Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Interviewing Maajid Nawaz

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July 7, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

49:25

Interviewing Maajid Nawaz

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	Hello everyone, I'm with Magin Noaz.
	Thank you so much for joining me for a Q ⁇ A session about the problem with Islamism and Jihadism in Britain.
	Think magic and put a D on the end.
	Oh Majid.
	Magid.
	Magic, yes.
	Imagine you're saying magic.
	Sorry.
	No, no, it's very common and Majid is also a name so you're forgiven for that because they are both very much like Sarah and Sarah.
	They're both names.
	But mine happens to be Magid.
	Magid, sorry, I do.
	That's alright.
	So okay, so I think if you could give people a quick overview of your background, why it's important, why you know, why you're a credible person to approach on this subject.
	Well that's for people to decide really.
	On the note of credibility, often people talk about credible voices and voices that lack credibility in this debate that happens to be the debate around extremism.
	And often it's people grinding their own ideological axes.
	So if you're on the right wing then a credible voice is a right wing or if you're on the left wing credible voice is a left wing and actually I think there's too much tribalism and credibility.
	Credibility is often a euphemism for I don't agree with that person therefore they lack credibility.
	True enough.
	So what I try and do is this is my story, this is who I am, this is what I say.
	I don't claim to represent anybody.
	I don't claim to be a Muslim religious leader.
	I'm not devout.
	I don't claim that I speak on behalf of any Muslim community, though I'm from the Muslim community and the community is of me and I'm of the community.
	But I don't claim to be a spokesperson for Muslims.
	And what I speak about comes from my own life experience and my own study.
	So in answer to your question, I was around the age of 15 years old, born and raised in Essex, around the age of 15 years old, went through a process of that we now refer to as radicalisation.
	At the time, I didn't know that's what we would end up calling it.
	But my process of radicalisation was essentially, well there were contributing factors to it.
	One of them was some very severe and violent domestic racism in Essex.
	I mean machete attacks and hammer attacks and both from what were then known as Combat 18 neo-Nazi skinheads, but also harassment from the police.
	Now for your viewers who aren't from Britain, many of them won't know that actually the Stephen Lawrence case was a major threshold, watershed moment in race relations in the United Kingdom.
	A lot changed after that.
	And my period of violent racism that I experienced was a year before Stephen Lawrence was murdered.
	So it's what I now refer to as in the bad old days of racism in this country because we have to acknowledge positive change.
	What year are we talking roughly?
	You know, 91, 2, 3 and 4 or almost.
	And so the Bosnia genocide was a second factor that was playing out across the continent.
	Again, for people that aren't from Europe, just imagine, for example, if you're a viewer in the United States, imagine there's a genocide on the West Coast taking place and you're on the East Coast.
	It's going to affect you still.
	And so we often forget that we have recently gone through a genocide in Europe and that was in Bosnia.
	And that also contributed to my radicalisation.
	So there was this sense of grievance and then there were other factors kicking in, identity questions and ideology, which is important.
	So at the age of 16, I joined an Islamist organisation.
	I'll give you a basic one-sentence definition of what I mean by Islamism when I refer to it.
	And that is the desire to impose any given version of Islam over society.
	Jihadism will be the use of force to spread Islamism.
	So if Islamism is the ideology, jihadism is the method.
	It's the method of al-Qaeda.
	And I see, but not every Islamist, in fact the majority of them, are not jihadists.
	But they are ideologues.
	So I joined an Islamist group at 16.
	Yeah, so you were politically active but not violent?
	I was a revolutionary Islamist.
	sought to incite revolution in Muslim-majority countries and to establish a caliphate.
	The group I joined was actually the first group that popularized the notion of how Muslims must resurrect a caliphate across the world.
	I spent 13 years in that organization recruiting for the notion that Muslims must become revolutionaries seeking a caliphate and I spent some of that time in Pakistan, some in Denmark, most of it in the UK.
	And to cut a long story short, I spent five years in prison in Egypt as a political prisoner, because I was there closetizing for this message as well.
	And I was sentenced for membership of a banned organization a year after 9-11.
	And I spent five years as a political prisoner in Masrat or a prison in Cairo with the other political prisoners, most of whom were Islamists or jihadists.
	Our conviction had nothing to do with violence.
	It was because the group that I used to belong to is still legal across Europe and Britain and in America.
	Our conviction was membership of a banned group because it's not legal in Egypt.
	It wasn't under Hosni Mubarak and it still isn't under Sisi.
	And that's for various reasons.
	Not least because they're not democratic countries, but for many reasons.
	So it is an extremist organization.
	And in those five years, when I was sentenced to five years in prison, Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, a controversial decision because, of course, though I was in prison for my ideas, my ideas were extreme.
	But they took the viewpoint that we will disagree with what that person says but defend vehemently his right to say it.
	And that helped me, counterintuitively.
	Amnesty adopting me as a prisoner of conscience made me see for the first time then I was 24 that the institutions that I as then saw them, the institutions of my society, weren't always against me.
	But here there was an institution that was defending me.
	And that got me thinking.
	And five years in prison is a long time to think.
	So I studied a lot, I read a lot, I learned classical Arabic, I memorized a lot of the Islamic theology and the Quran.
	I memorized half of that.
	By the time I was released from prison, most of my ideological fever had abated.
	I was still a member of the group for about 10 months afterwards.
	I was released from prison in 2006.
	I left the group known as Hezbollah Dahir in 2007.
