Maajid Nawaz, Director and co-founder of Quilliam
There are a host of academics and consultants working in the field of counter-extremism, but the Quilliam Foundation is different. It was founded by Ed Hussain and Maajid Nawaz, both ex members of the extremist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir. Nawaz was a founding member of HT in Denmark and Pakistan and eventually served four years in an Egyptian prison, where he mixed with leading ideologues. The foundation was set up after they renounced terrorism and they describe their organisation as ‘the world’s first counter-extremism think tank’. Maajid Nawaz was in Brussels to address a meeting on the future of the EU’s counter terrorism policy and spoke with New Europe
How well is the foundation doing?
We’ve been doing phenomenally well, being going for just over a year and a half now. For example I’ve just returned from Washington where I’ve spent two weeks presenting to think tanks and briefing the US administration, such as senior White House officials, Richard Holdbrooke and Hillary Clinton on our latest report ‘Pakistan: Identity, Ideology and Beyond.’ This is just one aspect of our work, we previously issued a report on the British National Party, ‘In Defence of British Muslims: A response to BNP racist propaganda’, We differentiate between Islam and Islamism and show how the BNP are deliberately conflating the two. Our briefing of governments is also going well and I think that is because an initiative like this is new and people are interested, because of our backgrounds.
You were previously an extremist, what was the appeal? It’s claimed that poverty is part of the motivation.
It’s not necessarily poverty, but it it can play a role. There are push and pull factors. The push factors include poverty, lack of education etc, but this is not enough. There are more poor or uneducated people in the world than there are extremists. Push factors are only part of the equation. It’s disingenuous to focus on the grievances and to think that by fixing grievances around the world we will somehow eradicate extremism because we have to recognise the pull factors. They are the ideology. This catches people’s anger, freezes it and re-frames it and institutes the mind to reorganise those grievances through an ideological framework and henceforth everything becomes about how to further the ideology and interpret things through the lens of the ideology. The group I used to belong to for thirteen years, Hizb ut-Tahrir, talk much about opposing dictatorships in the Middle East but they don’t talk much about their opposition to democracy, so their anti- dictatorship stance is only part of the story.
Turkey is a pretty democratic country and Hizb ut-Tahrir is trying to overthrow the government by a military coup, because, for them, democracy is man made law and this is an example of people who are ideologically driven, discovering a grievance where it doesn’t exist because they are ideologically opposed to democracy. In our counter extremism efforts we have to recognise that ideology needs to be countered and not enough is being done on this front.
There is a sense that the individual is getting smaller. Is globalisation an influence?
Globalisation is crucial in this debate because one of the reasons people join extremist groups is because of the identity crisis. When I joined, I didn’t know if I was Pakistani because I was born in Britain and didn’t speak Urdu, yet I was being racially attacked so I didn’t feel British either. I solved this by joining a club and this was the Muslim club and that allowed me to feel comfortable in an ideology that acted as a revolutionary doctrine for me, against racism and all problems I saw in society. With globalisation we find our societies are getting mixed and the homogeneous, ethnic based societies from the 19th Century where allegiances to a state were based on ethnicity are disappearing and new models are like the US where you belong by accepting an ideology, such as the American constitution or the American dream. In Britain you can be British without being Anglo-Saxon. Some countries in Europe are still having difficulties over ethnicity and identity. This is a two way thing, both Muslims and non Muslims are affected. In a globalised world, what does it mean to be European? Or German, or Danish? These are the key questions that globalisation has thrown onto Europe.
What do you think the EU is doing right or needs to do in the future?
Leaving aside debates on having a more integrated Europe or not, what we have is that Europe has failed to capture the imagination of the public and as a result there is a lack of interest in Europe and that leads to neglect and a lack of accountability. There is less popular contest over taking a position as an MEP so the talent isn’t heading this way. Europe needs to look at that. There are many negative conceptions of Europe and Europe really needs to tackle these perceptions. We need to make Europe more sexy, to make it interesting to work with the EU and coming from the UK, people are just not interested. We need to capture people’s imaginations and when that happens any improvement the EU makes in countering radicalism, the more interest there will be.
The growing euroskeptic movement is growing more extreme and the current parliament has some people with quite disturbing backgrounds, including the BNP
Of course. In the UK we’re worried about this as we have the rise of two polarisations. We have Islamic extremism on one hand and far-right extremism on the other and these are two sides of the same coin and they feed each other, so the Islamist narrative that ‘all non Muslims hate us’ is supported by BNP activity and their narrative that ‘all Muslims are extremist’ is supported by Muslim activity and the majority in the middle is marginalised, so we really need to start addressing both. We started a counter extremism institute, not a counter Islamic extremism institute. Although we focus on the Islamic side, because of our backgrounds, but as the far-right have grown and Nick Griffin got elected to the European Parliament, we’re addressing that as well. It’s very important for wider European society to address both issues.
