Maajid Nawaz

Maajid Nawaz is a British activist, author and politician perhaps best known for his former membership of the extreme Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (حزب التحري) and as author of his memoir, Radical. In recent times he has become a very vocal advocate for a moderate, secular Islam, including through Quilliam (formerly the Quilliam Foundation) which he co-founded.

Party Like It's 632 Islam

Turning towards Mecca

Ahmadiyya Al-Fārābī Ayman al-Zawahiri Burqa Hizb ut-Tahrir IslamQA List of actions prohibited by the Qur'an Mullah Krekar Revisionist history of Early Islam Sheik Feiz Muhammad Taliban Women (sura) v - t - e

“”"It's very very easy for me to slander you to pieces in my book, thus ruin not just your personal but professional standing... If you think I’m being harsh now, thank your Islamist god that I’m not speaking against you in public, because trust me, if I was half as ignorant and idiotic as you, I could destroy your career in a second. And that’s not a threat, it’s to show you how stupid you’re being by writing such one sided crap... And my megaphone is far louder than your petty ignorant one-sided emails against my work..."

—Maajid Nawaz, tearing his fundamentalist brother Kaashif, (whom he is alleged to have once threatened to turn in to the British secret services as a dangerous Islamic extremist), a new one[1]

Then and now

Then

Nawaz became involved with radical Islamism in his teens and worked as a recruiter for Hizb ut-Tahrir. He spent a year abroad studying Arabic in Egypt, where he continued his recruiting and as a result was arrested by Hosni Mubarak's notorious secret police and imprisoned for 4 years, starting in 2002.

Nawaz has since gone on to talk of how successful he was at fomenting Islamist fervour at Newham College, and how easy it was to get the primarily liberal institution to turn a blind eye to his brand of theocratic political agitation.

“”We disguised our political demands behind religion and multiculturalism, and deliberately labeled any objection to our demands as racism. Even worse, we did this to the very generation who had been socialist sympathizers in their youth, people sympathetic to charges of racism, who like [the student affairs manager] Dave Gomer were now in middle-career management posts. It is no wonder then that the authorities were unprepared to deal with politicized religion as ideological agitation; they felt racist if they tried to stop us...The default liberal position was to embrace the movement as part of multicultural sensitivity: to tell people to stop practicing their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicized youth.

Nawaz has claimed that while incarcerated, surrounded by several prominent jihadist leaders, he realized he wanted to take a different path. He cited George Orwell's Animal Farm as key to this realisation and how he came to a new understanding of "what happens when somebody tries to create a utopia."[2] Friends and family, however, are disdainful of this supposed come-to-Jesus prison experience -- of which they saw no evidence at the time -- and instead see Nawaz as an utter opportunist. They say he cares more "about being a well-compensated hero than he does about the cause he champions."[3]

“”Most in my family who witnessed his life outside home, religious or irreligious, find his story at least exaggerated or embellished for his agenda, if not absolutely false,” Nawaz’s elder brother, Kaashif, said. Ashraf Hoque, a friend from Nawaz’s college days, is more blunt. “He is neither an Islamist nor a liberal,” he said. “Maajid is whatever he thinks he needs to be."

Now

He was adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience[4] and was released after 4 years.

After his release, at the age of 24, Nawaz reportedly "was 100 percent committed" to Islamism, and at a press conference after held at his release, Nawaz declared: “I have become more convinced of the ideas that I went into prison with.” But, after about ten months out of prison he had concluded he could rise no higher in his Islamist organization.

Nawaz's renunciation of his ties to Hizb ut-Tahrir and his wider condemnation of Islamist ideals, occurred in the same week his friend, Ed Husain, gained some celebrity and adulation for writing "a stirring defection story of a Muslim extremist who had come clean." Shortly thereafter, in 2007, Nawaz and Hussain founded The Quilliam Foundation, and "the British government shelled out the equivalent of more than $3.8 million" to Quilliam in three years.

In 2012 Nawaz published his memoir Radical: My Journey from Islamist Extremism to a Democratic Awakening which was feted as a vital insight into how young Muslims are radicalised and embrace extreme Islamism. The book describes in detail how he experienced serious racist abuse growing up in Britain and how this led to his embracing the ideals of Hizb ut-Tahrir.[5]

Quilliam compiled a secret list of Muslim groups it considered as being sympathetic to violent Islamism. Nawaz sent the list to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT), a directorate of the British Home Office. The organizations and individuals named included the Muslim Council of Britain, the main umbrella group in Britain for Islamic organisations. Also included was the claim that a Scotland Yard counter-terrorism squad, the Muslim Contact Unit, is dominated by extremist ideology. Critics of the foundation accused it of McCarthyite smear tactics and branded its claims ridiculous. Nawaz's reputation among British civil libertarians and many British Muslims fell quite low.[6]

In 2014, he created a storm of criticism and received many death threats after posting on his Twitter account a Jesus and Mo cartoon. Even some supporters of Nawaz's ideals viewed this as a crude publicity stunt designed to offend and curry favor with his new Islamophobic friends.[7]

Nawaz appeared on Intelligence Squared, arguing that Islam actually was inherently a religion of peace that had been corrupted. Opposing him was Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray.[8] Unfortunately for him, the opposing side 'won' in that they convinced more people that Islam wasn't inherently peaceful.

