Radical is a book on the redemptive journey of Maajid Nawaz through childhood innocence, teenage radicalism, bigotry, extremism and beyond. The most fascinating conclusion reached by the UK-based counter-terrorism and Islamism expert is the evidence that extremists can change; it is possible... This is a book covers the extraordinary life of Maajid Nawaz and how he changed from being a radical, jihadi Muslim to a spiritual, moderate and civilized Muslim, who is nowadays one of the most reputable voices in the West countering militant Islamism and extremism. It covers different stages of his life from his young childhood and his upbringing in London through his teen years when he had his ‘induction' to Islamism. His first-hand experience made it easy for him to understand how political and ideological radicalism occurs. His description of the racism and prejudice – sometimes violent – he experienced in his youth is a lesson in what can happen when racism is allowed to flourish in society. The lesson is racist aggression creates a fertile recruiting ground for Islamist extremism. Mr Nawaz writes powerfully through his best-seller 268-page book, Radical: My Journey from Islamist Extremism to A Democratic Awakening, about his gradual detachment and inability to feel empathy for others; such was his experience of immersion in radical ideology. Mr Nawaz is particularly moved by the massive support he enjoyed during his arrest, unfair trial and ill treatment and imprisonment in Egypt from people he used to describe as kafir or infidels including members of international, non-profit rights groups like Amnesty International. Of Pakistani origin, Mr Nawaaz was born and grew up in a White area in Essex. "Growing up in such a minority community must to have an effect on you. It was a completely different experience from being brought up in a large Pakistani community." One incident in particular had had an enormous transformative effect on the writer during his childhood, when he asked a white kid called Patrick to play football in the lunch break at his school. This incident, more than anything else, "destroyed my childhood innocence." "Can I play?" I asked. What usually happened is that you would turn up wanting to take part, and those already playing would assign you to one or other team, depending on which was short of players. ‘This game's not for Pakis! He shouted. ‘Don't ask to play again.' As I fought back the tears with all my willpower, I resolved there and then that when I grew up I would never stand alone again." The writer cites several fights he had with white children in his neighbourhood. Such fights were the only "social interaction" with white kids. It was a bad situation for both sides, which had a corrosive effect on how each community perceived the other as he discovered later in life. The rise of white, aggressive racist culture in his area of Southend also stoked social tensions especially that at that time, in the mid-eighties, the violently racist skinheads were the ones that had taken over and also dominated the passion of many kids of his age: football. Mr Nawaz is also critical of what he perceived as the racist attitude of police towards teenagers and youths of dark complexion. "Not trusting the police to protect us meant that we had to rely on our won protection. Many of my friends had been stabbed, but the police rarely managed to make any arrests, and hardly ever pressed charges." In his teenage, exactly when he was 15, Mr Nawaz became non-religious a hip-hop B-boy as a sign of psychological protest against this racism. His favourite tracks included ‘Rebel Without a Pause, ‘Fear of a Black Planet,' ‘Fuck the Police' – their lyrics were deep. "I'm in a ‘click' suit, baggy corduroys with pin tucks at the bottom, rocking Adidas trainers. My hair's a grade zero up to the top – when not in a red bandana it stand up in a box-cut with a mad design trimmed up the back. My crew all wear the same clothes, blast the same tunes," he writes. And he was strikingly different than his parents, who themselves did not share the same ideologies, which created something of a polarised childhood. His mother in particular has always been very liberal and progressive in her outlook though she hailed from a conservative Pakistani family. His father, to the contrary, was strict and traditional. With the growing social alienation and the emergence of ghettos in London, Nawaz, the kid, and some of his friends suffered from an identity crisis. But after not so long time, they found that they had one identity shared among them all: Islam. "The communities adopted a more isolationist stance, a policy of self-exclusion. So instead of calling themselves British Asians as my parents had done, this generation now defined themselves as almost exclusively Muslim. They believed that their allegiance to the global Islamic community, the ummah, hindered them from defining themselves as being part of the country they were born in," he writes (page 55). In chapter six, the author says that Islamism was inspired by the rise of European fascism. "Like its European ideological counterparts, Islamism was not safe from its own schisms. Some groups wanted to bring about the ‘Islamic system' by working alongside the status quo; these were political Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Others were more revolutionary, wishing to upturn the status quo." A mixture of factors made him easily receptive to the radical Islamist message including the violence he had been subjected to, the police discrimination, a greater awareness of foreign conflicts or his country's foreign policy. But his journey into Islamism resulted in him joining a revolutionary group, known as Hizb al-Tahrir (HT). Sitting between political Islamists and the militants, HT aims to unify all Muslim-majority countries under an ‘Islamic caliphate' or Khilafa in Arabic. "I was sixteen at the time I started hearing all this. When you are that age, already angry and disenfranchised, you are very susceptible to absolutes. I did not trust the typical authorities to tell me the truth," Mr Nawaz says. "If we had the khilafa our armies could stop such atrocities happening. This was Hizb al-Tahrir message: what we needed was to work efficiently to control the mindset of the military top brass in Muslim-majority countries in order to eventually establish a state." Mr Nawaz believes young British Muslims are vulnerable to such disastrous and evil ideologies which he came to denounce later. He explains: "the message of Islamism was almost tailor-made for someone like me: intellectually curious and brought up in a Western environment. I didn't have the family or religious background to counterbalance what Nasim (an HT leader) was telling me." The writer ironically recalls how he was much influenced and desensitised by the radicals to the point that he wished at some point to become the "Caliph's ambassador to Britain." (Page 102). Mr Nawaz's radicalism process reached its peak when he realized that he lost sympathy with the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "Stalin once infamously said that a single death is a tragedy; a million death are a statistic. That's what my response to 9/11. It wasn't about individual people, it was about the overall picture, and by this time I was so consumed by the suffering of ‘my own people' that I had no empathy left for the suffering of those I accused of causing it," he writes. The writer also tells about how HT helped create the most notorious Islamist, terrorist groups in modern history especially in Egypt like Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya and Tanzeem el-Jihad, the latter eventually split to form Al-Qaeda. He himself was sent on an ill-fated recruiting mission to Egypt where he was arrested by the fierce State Security Services and spent five years in the Tora prison. On his Egypt's imprisonment experience he writes in chapter 19: "It is the sort of place that remains etched on your memory for ever. The sort of place that still, a decade later, I can recall with disturbing clarity as it wakes me up in the night, slipping insidiously into my dreams. The piling of the bodies. The heat and cold. The begging screams from the torture room at the end of the corridor." Mr Nawaz, as mentioned earlier in this book review, was passionately grateful to the support of non-Muslim rights activists especially from the London-based Amnesty International during his prison ordeal in Egypt. This support was a key element that made him eschew radicalism later. "I am, in part, the person I am today because of their decision to campaign for me as a Prisoner of Conscience. It is because of how much their intervention means to me that I do not want to see anything that might dilute that message; their work on human rights is too important for that," he said. But what really made him loathe Islamism and radicalism was his conviction that it was one side of the same coin of fascism and Nazism as such ideologies had one common feature: the dehumanisation of the other. In page 192, he writes: "It is easier to dismiss and do things to ‘the other' if you consider them as unworthy: the Nazis and the Jews; the jihadists and the infidels. Throughout my teenage and young adult life I had been dehumanised and desensitised to violence. As I got sucked into the Islamist ideology, I in turn began to dehumanise others."
