Radical by Maajid Nawaz — Book Review

Rad­i­cal is Maa­jid Nawaz’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy detail­ing his jour­ney of how he entered the folds of Islam­ic extrem­ism and then how he turned towards a mod­er­ate and demo­c­ra­t­ic thought. He comes from a mid­dle class fam­i­ly of Pak­istani ori­gin, based in the Unit­ed King­dom where Nawaz was born and raised.

Fac­ing racism dur­ing his teenage years and strug­gling to assim­i­late in Southend’s pre­dom­i­nate­ly Anglo res­i­dents, the ingre­di­ents of a reac­tionary in the mak­ing were all there. Ini­tial­ly he took to hip hop music to make sense of things around him. The infa­mous rap group Pub­lic Ene­my was one of those with which he could iden­ti­fy the most. This phase gave a new mean­ing to his faith; it became a sym­bol of resis­tance and defi­ance.

The next part of the book takes the read­er to the inner work­ings of Hizb-ul-Tahir, an extrem­ist orga­ni­za­tion active­ly recruit­ing mem­bers in a very skill­ful man­ner. Nawaz was made to believe in what he calls the ‘Nar­ra­tive’; the idea that the trou­bles he faced as an indi­vid­ual or saw his group of friends go through, were not iso­lat­ed inci­dents but a part of a major con­spir­a­cy of the West against Islam. Once sold on this nar­ra­tive, Nawaz not only became a loy­al mem­ber but scaled up the hier­ar­chy to become one of the lead recruiters for the orga­ni­za­tion. His tal­ents were not only used with­in UK but in Den­mark, Egypt, Pales­tine, and even in the coun­try of his fam­i­ly’s ori­gin, Pak­istan.

Rad­i­cal is also a tale of per­son­al redemp­tion that came after Nawaz was impris­oned and put in the tor­ture cells in Egypt under the rule of Hos­ni Mubarak. This sec­tion of the book is also the most chill­ing one, as the excru­ci­at­ing details of the pris­on­ers while wait­ing for their turn for tor­ture, leaves the read­er in haunt­ing antic­i­pa­tion. Amidst all of this, Nawaz’s engage­ment with oth­er fel­low pris­on­ers from all sort of back­grounds and view­points, brought him the real­iza­tion that ‘Islamism’ had not much to do with the teach­ings of Islam; instead it is a polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy giv­en the face of Islam.

Once a free man again, Nawaz took it as a per­son­al task to go around spread­ing the ideas of mod­er­a­tion and demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­ty through estab­lish­ing an orga­ni­za­tion named Quil­liam Foun­da­tion. In his own words ‘Ideas are like water, they take a while to reach a boil­ing point, but as soon as they do, they erupt’. One can there­fore appre­ci­ate his per­son­al effort in bring­ing about the change through the debate of ideas.

Though fas­ci­nat­ing read as far as an indi­vid­u­al’s per­son­al jour­ney is con­cerned, the book falls short on the expec­ta­tion of the debate on the big pic­ture about the issues high­light­ed in the book; the involve­ment of the major polit­i­cal play­ers at the glob­al front and giv­en this sce­nario the prac­ti­cal solu­tions to solve the prob­lem of extrem­ism. Some­one who has been a part of the inner work­ings of the sys­tem, it was expect­ed that some part of the book towards the end touch­es these issues that usu­al­ly go unan­swered and the dis­cus­sion ends around the tip of the ice berg only.