SPLC

Nawaz was considered an anti-Muslim extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. However, Hemant Mehta and Ophelia Benson strongly disagreed with this classification.[9]

“”In short, this pisses me off, big time. It pisses me off because it’s grossly inaccurate, and unfair to Maajid. It pisses me off because as he points out it puts a target on him. It pisses me off because the SPLC has done heroic, brave work in the past. It pisses me off because I have many liberal Muslim friends who also campaign against Islamist extremism. It pisses me off because the left really needs to get it straight: Islamism is not a left-wing ally, it’s a deeply right-wing, reactionary, anti-human rights, theocratic movement, and people who campaign against Islamism are not anti-Muslim and not extremist. Islamism is not our friend, and its enemies are not (all) our enemies.

—Ophelia Benson[10]

Nawaz issued a strongly worded reply:

“”Through the counter-extremism organisation Quilliam that I founded, I have spent eight years defending my Muslim communities in Europe, Pakistan and beyond from the diktats of Islamist theocrats. I have also argued for the liberal reform of Islam today, from within. But, in a naively dangerous form of neo-Orientalism, the SPLC just arrogated to itself the decision over which debates we Muslims may have about reforming our own religion, and which are to be deemed beyond the pale. (...) In a monumental failure of comprehension, the SPLC have conflated my challenge to Islamist theocracy among my fellow Muslims with somehow being “anti-Muslim”. The regressive left is now in the business of issuing fatwas against Muslim reformers.

—Maajid Nawaz[11]

As a result, Nawaz sued the SPLC, receiving a $3.75m settlement and an apology in June 2018.[12]

“”Given our understanding of the views of Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam, it was our opinion at the time that the Field Guide was published that their inclusion was warranted. But after getting a deeper understanding of their views and after hearing from others for whom we have great respect, we realize that we were simply wrong to have included Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam in the Field Guide in the first place.

—Southern Poverty Law Center

Islam and the Future of Tolerance

In 2015, Nawaz collaborated with Sam Harris to produce a short book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. The book is presented as a dialogue between the two figures. The two are at one in condemning what they jointly perceive as left wing/liberal apologists equating criticism of Islamic doctrines with Islamophobia and racism (or as Nawaz terms it, reverse racism). Both individuals are of the opinion that to hold Muslims to lower standards than Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. with regards to issues such as human rights, freedom of religion, and free speech, is to tacitly endorse the view that Muslims are inherently inferior, and incapable of being as "civilized" as non-Muslims. Borrowing the phrase from that former United States president George W. Bush, Harris, Nawaz, and several others claim to see Islamic apologists practicing a "soft bigotry of low expectations".[13][14]

Harris and Nawaz's critics claim that they are not, in fact, practicing any sort of bigotry, including that of "soft expectations." They object to a Western focus on the poor human rights records in some Muslim countries vis-a-vis women and sexual minorities, when the same West that lectures Muslims (as though the western world is a monolith) has colonized and subjugated their lands and continues to bomb and invade them, as well to support their worst tyrants. If Western modernity is unattractive to many Muslims, that makes sense to religious studies scholar Karen Armstrong:

We’re in danger of making a scapegoat of things, and not looking at our own part in this. When we look at these states and say, “Why can’t they get their act together? Why can’t they see that secularism is the better way? Why are they so in thrall to this benighted religion of theirs? What savages they are,” and so on, we’ve forgotten to see our implication in their histories.

We came to modernity under our own steam... But in the Middle East, in the colonized countries, modernity was a colonial subjection, not independence... That modern spirit is almost impossible to acquire in countries where modernity has been imposed from outside.[15]

Nawaz critics like Armstrong claim to not object to holding Muslims to proper standards of human rights; they claim to merely reject "Western arrogance" on the subject in light of the other kinds of Western human rights abuses that understandably aggrieve many Muslims. Noticeably, its "refutation" of Nawaz et al. relies on the tu quoque fallacy.

