon't like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make surethey're in line with the sharia."
He describes what is going to happen to them with a grin:"After they've been burnt, their skin will be recreated, and they willsuffer the same punishment again and again and again."
I wondered if Anjem's biography fitted with that of theex-jihadis' – or was there something different about them all along? Anjem sayshe was born in Welling in South-East London in 1967, where his father was aPakistani immigrant who ran a market stall. He first realised the One andEternal Truth when, one day in the early 1990s, he happened to hear a lectureat a local mosque by the Syrian-born Islamist Omar Bakri. Until then, Anjem hadbeen living a life of sin as a young trainee lawyer, known to his friends asAndy. The British tabloids have exposed that he had sex with white women anddropped LSD.
But as he tells it, in the flames of Bakri's rhetoric, Andywas burned away, and Anjem was born. "Yeah, obviously, I had a periodwhere I was not practising ... I have no shame at all in saying that I didn'talways use to be like this. And I have great thanks to Allah that he guided me."
Yes, I say – but you would whip and lash and execute theperson you were 20 years ago. His eyes flare. He pushes back his chair, half-risingto leave. "What I used to be like and what I used to say before isn'tunder discussion. If you're going to continue to ask about that, then I'll juststop the interview."
He then launches into half an hour of theologicalgobbledegook, where any question I try to interject is waved aside with asneer. He has no interest in persuasion: with dull Torquemada eyes, headvocates the execution of anyone who disagrees. Is he scared of the ex-jihadisand their arguments? He is certainly angry with them – but he is so angry ateveryone that it is hard to tell what this means.
He begins to ask – jabbing his finger – what my alternativeis. "In the United States,bestiality is legal in the privacy of your own home," he says. Paedophilesare rampant, with the Man-Boy Love Association on the brink of success. Comparethat with the 1,300-year long caliphate. In all those years, he says,"there were only 60 rapes".
Do you really believe that if people are not suppressed by atyrant-God, they will become paedophiles and start fucking animals? Are you sorotten inside? Does Anjum fear Andy that much?
He stares at me, flat and emotionless now. "That isyour last question," he says. And as I leave and look back at him throughthe glass, jabbering on his phone and daydreaming of annihilation, I realisehow far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled.
They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have feltit consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last,to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a greatunclenching of the jihadi fist?
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here. You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com
You can watch Johann taking on Hizb ut-Tahrir in a debate on the Islam Channel here.
Johann is also a contributing writer for Slate magazine. To read his latest article for them - about the loon Ayn Rand - click here.
You can follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101