	In January 2008, I launched Quilliam.
	I'm now founder of Quilliam, among many other hats I have, columnist and radio broadcaster for LBC.
	But I launched Quilliam as what we built as the world's first counter-extremism organization.
	And our aim is to provide a voice that emerged from Muslim communities to warn of the dangers of Islamist radicalization and to advocate instead for liberal, democratic, human rights-based reform to the Muslim mind frame.
	Now, that means two things, I believe.
	We have to, what I say often is we have to intellectually terminate the ideology of Islamism because it is in essence theocracy and theocracy can never be just in principle.
	Theocracy will always be unjust.
	There's no such thing as a free and fair theocracy.
	So intellectually terminate the Islamist ideology.
	And then point two of my personal mission statement would be to encourage the reform of Islam as a religion today.
	And that's who I am to be.
	That's a fantastic jumping off point, actually.
	Okay, so I'm an outsider, I'm an atheist, and so I look at...
	Well, depending on what you're talking about, you're an insider as a fellow human being.
	Well...
	Well, again, to the religion of Islam.
	I used to see it as quite a monolith, which I think a lot of people still do.
	But I think a lot of people don't understand that there are very, very many competing strands of thought.
	Of course there are, obviously.
	But the one that I find most interesting is what most people call Wahhabism.
	But that's not really what they call themselves, is it?
	I think they call themselves like the true Muslims.
	And I've heard it referred to as the Takfiri doctrine.
	Yes.
	I mean, so Wahhabism is, again, it's the official state version of Islam that's implemented in Saudi Arabia.
	It's from the Sunni sect of Islam, but is very austere, vacuous, and literalist and medieval in its outlook.
	And is happily excommunicates, for example, Shia Muslims, who are from another sect.
	But even within the Sunni sect, you know, the vast majority of Muslims in the world, about 80% are Sunni, but most of them aren't Wahhabis.
	But Saudi Arabia and its petrodollars has been proselytizing for Wahhabism, and that's how it's happened, especially since the Afghan so-called Afghan Jihad against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
	The Saudis, the CIA, and the Pakistani ISI encouraged the jihad in Afghanistan.
	And that was the beginning of exporting Saudi Wahhabism to the world.
	Yeah.
	See, this, I think, if we call it Wahhabism, I think that's accurate enough for the interview.
	But I think it's important people understand that they don't see themselves, as I understand it, they don't see themselves as a new version or like an innovative creed.
	In fact, as I understand it, they seek to reduce innovation into Islam.
	If you look at the Reformation, the Christian Reformation, this is why I don't use the word Reformation.
	I use the word reform linguistically.
	But the actual terminological usage of the word reformation, capital R, that's what the Wahhabis did in Islam.
	So they had their Martin Luther, who was, and why they're called Wahhabis is because his name was Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab.
	And he came along and he smashed all the pictures like the Protestants did to the Catholic churches.
	There's no crucifixions in this.
	None of these, you know, they call them idols.
	You know, the statue of Mary, they smash all that.
	So this guy did the same thing.
	It was very much like, I recently read a book about it, and it was shockingly like what ISIS are doing now.
	I mean, like sacred grave sites.
	Yeah, yeah, well, ISIS is doctrinally Wahhabi.
	Yes.
	Except it's not in its method.
	So we look at it, say, so first of all, let's establish something.
	Wahhabis emerged from the Sunni denomination of Islam, which is 80% of Muslims in the world.
	From Wahhabism, when it mixed in Afghanistan, Islamism, which I've just defined as the desire to impose a new version of Islam over society as an ideological phenomenon, emerged from Egypt.
	And not all Islamists are Wahhabis, right?
	Because Wahhabis actually refers to a creed or dispute.
	A doctrinal dispute, not a political ideology.
	Islamists aren't so fussed about the doctrine.
	They're more fussed about the politics.
	But Islamism and Wahhabism merged in Afghanistan.
	And when they merged, when you had doctrinal fundamentalism merge with political theocracy, you ended up with jihadism.
	Because then you have the two fundamentalisms in politics and in religion mixing together.
	And that's when jihadism emerged.
	Because that rigidity in doctrine and rigidity in politics only left violence as a way to get your own way.
	And so the jihadists are the bastard children of the Wahhabis and the Egyptian Islamists.
	Right, okay.
	And so I am accurate in saying that they are, there seems to be a great concern with Western influence over the Islamic world.
	And from what I've read, it seems that they're trying to essentially get back to sort of a Quranic fundamentalist, literalist view of things.
	I mean, al-Wahhab, when he started making, when the House of Saudi started making pacts with the British, it was very difficult to persuade his own troops, who were effectively like ISIS jihadis, accept firearms and cars and things like this and so as I understand it they're trying to get back to a very literal interpretation it seems that there's a great deal of I'm interested in the the ideology specifically in this case
	There seems to be a great concern within the Islamic world about the arguments being used.
	Because I think a lot of people fail to understand that it's argumentation that's putting people in this mindset.
	I think that there is also a connection between sort of a cult mentality around certain figures, like Abu Hamzas and stuff.
	But there is an indoctrination process.
	Yeah, and there is a certain kind of argumentation where, and it does seem that they are taking a specific strand of argumentation, deliberately leaving out other sectors, other arguments on purpose.
	What do you make of it?
	Well, this is where my dialogue with Sam Harris went into some of this.
	The reason I use the word vacuous interpretation of scripture and not literalist is because people often say to me, okay, but come on, Majid.
