An important new contribution to understanding Islamism and counterterrorism efforts

Egypt Today has a brilliant contribution to the effort to understand Islamism and the domestic and international terrorism threat it offers in the Middle East.

Memoirs of an Ex-Jihadi

Ed Husain was 16 years old, he says in his memoirs, The Islamist, when he traded in his family's traditional Islam for the radical political Islam of Jamaat-e-Islami, later the Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT).

His story of entering fundamentalist Islam and finally leaving it is a fascinating account of what motivates people to join, what daily life looks like in such groups, and what is at stake in his leaving and in the effort to persuade younger and older people to leave or never join, when possible.

This was the most powerful passage in this review, I thought:

"In 1995, during his second year of college, a fellow student — a Christian Nigerian — was murdered on campus, surrounded by a crowd of students, including Husain. 'It was inhumane, and it’s as if there was no differentiating between right and wrong,' he remembers.

Husain is certain today that the environment he helped to create in college, where outsiders felt confident coming in and distributing propaganda, led to the death. 'Who gave these Muslims this idea of supremacy?' he says. 'Who created this environment? Who created these clusters? Who gave them these ideas of jihad? Who said violence was legitimate? We did. HT did.'

One of the main aims Husain had in writing his book was to bring home the impact of ideas. 'I saw the impact of ideas on people. That’s why I have a problem with people going around calling for jihad, and calling for the kaffir to be killed, without taking responsibility for the actions that such rhetoric leads to.'"

The heart of the differences and conflict between liberal and illiberal forces in the world is their ideas and values. That is why we must be as clear as possible about the commitment in liberal democratic values to ideas rather than force animating our cultural and political life. That is the full embodiment of liberal values that we have been missing during this political period. As long as liberal peoples and governments rationalize force instead of ideas as the central value of liberal democracy, every illiberal group or government - terrorists, theocracies, Communist regimes, totalitarian regimes of all kinds - have the cover they need to engage in every illiberal imposition of force over ideas animating their own cultures and politics.

Ed Husain's experience makes that all the more clear for liberal peoples who might be and should be weary of force foolishly animating liberal and as well as illiberal cultures and politics, which is the ugly, long, and illiberal history of liberal and illiberal cultures and governments alike.

Love,
Ben