Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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 Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 8:30 am Post subject: Ex-Islamists in England |
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Johann Hari
It's a long article, and well worth the read. This is what stood out to me.
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Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group � but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities � their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.
Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.
"Nobody ever said � you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"
Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.
To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy � which was real, and burning � emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told 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 amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."
But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma � the global Muslim community � they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 � from Guantanamo to Iraq � made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think � anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"
But the converse was � they stressed � also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya. |
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