	My atheist friends, my brothers and sisters who are atheists, I mean, there's no, that's why I said insider, outsider, depending on what you're looking at, you know, in liberalism and human rights, you're my brother.
	So my atheist brothers and sisters often say to me, but Majid, look, we get what you're saying about the need for Islam's reform, and yes, it's important we support you, but you've got a hard task because the literal interpretation of the scripture lends itself to Wahhabism, right?
	And I often say to them, actually, no, that's a vacuous interpretation, not a literalist interpretation.
	And the difference being vacuous meaning devoid of context, literal meaning adhering to the literal actual wording of the text, right?
	And if you see that subtle difference, sometimes the literalist reading ends up producing a very liberal result.
	So I gave an example in my dialogue, which is a second book with Sam Harris, being turned into a film.
	And I said, look, the example of alcohol.
	Literally, in Arabic, in the original Arabic of the Prophet Muhammad, alcohol, the word for it was khamr.
	And it only referred to wine made from grapes.
	So it excludes in its original word any reference to whiskey, vodka, gin.
	So there's out of the four schools of jurisprudence that are traditional within Islamic theology, the first of them, perhaps in many ways the senior of them because it was the first of them, known as the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, was the closest to the time of the Prophet, takes the view that this word khamar, or the prohibition of what we refer to in today's language as alcohol, only applied to wine made from grapes.
	Right.
	And that's a literalist take on the word khamr and a refusal to use common sense and say, well, clearly alcohol was forbidden because God didn't want people to get drunk, so that must apply to whiskey as well because that also gets you drunk.
	They said, no, no, no, we're going to be literalists.
	It only referred to grape wine.
	So the literalist reading there leads to a liberal result.
	And that's why I use the word vacuous because they don't always concur.
	So vacuous readings are readings that are devoid of context, devoid of an understanding of the world around us has changed.
	A desire to be the Puritans go back to the times when, that's why they call themselves Safis, which means the predecessors.
	And this is something that's something that's popped up multiple times throughout the history of Islam, isn't it?
	Like the, how do you pronounce it?
	The Kajarites, is that correct?
	Kharijis, yeah, the Khawari, yeah, that's a plural.
	I've only ever seen these things right now.
	That's right, that's right.
	That's dull English stuff.
	No, no, it's absolutely funny.
	Khawarij is the plural, Khariji is the singular.
	What were they, 7th century?
	Yeah, so they came about immediately after the death of the Prophet.
	So this is a problem that's plagued Islam from the beginning.
	People often say to me, and we'll get to the left wing in a minute as well, because the Brumin left try and preach to me, preach at me, right, about this stuff, and they haven't got the faintest idea about Islamic history of theology.
	They say, so why I just had a dig at the left is, oh, imagine speaking against extremism is part of the imperialistic plan.
	It's like the Prophet has, you know, hadiths are the saying of the Prophet, right?
	The Prophet Muhammad has hadiths, has sayings that warn us against extremism.
	Which means I warn you about extremism in religion.
	That's a hadith of the Prophet, right?
	And whether or not, you know, because you're an atheist, you're not going to believe that was divine inspiration.
	So whether it was constructed by the followers of the Prophet to warn against the Khawarij, or a believer would say the Prophet was warning against the coming Khawarij, meaning it was a prophecy.
	Either way, point being, it's part of Islamic heritage to talk about extremism because we've had the Brumin buggers since day one.
	We've had to deal with them.
	The Khawarij exactly were doing what ISIS is doing today.
	By the way, right down to the same Quranic references they use.
	So there's a passage in the Quran that the Khawarij were famous for quoting a companion of the Prophet when they went to war against him.
	And they said, which means that the rule is for none but God.
	What does that sound like?
	It says exactly.
	That is what it's saying.
	And we read all this stuff in our books.
	When we studied religion growing up, we would learn that the Khawarij would use these passages to say that, and the companions of the Prophet fought them.
	There's another hadith of the Prophet, again, whether it's prophecy or you think it's something that someone made up within the heritage, yeah.
	There's another hadith that says, talking about the Khawarij ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, saying, kill them wherever you find them.
	Again, because they were described as having exactly the traits that ISIS has today.
	And they were at war with the companions.
	And so it was like, this is all our war against these people who are attempting to enforce this very, very rigid, to the point where a disciple of the Prophet is being fought.
	And it's like, you don't understand the religion.
	I'm the disciple of the Prophet we're talking about.
	How could you even begin to make that assertion?
	So let's move on to the next set of questions I've got.
	I probably won't edit any of this because I'm doubtful.
	On that literatureism and vacuum point, just quickly.
	So it's why I say when people say about Majid, you know, the literalist reading lends itself to say fundamentalism and Wahhabism.
	And so they say, look, the Prophet said, kill the person that left the religion, kill the apostate.
	And he did.
	The hadith says, right, whoever leaves their religion, kill.
	That's a problem.
	We've got to talk about it.
	That doesn't confer with my views or your views about human rights.
	Of course.
	So there's a passage there that's problematic.
	And people will say, you see, literally, that passage lends itself to Wahhabism.
	And I say, well, yes and no, that passage does.
	But why I call it vacuous is because there's another explicit passage saying 100% the opposite in the Quran.