Some accuse Nawaz of "making money playing the role of the 'good' and 'moderate' Muslim every Islamophobe loves" and argue that his projects are simply self-promotion;

There are few get-rich-quick schemes left in modern publishing, but one that persists could be called Project Islamic Reformation.... the root of the anti-Nawaz sentiment is that he has used Project Islamic Reformation as a self-serving tool to enrich himself. This book both opens and closes with details of Nawaz’s life story, his radicalization, his time in prison, and his shift to liberalism. The implicit thread that runs through his public performances is I went through this, therefore you should listen to me. Unless Nawaz is perpetually writing a memoir, his personal experiences should reach diminishing returns quite quickly, yet they are right there, front, center and back. Can a man who makes all of Project Islamic Reformation about himself really claim offense when his critics attack his character? They did not make this personal. He did.[16]

To promote the book, in September 2015 Nawaz and Harris jointly addressed Harvard University's Institute of Politics.[17]

The Cameron Speech

In July 2015, Nawaz collaborated with the British Prime Minister David Cameron to write the speech delivered by Cameron as his 5 year strategy purporting to counter Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.[18]

Feminism

In 2015, Nawaz was filmed  in a London lap-dancing club on his stag night, receiving a private dance and putting his hands on the woman dancing for him. This resulted in a barrage of dubious criticism and some counter-claims from Nawaz making arguments inline with the views of sex positive feminists. In the UK, however, sex postive feminism is weak, therefore many declared Nawaz to be no feminist at all.[19]

Questionable funding

The Quilliam Foundation has received funding (at least $3m) from the conservative, right-wing Christian John Templeton Foundation.[20] Quilliam (and hence by association, Nawaz) has also received funding from a man^[Who?] associated with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, neo-cons.[21]^{[please explain]} Moreover, Quilliam takes money from the UK government[22] as a quid pro quo and, as noted, has sent a list of alleged Islamist sympathizers to British intelligence.

Muslim grooming gangs

The Quilliam Foundation has long campaigned on the issue of alleged targetting of vulnerable white children by Pakistani Muslim men (such as the Rochdale sex trafficking gang). In December 2017 Quilliam produced an influential report claiming that "84% of grooming gang offenders" are Asian, and dwelt on the problem of Asians, particularly Pakistani Muslims, targetting vulnerable white children. While it was praised by the UK Conservative Party and many figures in the media, the report has come under attack over its flawed methodology, its failure to disclose some details of its methodology, and secret edits made to the paper online to cover up these methodological flaws. It was based on a partial sample of cases, performed in an opaque way but apparently based on media reports, which are influenced not only by racial bias of the media, but by biases in police investigations and the differing tendencies of people to report crimes (a particular issue with child sexual abuse where only 3-15% of cases may be reported). Although the ethnic group of offenders was recorded, there was no systematic recording of offenders' country of origin or religion, making claims about Pakistani Muslims problematic. Its suggestion that white children were at risk was challenged as facing several biases, not least that there was no recording of the race of victims and the report ignored cases where ethnic minority children were targeted.[23][24]

More recently the report has been panned for it's deliberately misleading content by the highly acclaimed peer-reviewed SAGE journals.[25] It was "fiercely" criticised for its poor methodology by Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, in their paper "Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the 'Muslim grooming gangs' narrative" which was published in January 2020.[26][27] In December that year, a further report by the UK Government was released showing that the majority of CSE gangs were, in fact, composed of white men.[28][29]

Research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white. Some studies suggest an overrepresentation of black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations. However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending.

– Home Office.[29]

Writing in The Guardian, Cockbain and Tufail wrote of the report that "The two-year study by the Home Office makes very clear that there are no grounds for asserting that Muslim or Pakistani-heritage men are disproportionately engaged in such crimes, and, citing our research, it confirmed the unreliability of the Quilliam claim".[30]

Right wing apologism

In 2013 Nawaz allied himself with Tommy Robinson, far-right leader and self-styled expert on child grooming.[31] Robinson claimed (perhaps rather dubiously) that Quilliam paid him to quit the English Defence League so they could claim credit for de-radicalising him.[32] This was one of a series of conversions that Quilliam claimed to have carried out; but certainly in Robinson's case it was short-lived.[33]

In April 2019, Nawaz felt the need to defend Candace Owens after the comments she made about Adolf Hitler were brought up during a congressional hearing on white supremacy.[34]

In June 2019 Nawaz promoted the claim that cement was used in the milkshake thrown at Andy Ngo.[35] The following year, he invited Ngo on to his radio show to discuss the Portland protests[36] and commented that "few undercover journalists have the courage of Andy Ngo".[37]

In August 2020, Nawaz defended Nigel Farage's use of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, stating that it "refers to [the] Long March through our institutions of Frankfurt School critical theory".[38]

2020 American election and fall from grace

“”If only we could enlist 2010 Maajid Nawaz to deradicalize 2020 Maajid Nawaz

—@Halalcoholism[39]

