Radical

My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Maajid Nawaz, 2013

Nawaz was born in Southend England in 1978, of Pakistani immigrant parents. Abused by other kids, he encountered Islam, both as a guiding principle and a threat against gangs. But this was Hizb ut-Tahrir: radical, Islamist, restore-the-caliphate, blame-the-west Islam, sparked by western indifference to the fate of caucasian Muslims in Bosnia, based on a selective reading of the of Koran, and western nationalism.

This is not the scimitar-wielding woman-mutilating Jihadism that led to the Taliban, but it still is at odds with the west and many Muslim dictatorships, where Nawaz travelled as a recruiter. In Egypt, he was arrested by Mubarrak's secret police, abused, threatened with torture, and spent 2001 to 2006 in prison. There, he learned about the much richer and complete Koran, and met leaders of the future Arab spring in Egypt. He was released with the help of Amnesty International.

He now leads a London thinktank, Quilliam

He quotes this translation of Jalaluddin Rumi on page 179:

• Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah ... it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you."

This may be a too-secular translation; others point out that this bowdlerizes Rumi's more Allah-centric verse.

See also IslamWithout

Islam and the Future of Tolerance

A dialog, by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Hillsdale 297.28 H3161i 2015

This small book is in interview format, mostly atheist Sam Harris making provocative statements and Nawaz responding. Harris is a "Qu'ran literalist", claiming that scrict Islam is anti-liberal. Nawaz claims that the text does not speak for itself; instead, the reading and the context determines the interpretation of the text, and that history demonstrates many different interpretations by different Islamic scholars, and that contemporary Islam also offers many different interpretations.

• N: Maajid Nawaz
• H: Sam Harris
• K: Keith, my own reaction

I'll mostly quote the responses from Nawaz

• p002 2010 Intelligence Squared Debate, Nawaz against Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray. Harris challenges Nawaz at dinner afterward, particularly about jihad: inner spiritual struggle, or holy war?

• p005 N: ... Islam is not a religion of war or of peace - it's a religion. It's sacred scripture, like those of other religions, contains passages that many people would consider extremely problematic. ... Religion doesn't inherently speak for itself: no scripture, no book, no piece of writing has it's own voice. K: an axe can cut firewood or kill people. Writing and reading are tools.

• p006 N: ... I asserted that Islam is a language of peace simply because the vast majority of Muslims today do not subscribe to its being a religion of war.

  • Harris addition, 2013 PEW poll in 11 Muslim majority countries re. justification for violence against noncombatants: Pakistan 3%, Indonesia 6%, Nigeria 8%, Jordan and Tunisia 12%, Turkey 16%, ... Egypt 25%, Malaysia 27%, Lebanon 33%. Then Harris writes "if even 10% support suicide bombing against civilians ..." K: ... which is provocateur bullshit, because that was not the question and tha 10% is pulled out of his ass. Context and commitment matter, most of those "sometimes" are abstractions and equivocations; for example, seemingly enough Americans agree with dropping 30,000 bombs a year (without a declaration of war) that they don't have their President tried for murder and hanged. Most just do not care, they concern themselves with other things,

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Oopsie, lost my notes, MoreLater