	It says, ⁇ ⁇ ⁇ There is no compulsion in religion. So which one is the literalist reading now? Do we choose this one or this one? What we have is an apparent contradiction. So literalism doesn't help us there. That's why I call it vacuism. No, I completely agree. I've been researching this heavily and it's very obvious that these people are choosing what they want out of this. And it's clear that they're trying to justify the reason that they're doing that. And that's not to say there aren't problematic passages. They clearly are. I mean,
	I'm an English liberal. I think of myself as coming from the heritage of Locke and Hobbes. And that's where I ended up eventually. Good. And so, like, I mean,
	there isn't a reading of Sharia that I find acceptable. But that's not my problem. I'm not concerned. I mean, if people wish to live that way, that's entirely their choice. I have no problem with it. My concern is the Islamism and the Church. What concerns me most is that's what's drumming up the right wing. And we're having this debate,
	even where it doesn't concern you or affect you, because say it's whatever, it's a woman covering her own. Exactly. But within the community, we're having this debate. We're having this conversation about do you need to cover your face? Do you need to cover your hair? Well, that's where I was going to go next, actually. So, as I understand it,
	I was reading Force and Fanaticism by Simon Ross Alente. Really, really in-depth book. For anyone who doesn't know, he was a British professor who on his own merit decided to travel to Saudi Arabia and study Wahhabism for three years on his own. He wasn't even backed by an institution. And he's very pro-Islam. I mean,
	he kept bringing up the point, look, they're saying all of these things, but they just ignore the fact that it was explicit that there's no compulsion in religion. So, how can they justify compelling people to be this way? And so, he was saying that Muslim students in Bradford, where he taught, were complaining about the Wahhabis in their communities, and he would liken them to Ostean nuns who would go around harassing the other Muslims who would maybe fraternise them with women or, you know, maybe drinking alcohol or something like that,
	and they would effectively try to bully them in small gangs.
	What's the general perception of Wahhabis within Muslim communities?
	So it used to be very negative, and now look at my dad's generation.
	My dad, who's like, but he's still alive, still around, despises them, because he comes from a Sufi tradition, and the Sufi tradition was the default tradition.
	Again, from within, Sufism is mysticism, spiritualism, right?
	Think of Rumi, think of Omar Khayyam and his Ruba Ayyad, and Sufism crosses over from Shia and Muslim.
	Oh, you haven't got any milk here.
	Oh no, I didn't know if you wanted...
	It's alright, don't worry.
	I don't know if that...
	It's alright, it's alright, don't worry.
	It's an English breakfast, it's alright, it won't be too strong, it's not an assam.
	I'll wait till I'm desperate.
	Okay, so it'll warm your throat anyway.
	Sufism cuts across the Shia and the Sunni divide, it's more a mystical journey, and that's what the default of Muslims was, until the Petrodons started exporting Wahhabism.
	So, in Origin...
	Muslims around the world were very, very hostile both to Wahhabism and Islamism because they are two different strands in their origins. They did cross over eventually. What's happened recently is that's all changing. So the Wahhabization of Libya, the Wahhabization, and then on top of that, keep in mind the Islamicization and it becomes jihadism when they merge. That's happened in Iraq. And it's happened in Libya. It's happening right now in Pakistan,
	in Indonesia. And the problem is twofold. One is Saudi influence and money, and the other is Iran. Because Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a sectarian war playing out in Syria right now. For anyone who doesn't know, Iran is a Shiite nation and a Shia. Yeah, a Shiite theocracy, not just any old Shia nation. And Saudi Arabia is obviously a Wahhabi theocracy. Analogies. Analogies between Protestantism and Catholicism,
	Catholicism aren't perfect. It doesn't do it. But the hatred is there, you know. And this is a civil war going on within Islam today. And so Wahhabism is facilitated in its spread by two factors. And that is the money coming from Saudi Arabia from the Afghan days before the Shia-Sunni civil war was revived. But then what's exacerbating it today is the Shia-Sunni civil war in Yemen,
	in Iraq, in Syria. It's wherever Saudi and Iran are at loggerheads. And that is a geostrategic war and religion is being used as an asset in that war. Right. So there's a lot of concern about Saudi funding in mosques,
	which I'm not surprised at. But I saw an article on the Independent the other day that suggested that I think it was 46% of Britain's mosques are controlled by the Diobandi sect, which as I understand is another sort of very fundamentalist sect from Pakistan. And I briefly read about them and it seemed that they were essentially the same. So the Indian Diobandis are different to the Pakistani Diobandis. Diobandis emerged in India. The Indian Diobandis are very scholarly and actually are,
	you know, you can have a conversation with them and, you know, you won't get far because they're still strict Muslims, but you can actually have a reasonable conversation. It's like speaking to a Jesuit or something. It's a good conversation. But the Pakistani Diobandis, because of the Afghan jihad, they became more and more Wahhabi. And so the Taliban actually emerged from the Diobandis. But of course, they fought alongside Al-Qaeda. And so the influence was there, and the funding was there from Saudi Arabia,
	so they became stricter and stricter. Right, because apparently the Saudis only control about 6% of Britain's mosques, which I thought, wow, that's nice and low. But the Diobandis, they're essentially brothers of faith. The influence is there. That's half of Britain's mosques that are being controlled by radical fundamentalists. I mean,
