ed husain: The Islamist

WHY I JOINED RADICAL ISLAM IN BRITAIN
WHAT I SAW INSIDE
AND WHY I LEFT

comment by harry miskin
Tue 02/05/07

In July 2006, I was on my way to Lebanon when the first bombs fell on Beirut. Exactly a year previously, I had gawped at the roofless bus in Tavistock Square and been astonished at the sight of limbless torsos strewn across the familiar street.

A few weeks later, Ed Husain’s manuscript arrived in the post at Caroline Davidson’s, where I was then her assistant.

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It was thanks to the generosity of Ed’s thinking, transcending race, religion and class, that I sat on a roof terrace in Rome the following summer, trying to work out the cheapest route to Beirut. I never made it of course, but my subsequent experiences of Cairo, Amman and Jerusalem reaffirmed what Ed and I had spent a year discussing: the need for personal dialogue in a partisan world.

The media, in its immediacy, lacks the language necessary to talk about the complexities of the great crisis of our times. It retains the language of 1939: Islam and the West; us and them. So it was that, having recently seen blood blasted against Victorian brick, on first reading Ed’s manuscript, I was reminded of the unassailable importance of books to the modern world.

The Islamist, though a personal memoir, speaks for a whole lost generation, whether soldiers, civilians or Jihadists, who have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, on planes, on trains and in towers.

It cannot, of course, explain what leap of insanity drives a man to blow up both himself and strangers. But it does describe a journey from childhood, through educational segregation, religious indoctrination to political inflammation, that will not be unfamiliar to those recently convicted of attempting such an act. And thereby, it answers many of the questions that the victims of terrorism – and bystanders besides – will have been asking

Ed Husain was born the son of a first-generation Bangladeshi restaurateur. His father, alive to the dangers of extremism, advises him at one point to ‘join the Labour Party’ if he wants to make a difference. Ed grew up in Limehouse in the East End, which contains the highest concentration of a single ethnic group in Europe. At an early age he became the protégé of a Sufi pir (spiritual master), whom he knew as ‘Grandpa’. In one particularly moving passage, he recounts how Grandpa’s youngest son has a premonition of his conversion to Islamism:

“Uncle Husam was in a total panic. He was desperate to speak to me and establish if I was well. I had no idea why. Baffled, I spoke on the phone, though the echo on the line between Mecca to London made communication almost impossible. My parents gazed at me after the call. What had I done?

That night, my mother told me that in Mecca Uncle Husam had dreamt that I was sitting on the branch of a large tree. Suddenly, without cause, I fell down and died.”

As a second-generation immigrant with religious inclinations, Ed was subject to exclusion from his primarily Bengali-born classmates, whose main interests were Bollywood and computer games. The East End at the time was – and remains as it always has been – a furnace of polemics and radical thinking, as Britain’s (wonderful) tolerance of free speech gave space to ideas recently imported from countries in which they are suppressed as seditious.

By the time that he arrived at Tower Hamlets’ College for the Sixth Form, the appeal of structure, place and rebellion that Islamism provided had exerted a powerful grip on Ed. A poster he disseminated at the time best highlights the extent to which he had inculcated its creed:

Prophets of Islam:
Adam
Noah
Abraham
Jacob
Joseph
Moses
Jesus
Mohammed
What is Islam?

THE FINAL SOLUTION.

During his time as an Islamist, Ed was to come into contact with a number of similarly minded young men who have gone on to become some of the most senior members of the Islamic community in the United Kingdom, as well as more notorious figures such as Omar Bakri, alongside future suicide bombers. He argues that, despite protests to the contrary, all of these groups, whether mainstream or extremist, are in favour of the politicisation of Islam in Britain and the religious acquisition of power in a secular country. While the silent majority of Muslims in this country acquiesce to the separation of state and religion, it is those who have quacked loudest – Islamists from across the spectrum, from the MCB to Hizb ut-Tahir – who have continually set the agenda.

The Islamist is not, however, simply the story of a descent into hatred and outrage; it is also a recounting of the heart-rending process through which Ed had to go in order to finally cast off the shackles of Islamism. By recounting his own understanding of Sufism, he reveals the alternative to political Islam: a faith based on love, close to the scholarly, exegetical interpretations that flourished in the Middle East at a time when the area saw the genesis of modern mathematics and the preservation of Plato.

The book is finally, then, both an attempt at explaining how we live in an age of subtle war and discreet infringement, and also a plea to the Muslim community itself. Ed reserves his righteous anger for his penultimate chapter, in which he describes his experience of teaching in Saudi Arabia. Women are kidnapped on a regular basis, pornography is commonplace, racism is integral to the fabric of society and shanty towns spring up like welts on the face of the Holy Land. Will British Muslims, he asks, look nostalgically backwards to this imaginary heartland of the umma, or can they find the resolve to forge here in Britain the conditions requisite for an Islamic culture that sets a standard for the world over?

It is perhaps astonishing that this is the first book that details Islamic extremism from the inside. But Ed is far too good a writer, and the topic too vital, for The Islamist to remain simply an exposé of radicalism. The time that I spent in the cafes and bazaars of the Middle East taught me, above all, that the ‘West’ cannot provide the answers, for it is already an undone hegemony. The answers for peace are in uterus, for Islam has much yet to teach us all. But it is only when the likes of Ed Husain, straddling a plurality of cultures and mindsets, are finally listened to that this conflict, at least, has any chance of coming to an end.

Harry Miskin 02/05/07
http://www.harrymiskin.co.uk