met Maajid Nawaz on a drizzly afternoon in March, tucked in a corner of the restaurant at the central London members’ club he uses as a satellite office. He was dabbing the chicken from his Caesar salad into a mound of yellow English mustard, which he stopped doing for long enough to load a video on his iPhone and slide it across the table. It showed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich, speaking at Duke University about him. “Let me just give you an example of Maajid Nawaz — our problem with him,” she says. “He believes that all mosques should be surveilled. In other words, his opinion is that all Muslims are potential terrorists.” Nawaz, a Muslim himself, bristled with frustration at the claim. In fact, he explained, he is on record making the case against collective surveillance.
A former Islamist, for the past nine years Nawaz has made a name for himself as an indefatigable anti-extremist activist. These days he blends seamlessly into the sort of cosmopolitan circles that extremists decry; at his club, dressed in an olive bomber jacket over fitted workout sweats, he could have been a senior marketing exec or a music-video director. At 39, Nawaz is handsome and vaguely famous looking in person, prematurely silver-haired, with a widow’s peak and Mephistophelean soul patch that punctuates a politician’s easy smile. Whenever I saw him, he dapped me with one of those handclasp-half-hugs that, to anyone of a certain age, serves as shorthand for an adolescence steeped in the manners of hip-hop.
For Nawaz’s detractors, of whom there are many, it’s this very chameleon quality, this at-homeness in disparate roles and spaces, that has earned him a reputation as something of a charlatan, a preening opportunist cashing in on his own sensational travails by means of society’s abundant anti-Muslim bias. This uncharitable narrative has shadowed him from the outset, yet his point of view has only grown more relevant after an exceptionally violent 2016 that saw coordinated suicide bombings in Brussels and Istanbul; mass shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando; the ambush and execution of a police officer and his partner near Paris; a Bastille Day slaughter in Nice; ax and suicide bomb attacks in Bavaria; the throat slitting of a Catholic priest in a church in Normandy; pressure-cooker bombs in Manhattan and New Jersey; and a massacre at a Christmas market in Berlin. And on March 22 this year in London, a man mowed down pedestrians with his car near Parliament before stabbing a police constable to death.
With each grisly new assault — and the specter of Syria and the Islamic State looming beyond it — the voices of hatred and reaction in the United States and throughout Britain and Europe found not only sympathetic ears but also willing hands to pull levers in the voting booths. Throughout the upheaval and backlash, Nawaz has remained a constant presence in the media: on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” trying to draw a distinction between religion and political dogma; in his book, “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” (co-written with the prominent “new atheist” Sam Harris), insisting that Islamism does have something to do with Islam and that ISIS in fact possesses a plausible if terribly ungenerous interpretation of the Quran. But whatever role Nawaz enjoys as a public intellectual is inextricable from his personal celebrity as a former fundamentalist. His work is his story, and his story is his celebrity. In order to make his case against radicalism, he finds himself in the not entirely enviable position of nonstop self-promotion.
Categories: The Muslim Times, UK