	what do you think should be done about that? Well, you know, the problem is, unfortunately, bigger than most people are comfortable admitting. And we know this because of surveys and polling data. We just know this empirically. When we know that when surveyed,
	0% of British Muslims returned a result having any sympathy for homosexuality, saying it was 0% said it was morally justifiable. The survey was done again about six months ago through a Philips ICN poll became infamous because 52% said they would ban homosexuality if they were in charge in Britain. So the polling there,
	and this is just one example. There's many. And you've got to keep in mind, American viewers listening to this will say, yeah, we've got our Bible belt, right? But there's two differences. I mean, there are fundamentalist Christians. Some of them do attack abortion clinics. But what you don't have is this global insurgency of Christian fundamentalism. With women being enslaved in Syria,
	with Boko Haram enslaving women in Nigeria, with al-Shabaab in Somalia, with Pakistan and the LET and the Taliban taking over entire countries. Mali being taken over an area bigger than the size of France, being taken over by Al-Qaeda before the French had to go in and bomb the heck out of Timbuktu, right? It's just, it's actually insulting to me to try and make that analogy. Not only that, I think people don't understand the difference in scale between saying,
	well, we would outlaw homosexuality, which, okay, you may well do that. But there are, what is it, 10 or 11 Muslim countries that have the death penalty for homosexuality? And atheism is a terrorism offense in Saudi Arabia. Oh, absolutely. The thing is that why I said it's insulting to me to try and downplay the nature of this threat is because these liberals, and actually the left-arm, the left-arm liberal, right? So let's change that word. These are people that are, yeah, I call them regressive left, yeah,
	the regressive left who want to obfuscate and excuse the nature of this problem. They claim that it's because they're caring about Muslims. And the problem is, no, you don't, because the first victims of all of this happen to be the Muslims who have the misfortune of coming under the dominion of these extremist theocrats. All the minorities within that minority,
	right? So liberal Muslims, Christian Arabs, feminist Muslims, dissenting generally, intellectuals, they are being killed. ISIS made a point of going around killing even the guy that was looking after Palmyra. They beheaded him in Palmyra. The guy was a walking library and they beheaded him in Palmyra. For anyone who wants to get some real detail on this,
	you can read Black Flags, The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrecket. It's a horror story. It's just a horror story, but it's true. But this is my point to the regressive left, and it is that you claim to care about Muslims. It's insulting to me. Unless you're going to excommunicate me, I'm aggressive left. They've already done that. We'll get to that. But I was going to get on to that. But I'm a Muslim. And I'm telling you,
	my communities are suffering. And downplaying the extent of this problem is only making them suffer even more. We've got to accept the level of the problem that we're dealing with before we can begin to tackle it. We are faced with what I call a global jihadist insurgency. Frankly,
	that's what it is. And no amount of lying or pretending is going to do away with that. We can see it as clear as day in front of us. As I said, I've just listed, look, you know, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran. I mean, it's everywhere. Somalia, Nigeria is enslaving women, Syria, enslaving women, Iraq. And it's not just the Muslim world either. I mean, look at France. France suffers from so many more terror attacks than Britain. It's undeniable, and any attempt to deny it,
	it can only be ideologically driven. Yes. Totally agree on that. So, and okay, this is an interesting thing. So, I think we can agree that the Wahhabis and the Islamists are Islamic because this is the first barrier you come across when talking to the Revolution. They're saying,
	well, they're not real Muslims. And I find it very interesting how they seem to be takfearing the Islamists in the same way the Islamists tag fear everyone else. And for your viewers, takfira means to excommunicate. And actually, I make this point that these same regressive leftists would never, never say that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism or the Crusades had nothing to do with Catholicism, and Pope Urban II declaring them. So they're happy to ascribe Christianity's mistakes, rightfully so,
	to the church. Absolutely. When that big child abuse scandal happened, it was recognized that there would be a link between the celibacy, the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church, and this scandal of child abuse. And the church needed to introspect. And liberals and leftists, two separate groups but often aligned when it comes to stuff like being against Christianity, went for it. They went for it. They went for the Catholic Church. As you would expect,
	as you would exactly say. So, yet, that same idea of, you know, the Crusades had something to do with Catholicism is abandoned when it comes to jihad having something to do with Islam. I think the answer here is, as we just discussed, It's not that ISIS is Islam per se, but it's also you can't say they're nothing to do with Islam.
	You know, it's a concept.
	I mean, Sam breaks it down very nicely when he's got his concentric circles.
	So they have something to do with Islam.
	Absolutely.
	They're within the...
	We have to accept that.
	They are.
	They are Muslims, They are one of the various factions that have emerged from Islam and they happen to be currently.
	Jihadism and Islamism generally happens to be ascending in the ascendancy and it's a problem.
