Memoir of an Islamist

It was a surreal experience to meet Maajid Nawaz for the first time. I had known of him for years and admired his bombast. He was a hero — not just my hero — but a hero to hundreds of young Islamist radicals. ‘Woah, this is the brother in Egypt, isn’t it?’ said an erstwhile comrade, listening to a cassette in my badly beaten Peugeot 106 as we drove through Bradford. That brother was Nawaz and it explained why neither of us had met him at that time.

In late 2001 Nawaz had travelled to Egypt to learn Arabic as part of an undergraduate degree at SOAS but was now being detained in one of Mubarak’s notoriously brutal political prisons. Like me, Nawaz was a member of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir (whose name means ‘party of liberation’) which is outlawed in Egypt — but legal in Britain — and campaigns for the creation of a global Caliphate.