I thought that any readers who are gearing up for summer holidays might like a couple of HP themed recommendations.
The first is Maajid Nawaz’s Radical. This is a gripping memoir, explaining what made him reject his comparatively secular background and turn to Hizb-ut-Tahrir radicalism – and what then caused him to rethink, and not simply abandon political Islam, but direct all his energies into combating extremism.
One point which Nawaz seems keen to emphasise is that, although of course you can’t spell Islamism without Islam, the ideology of Hizb-ut-Tahrir does not simply represent a misunderstanding of Islam, as Robert Spencer might put it, but is primarily political rather than religious. This certainly chimes with Nawaz’s own journey, in that his views seem to have been shaped initially by the experience of racism, by the realization that his Muslim identity could be weaponised in order to intimidate his opponents, and then by essentially political grievances at the shortcomings, real or perceived, of the West.
His account of how HT took over the Student Union at Newham College, outmanoeuvring both other Muslim groups and confused liberals, is fascinating – for example he describes how the Western dress and political rhetoric of his own friends struck a chord with other Muslim students far more readily than the more conservative approach of pious Salafists.
We had a female HT supporter who stood for the role of women’s officer, and who didn’t wear a headscarf; we conveniently tolerated that if it could win us the elections. We secured the female votes, hands down. (112-3)
The most dramatic part of the book is Maajid’s account of his spell in a brutal Egyptian prison, where guards alternately terrify and humiliate him. His gratitude to Amnesty International, who adopted him as a Prisoner of Conscience, is tempered by a word of advice for AI – ‘ I gently agree with Gita Sahgal’s principled critique from inside Amnesty International Secretariat’. (279-80)
Nawaz attributes his own rejection of HT partly to his perusal of classic English literature, including Orwell, and partly to an unmediated reexamination of Islam. His account of the setting up of Quilliam, and the very mixed reactions it elicited, is not the most obviously page-turning section of Radical, but I found it particularly absorbing. Finally he has returned to values which are actually pretty close those of his own family. His mother Abi emerges as an extremely engaging figure, buying The Satanic Verses so that she can form her own opinion – “Let him write his book. If you don’t like it, go and write your own book against him” (p.25) – and fiercely condemning her son’s extreme views.
The brutal treatment of prisoners is also a major focus of my second recommendation, A. T. Williams’s A Very British Killing, winner of the 2013 Orwell Prize. This is an exhaustive account of the events which led up to the death of Baha Mousa after his detention in Basra, and its aftermath – the internal enquiry, eventual court martial, and the findings of the Gage report. As others have observed, it is all the more powerful for being measured, approaching these disturbing and distressing events with forensic accuracy rather than emotional rhetoric. We are given a strong sense of what went wrong, where people behaved cruelly or negligently, and the extent to which the institutional culture was to blame – the complete lack of agreement amongst senior officers as to what degree of pressure might reasonably be applied to detainees is telling, for example. But we are also given some evidence which demonstrates that the conduct of the British soldiers wasn’t all bad. Mousa’s father felt confident enough to inform an officer that he had seen soldiers looting from the safe in the hotel where his son worked, and the officer immediately dealt firmly and appropriately with this incident. But the predominant note is, of course, critical, and events in Iraq are interspersed with other comparable army failings in recent decades, particularly in Northern Ireland. Brutality, contempt, indifference and evasion are demonstrated repeatedly. Williams handles this complex material, involving a great many participants (most of whom don’t appear to advantage), remarkably clearly.
Whereas Maajid Nawaz writes in a very personal way, and certainly isn’t lacking in self-belief, Williams is a comparatively self-effacing narrator. His own feelings are in some ways most in evidence when he describes the court martial which saw almost all defendants acquitted of the charges brought against them. Although he is careful to explain the problems with the prosecution’s case, his bitterness and frustration at the result is very apparent, as is his antipathy to the smugly urbane atmosphere of the courtroom, in which confused witnesses were efficiently eviscerated by lawyers.
It’s just possible you don’t want to reflect on liberal interventionism or Islam on holiday. If this is the case, I’ll also put in a good word for two novels, John Williams’s Stoner and James Smythe’s The Testimony.