	Yeah, absolutely. And it's a huge concern to me. It's not just the fact that it's a group of people who call themselves the real Muslims. You say no one else is actually a real Muslim. We are actually here to restore a caliphate, we're here to return to Muhammad's original words and deeds. And the idea that they have any authority to turn around and then say, well, these people aren't Muslims. It's ridiculous. And the problem then is, of course,
	here's the problem, right? It is a bunch of people. Let's move to the left, right? Let's move to where they have even. Because when I speak like what you've just said, when I speak like this, because it's off script,
	right? What I mean by that. They have a narrative. They have a narrative. The left has a narrative for people like me, right? I'm the victim. I have been through, and I'm not just saying that, because actually, you could be talking to somebody who the left wants to be a victim. I've actually been through the stuff that they say Muslims go through that makes them victims. I've been through violent racism. I have been arrested at gunpoint at 15 by Essex police authorities and racially profiled. I have had my DNA forcibly taken from me at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000,
	whereby it remains a criminal offence to be silent. The right to silence has been taken away, the Amanda writes. It's now criminal not to speak. And they took my DNA. I have been imprisoned in the war on terror. I have witnessed torture. I am a brown Muslim. Everything that they say should make me a victim has happened to me. But because my conclusions don't concur with their preconceived ideological script,
	suddenly my voice becomes illegitimate. And it's incredibly patronizing and colonial if you think about it. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I can only imagine the number of times you've been called an Islamophobic. And well, the Southern Poverty Law Center has,
	the SPLC has actually listed me as an anti-Muslim extremist. Now, I'm the guy, this bunch of white guys, and they'd like to play identity politics, and I point to the hypocrisy in their identity politics when I throw it back at them. I don't believe in identity politics. I see people as human beings. But if someone are going to play that game with me,
	then on their own terms they lose. Because the point is, a bunch of white guys sitting in Sweet Home, Alabama, from their Ivory Tower, this big corporate office, a multi-million dollar business they've built up called the Southern Poverty Law Centre, punching down, right, which is what they like to talk about, punching down at an individual private citizen by putting me on a list, right, when other people that put me on lists, I can tell you now I'm on kind of an ISIS lists, right? They're the other lists I'm on. When they killed Tia van Gogh in the Netherlands,
	they pinned a list to his body and that had Ayan Hursey Ali's name on it. And they put her on the Southern Poverty Law Centre. I saw an anti-Muslim list as well, right? It's ridiculous. And so I'm a guy, I'm the Muslim here, guys. I'm the guy who learned classical Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic. I could sit right now and do this interview in Arabic with you. I learned half the Quran by heart. I memorise my Islamic theology and history. I was born and raised a Muslim,
	have a Muslim family. My child self-identifies as Muslim at 16, my boy. And my grandmother wears a headscarf and some white dude sitting in Alabama is going to call me an anti-Muslim extremist because I've gone off script. Because unless I power what they want me to say according to their own ideological narrative, They will deprive me of agency.
	They will assume that I don't have intellectual agency.
	I can't speak for myself unless I'm saying what they want me to say.
	Now, if that's not the bigotry of low expectations, in other words, racism, right, then what is...
	Well, it's also very...
	I really liked Christopher Hitchens' definition of racism.
	It's a lack of discrimination between people in a certain group.
	And that's my problem with the way they treat Islam.
	They treat it like a giant monolith.
	Like, you can't criticize any of it.
	Well, see, this is where the populist, extreme, anti-Muslim right will say Islam is this totalitarian ideology and we want to ban it.
	The regressive left will say Islam is this totalitarian ideology as the Islamists define it and we want to protect Muslims from your criticism.
	And the Islamists are saying Islam is this totalitarian ideology and we want to implement it.
	It's either ban it...
	protect them or implement them. And none of them are correct. None of those positions are correct. No, it's ludicrous. And this is why I wanted to get into it like this. Because I know there are so many people who have this opinion. And I mean, I just want to reiterate, you know, as a liberal, I look at like Muslim prescriptions on gender divide and head starts and the treatment of homosexuals. And I think, well, that's anti-liberal. That's illiberal. I can't agree with that. But if that's something that they want to do in their countries,
	and I can be an activist against it, and I am. But I'm not scared of it. Because it's not a threat. It's just a way of life I don't agree with. There are plenty of ways of life I don't agree with. But the way that they try to defend absolutely, and it's, I mean, by their own definition, they would call it a right-wing conservative religious sort of countries. They would never defend these things if they were Christian. Well, this is what I said on my interview with Bill Marshaw when talking about the SPLC. I said, look, you guys,
	they have listed Christian fundamentalist groups on their hate list, yes, right? So you, hang on, you arrogate to yourselves the right to challenge Christian fundamentalism in your Bible belt, but you don't allow me to challenge Muslim fundamentalism in the Quran belt. We have a Quran belt. We have problems with Muslim fundamentalists, you know, more so than Christian fundamentalism, as we've just discussed, right? On a far larger scale. So I can't challenge that. It's ridiculous. So this is why, even though we're here in the UK, we're in London,
	our defamation laws are stricter than America's. We can win cases here easier. But though it's harder in the US, it's why I've decided to sue the Southern Poverty Law Centre for defamation. I'm crowdfunding the campaign. So I don't know if you put text on the videos basically. I'll leave a link to it. It's MaginNoas.com. I'm probably on their list as well,
	to be honest with you. So MaginNoiraz.com, and it's just, I just need people because it's very expensive in the States to take a defamation action, especially with the SPLC. They're all lawyers and they are mega-mega-rich. Which is the irony here. They're punching. They're punching a huge amount of rich backing. Yeah,
	and you know, so that mega-rich, huge organization is picking on individual private citizens in this way. It's despicable. It's an obvious abuse of power. And this is one of the real problems that we have with the progressive left. They're very active and they're very engaged and they're not afraid to victimize people. And we see this a lot. And that is bullying,
	right? Absolutely. And so I've decided, you know, enough is enough. You know, I've seen torture in jails. I've seen people drop dead in front of me in prison from their wounds and illnesses. I have faced off neo-Nazi machetes. I'm not the kind of guy that's going to let a bunch of white dudes in Sweet Home,
	Alabama tell me I'm the anti-Muslim extremist, well, I'm the Muslim in this conversation. So I'm going to stand up to them and I want your viewers, I want you to help us crowdfund this case so we can bring the regressive left to justice. I'll definitely leave a link in the description for this video because I would like to see that happen too. Right,
	okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is I don't know what your relationship with Tommy Robinson is like. But he, a few years ago, made the claim that in British prisons, young men, young Muslim men were being radicalised and we would see a problem with that. That's true,
	bear fruit, and it appears to have borne fruit. What do you think of his predictions? And what do you think of Tommy in general? Well, so Tommy, obviously, you may be aware of the history. We helped him leave the EDL. I'm actually not aware of the history with that. So I'll tell you, He's fine.