In the wake of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election which saw Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump, Nawaz began to extend an excessive amount of charity to individuals alleging mass voter fraud by the Biden campaign. This involved promoting far-right websites such as Red Elephants and Project Veritas, known for their conspiracy theories (Nawaz later apologized when he realized the former also promotes antisemitism).[40][41] Nawaz also promoted doctored images fueling these conspiracy theories, and those who attempted to correct/criticize him for these actions were swiftly blocked,[42] and were also often met with random legal threats from him[43]. Nawaz had succeeded in alienating many individuals who once admired and supported him.[44][45]

References

1. http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/self-invention-maajid-nawaz-fact-and-fiction-life-counter-terror-celebrity
2. How Orwell's 'Animal Farm' Led A Radical Muslim To Moderation | National Public Radio
3. What Does Maajid Nawaz Really Believe? | New Republic
4. The Story of Maajid Nawaz | Amnesty International (USA) blog
5. Alom Shaha admires the honesty of a former Islamist | NewHumanist.org.uk
6. List sent to terror chief aligns peaceful Muslim groups with terrorist ideology | The Guardian
7. Maajid Nawaz's with-us or against-us mindset is out of touch with reality | The Guardian
8. Intelligence Squared, Is Islam a Religion of Peace
9. Southern Poverty Law Center: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz Are “Anti-Muslim Extremists”
10. Bad move SPLC
11. Maajid responds
12. http://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/06/18/splc-statement-regarding-maajid-nawaz-and-quilliam-foundation
13. Let’s Talk About How Islam Has Been Hijacked | Wall Street Journal (Commentary)
14. Maher vs. Charlie Rose: To Claim Islam Is Like Other Religions Is Naive And Plain Wrong | RealClearPolitics.com
15. Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps” - Salon.com
16. Sam Harris’ detestable crusade: How his latest anti-Islam tract reveals the bankruptcy of his ideas - Salon.com
17. Islam & the Future of Tolerance - Maajid Nawaz & Sam Harris (YouTube)
18. David Cameron & Maajid Nawaz unveil strategy to tackle Islamism (YouTube)
19. Nice try, Maajid Nawaz, but you didn’t go to a lapdancing club because you’re a feminist | NewStatesman.com
20. , Medium, 8 Jan 2016
21. Maajid seems to have gotten funding by a man associated with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, known bigots | loonwatch.com
22. Home Office funding to the Quilliam Foundation from 2008 to 2012 - Publications - GOV.UK
23. When bad evidence is worse than no evidence: Quilliam's “grooming gangs” report and its legacy, Ella Cockbain, Policying Insight, 20 March 2019
24. We’re told 84% of grooming gangs are Asian. But where’s the evidence?, Kenan Malik, The Guardian, 11 Nov 2018
25. Cockbain, Ella; Tufail, Waqas (2020). "Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the 'Muslim grooming gangs' narrative". Race & Class. 61 (3): 3–32. doi:10.1177/0306396819895727. ISSN 0306-3968.
26. Cockbain, Ella; Tufail, Waqas (2020). "Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the 'Muslim grooming gangs' narrative". Race & Class. 61 (3): 3–32. doi:10.1177/0306396819895727. ISSN 0306-3968.
27. Kenan Malik (November 11th, 2018). We’re told 84% of grooming gangs are Asian. But where’s the evidence?. The Guardian. Archived Version. Retrieved December 25th, 2020.
28. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944206/Group-based_CSE_Paper.pdf
29. Grierson, Jamie (15 December 2020). "Most child sexual abuse gangs made up of white men, Home Office report says" (in en-GB). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 16 December 2020.
30. Cockbain, Ella; Tufail, Waqas (19 December 2020). "A new Home Office report admits grooming gangs are not a ‘Muslim problem'". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
31. Tommy Robinson link with Quilliam Foundation raises questions, The Guardian, 12 Oct 2013
32. Tommy Robinson, Former EDL Leader, Claims Quilliam Paid Him To Quit Far-Right Group, Steven Hopkins, Huffington Post, 04/12/2015
33. The Phony Martyrdom of Tommy Robinson, Richard Seymour, Jacobin magazine, Aug 2018
34. https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1115951703520612353
35. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1145353112707895297.html
36. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPsW5PQDi0E
37. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=135775283156412&story_fbid=3120810351319542
38. https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1300007484225204224?s=20
39. https://twitter.com/Halalcoholism/status/1326109735364386817
40. https://twitter.com/maajidnawaz/status/1325113223906013184
41. https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1326435144937435137
42. https://twitter.com/LaloDagach/status/1325650133023924226
43. https://twitter.com/gspellchecker/status/1347156935792078848?lang=en
44. https://twitter.com/Mohammed_Amin/status/1330216815314825217
45. https://twitter.com/jay_shapiro/status/1325053772503068672