	So, Quilliam, we say Quilliam, helped Tommy leave the EDL because he expressed, as I'm sure he's written in his book, I haven't read it, but he expressed that he felt the EDL was being infiltrated by neo-Nazis.
	Can we stop on that point here quickly?
	Because I think one thing that a lot of people don't understand is that the EDL wasn't originally a sort of white supremacist organisation, as I understand it.
	No, no, no.
	There were lots of...
	It's been dominated by them now.
	Yeah, after Tommy's absence.
	But I did an interview with him and he said that he spent an awful lot of time keeping these elements out of the EDL.
	And he eventually gave up.
	He couldn't keep pushing them out, so he left.
	And that's good, you know, if somebody comes to me and says, I want to leave this organisation because neo-Nazis are infiltrating, it's what I set Quilliam up to do, it's just to help people move away from radical environments, right?
	When I speak to a jihadist or an Islamist to help them move towards the liberal centre, You know, I trail the image that his world needs to come out and then what's called So, what happened?
	Yeah, my heart is a little broad person that I can put on, right?
	And the name goes on, right?
	Well, I have a judge.
	nobody complains. But when I tried to help Tommy, a whole bunch of leftists were like, you're speaking to the enemy. I'm like, hold on, I've spoken to far worse people than this on the jihadist side, and none of you said jackal. Seriously, it's my job to speak to Islamists and jihadists to try and help them de-radicalise. And yet the minute I try and do this on the other side of the spectrum, somehow I'm speaking with the enemy. This is a very interesting idea as well, because I always want to know, well, okay,
	what do you expect us to do with these people? Our only option is to de-radicalise them and bring them back into the fold. Can't continually excommunicate them because they had a right to be. And in fairness, in Tommy's case, he was worried about the neo-Nazis infiltrating the EDL. I took a view, and I think it was proven correct, that actually the EDL minus Tommy would fizzle to a smaller, you know, less powerful version of itself, a shadow of its former self. And it has, it still exists. It is dominated by these nuts,
	But it is a shadow of its former self under Tommy.
	Now, Tommy's gone on to do other things, some of which I have agreed with in public and some of which I've disagreed with in public.
	But you know, that's different.
	There's no longer a national Europe's largest street protest movement was the EDL.
	And that has been.
	That potential for causing community strife has been removed from the scene.
	It's far smaller now.
	And so I saw that as a.
	I never claimed we de-radicalized Tommy.
	I've never made that claim.
	What I've said is we helped him leave the EDL, which we did, and I'm happy we did.
	You know, because it's a pragmatic thing to do, as you just said, what are we going to do?
	If someone comes to me and says, I want to leave a group that's being infiltrated by Neo-Nazis, I say, no thanks, I'm not.
	Did you stay with the Nazis?
	And I happen to have founded an organization that was set up to do precisely that, but I'm not going to help you. Especially when it's a man like Tommy Robinson who's capable of organising and leading. There's no doubt. I mean, as I said, it's the largest street organisation. And like I said, when Tommy left, it's fizzled out. That means that he's a charismatic man. He can achieve things. Do you want to leave him in the influence of neo-Nazis? Of course you don't. No. You know, that's crazy to do something like that. You know, we've had our ups and downs since. Yeah, well, of course,
	me. Because he's a bit of a lad. He is. I'm not going to lie. There's a part of me that quite likes that. And I don't mind him being provocative, although I don't necessarily agree with his methods myself. So the government's prevent strategy. And while I was hoping you'd give us a quick overview of the government's prevent strategy and the regressive opposition to it. Yeah. So the prevent strategy,
	which under Cameron became a statutory obligation for schools, colleges, universities, other organs of the state, it became a statutory obligation to have a counter-extremism element in schools. And that especially kicked in after those young schoolgirls went off and became jihadi brights and fled to ISIS territory. And so it's a the best way I can describe it is it's like an anti-racism campaign,
	an anti-homophobia campaign. It's an awareness campaign that teachers have a duty to implement, right? Now nobody complains when a teacher teaches their children that racism is wrong or homophobia is wrong. Obviously. Yet to say extremism is wrong,
	suddenly there's a different way that you're now spying on the kids for the government, you know? And it's like, hold on. And then they say prevent the regressive opposition to it. Another line of theirs is prevent radicalizes Muslim communities because by telling Muslim communities not to be radical you're antagonizing them and you're radicalizing them. And the thing is those arguments,
	if I flip them and I always do this analogy with racism to drive the point home, if I said to you that if racism was a big problem in Essex as it was when I was growing up, don't tell white working class lads not to be racist because it's going to make them more racist. Where is the logic in that? It doesn't make sense. It doesn't follow at all,
	does it? I mean, do you feel that Muslim communities are finding themselves offended that they're being fierce debate within the community, right? But the problem is the megaphones, the so-called community leaders and their organisations, have come to dominate the debate through media and government apparatus. The same thing though that the internet did to politics and to media,
	like the fact you'd have a channel on YouTube and probably watch more than some TV interviews, right? And the actual terrestrial TV. Actually, yes. So the same thing, the way in which it democratised the inter-democratised media and politics, it will happen to Muslims as well. And these community organisations will just realise they have no real power. Well, that's actually something I was looking at the other day. Apparently organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain and things like this aren't actually very well supportive. 1.9% of Muslims said that the MCB,
	the Muslim Council of Britain, represents them. And yet media, when they want a Muslim community leader, keep going back to that organisation, the leadership of which is dominated by Islamists of the Jamaat Islami horribity, who are the Muslim Brotherhood of South Asia. Why are we propping up Islamists as spokespeople for my communities? Theocrats. Do you think it's because they've kind of hijacked the identity, perhaps? Yeah,
	and it's the lazy option. I work on radio in LBC and I see if producers are under pressure, they've got time commitments, they have to book somebody within the next two minutes because the two minutes after that, they'll book somebody else. Means readily available immediately. And these guys are always ready. These guys are ready. And the producer needs a quick fix. I need a Muslim to speak about whatever the issue was. Ah, speed dial. And they're like, yes, I'll do it. Now,
	one of the things Quilliam did when we set this up spinning about eight and a half years now, right? Is we were able to say, no, we're here too. And we accept interviews like that now too because we do this full time. And what it's done is it really wound the Islamists up because suddenly you introduced a diversity. And then after Quilliam,
	other voices emerged. In the UK, British Muslim scene, other liberal voices began emerging. Then, so, you know, there were like feminist Muslims, there were ex-Muslims, ex-Muslims emerged. And what it suddenly did, and then we started networking and saying to the media, look, have you ever considered a feminist perspective on this from within the Muslim community? Have you ever considered an ex-Muslim's perspective on Saudi Arabia? That might be interesting. And by making all of this available, you solve that producer's dilemma. So obviously the MCB,
	they don't like us. This is, I think, a lot of people's misunderstanding of how these things come about. People don't understand the inner workings of the system. And so I'm sure they are getting frustrated with the fact that they're constantly hearing from the Muslim Council of Britain. And as you said,
	less than 2% of Muslims even care what they think. So it's a dialogue that we really have to change. But I will say there are, of course, some ideological bookers who will book things like the MCV and Islamist voices because they have an ideological agenda. And they will book them because they want that voice to be up there. That also happens. One thing I noticed as well is the Islamists and the regressive left are,
	they seem to be forming some sort of pact. They are starting to use the same language, they start to reflect intersectionality, and they're almost adopting each other's talking points. What do you think of that? Well, this has been, so in my autobiography that I wrote in 2011, but was published in 2012, it's where the first reference of regressive left occurred. Right, okay, I know, I knew you're coining it. It's really caught on. It's in radical. And so this is nothing new. In my days as a Hizbatahir activist, when I was 17, and I'm 39 now,
	we were courting the socialists in this way because we wanted the overlap of their anti-imperialist discourse and their anti-racism. We wanted to co-opt that and use it as a shield for our advocacy for Islamism. And that generation of Islamists that I was when I was 17 succeeded and set that precedent. Before that point,
	if you look at socialists, they were consistently anti-religion. Of course. Even especially in the Arab world. If you look at the remnants of socialism in the Arab world, they are all these Ba'ists. Oh, yeah, the Ba'athist parties, yeah. They're fiercely anti-Arab socialist republics. People often don't realise that. Fiercely, well, they're now obviously dictatorships as well. But they are fiercely anti-related. The underlying ideology. Yeah, that's right. And so whether it's Saddam Hussein, Baathist, Gaddafi,
	Ba'athist, he called it his own thing. They've got their own names, but it's the same principle as Ba'athist, right? Everyone in Saudi Arabia hated, basically, because they were of the other end, but theocratic. But that is what socialism meant for Muslims. But what's happened is this deliberate, since the fall of the USSR, this deliberate realignment of the underdog against America. And for the socialists to be able to do that, they had to become culturally relativistic,
	which is where the whole Frankfurt school kicked in. Post-modernism kicked in, and it allowed them to do all of that. Now, my friends on the left, now I say the left is no longer liberal, but there are still some leftists out there that aren't regressive left,
	right? Yeah. So the regressive left, so the normal leftists who aren't the regressive left, they would argue that actually genuine leftism would maintain an anti-religion stance. Absolutely. And that's the kind of leftism they're clinging on to. Good luck to them. I'm a liberal in the English classical sense. I don't work. We are doing our best. I'm not a journalist,
	I'm an activist. I run a YouTube channel. I make videos on things that concern me because I want to see a restoration of English liberalism. I'm very tired of seeing socialism. Jeremy Corbyn is a very scary man. Yeah, I mean, anytime there's anyone in doubt, I'll say to all of your viewers, I'll say, if ever in doubt, read Orwell. That's the solution to most political problems. Absolutely. I mean, in fact, that's opening a can of worms when you actually talk to these socialists as well, because they'll say, well,
	that's state socialism. We want anarcho-syndicalism or some just infeasible. The beautiful thing about Orwell is he understood its dangers because he travelled to Spain, fought with the socialist brigades, having seen it close up firsthand, realised the dogma that is involved. It always builds the same sort of structures. This is what drives me crazy. I mean, they can't point to a good example of the socialist state,
	and yet they still advocate for socialism. It just doesn't work. I'm really sorry that it doesn't work. And maybe in 200 years' time when everything's automated, no one has to do any labor or something. Maybe it'll work then. But right now,

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