It should be no surprise that doctors are lured to radical Islamism, author Ed Husain tells Mary Fitzgerald, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
The man who first led Ed Husain down the path of radical Islam was a medic at the Royal London Hospital. Sidling up to the east London teenager at the wedding of a distant relative, the man had a quick, silkily delivered answer for everything Husain put to him. He also had a few questions of his own. It was the early 1990s and Bosnia's horror was at its height. "White Muslims are being killed in Bosnia," the man pointed out. "What chance do we have as brown people in England?". Later there would be more questions, more appealingly simple answers and books for Husain to read. Among them were polemics by Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, the Palestinian judge who set up an Islamist organisation in the 1950s called Hizb ut-Tahrir, Arabic for "party of liberation".
It wasn't long before Husain - whose controversial, recently published memoir, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, has pitched him headfirst into Britain's shrill debate on radicalisation and extremism - signed up. He joined the London Hospital Medical College branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir and spent two years devoted to an ideology that calls for the establishment of a transnational Islamic state or caliphate and an end to Israel. Banned in many countries in the Middle East and Europe, Hizb ut-Tahrir has always insisted that it is non-violent and bristles at suggestions it may act as a "conveyor belt" to terrorism. While anti-Zionist and hostile to Western democracy, it denies it is anti-semitic and maintains it employs lawful means alone to disseminate its ideology.
During his time with Hizb ut-Tahrir, Husain became close to Sheikh Omar Bakri, the firebrand preacher now exiled to Lebanon, and had fleeting encounters with many who later graduated to terrorism, such as Omar Khan Sharif, the British-born radical who carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and Dhiren Barot, jailed last year for planning several attacks, including one involving limousines packed with gas canisters, petrol and nails.
HUSAIN FRAMES HIS experience in a familiar way, echoing the testimony of others when he talks about how exciting it felt to be involved with a radical, fringe organisation committed to a big idea; the heady sense of being part of something greater than the humdrum of everyday life in the Tower Hamlets estate where he grew up. Although some of the more breathless media coverage of Husain's story casts him as an "ex-jihadi", he was never involved in violence. Rather, he says, he believed in and helped spread the ideology that allows it to happen. Though critics - and there are many - point out that Husain's time in Hizb ut-Tahrir was relatively brief and took place more than a decade ago, his own evolution from self-described "Muslim choirboy" to radical Islamist and now tweed-jacketed PhD student provides ample clues to the puzzle of what draws some young Muslims to embrace violent, extremist ideology.
Sitting in a London cafe, he says the widespread shock and bewilderment that most of the suspects linked to the recent attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow were doctors shows how little the issue of radicalisation is understood.
"I was recruited on the campus of a medical college," he says. "At that time Hizb ut-Tahrir and other organisations were most active on the campuses of medical universities and engineering colleges." Islamist organisations and political parties have long been dominated by doctors, lawyers, engineers and architects - from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to Hamas and Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Islami. Several members of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain are medical practitioners; its spokesman, Dr Imran Waheed, is a psychiatrist. At the more radical, violent end of the spectrum, Osama bin Laden studied engineering, while his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, once worked as a paediatrician. And Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, was a gifted architect.
MOST OF THOSE arrested last week were born outside Britain and were working for the NHS, triggering speculation over whether they were radicalised before they arrived in Britain or after. For some Arab and Asian Muslims, Husain says, the sense of cultural dislocation they experience on arrival in the West makes them susceptible to more radical interpretations of their faith.
"I lived in Syria for a while and taught doctors who were coming to work in English, Scottish and Irish hospitals. Many had really high expectations of life in the West and deep frustrations about their lives in the Middle East. It often made the transition from one to the other quite difficult.
"One thing that happens to some young Muslims that come over here, whether Arab or Asian, is they suddenly become ultra-religious. You start to see things like very lengthy beards, very short trousers, certain attitudes to women, music and fellow Muslims that don't - quote, unquote - 'practise'. Some start reading books written by radical preachers.
"There was no need to constantly emphasise their Muslimness when they were in the Muslim world, but when they arrive in the West many feel like a fish out of water and it becomes a real need for them to reinforce not just being Arab or Asian but being Muslim and distinctly politically, socially and religiously different from mainstream society.
"All that religiosity comes against a background of feeling out of place in British social life. It's not easy to make friends in Britain and besides you've got an accent, you're always being made fun of, you've got all that baggage of being Arab or Asian."
It's a point echoed by one Jordanian blogger named Firas in a post discussing the arrest of Mohammed Asha, a junior doctor from Jordan, in connection with last week's car bomb plot. Referring to his own experience of seeing a close Muslim friend transformed in five months to the point of not talking to him because he was Christian, Firas writes: "What happens is that Arab students go to study abroad in countries where political and religious freedoms are granted for all, say countries like US, UK, Canada and Australia. Now these students get to know other Muslim students, usually Pakistanis who've got some extremists among them, and that's when they are fed with all this crap . . . for an Arab student who finds him/herself in an alien culture and lately a hostile culture to Islam (think of post 9/11, the Danish cartoons, the Pope's lecture etc) these guys would have some effect . . . The question is, if this Asha guy didn't leave Jordan, would he ever get involved in such things? It's a very tricky question."
Added to that is a tendency among radicals to engage in a selective reading of Islam's sacred texts, Husain says. "One of the things Omar Bakri used to do was throw Koranic verses or Hadiths [ stories recounting the sayings and conduct of the prophet Muhammad] at us but always in snippets. He would never quote an entire verse or hadith or explain the context and nuance. It was all a case of this is what it says, so do it.
"Some of these medics and engineering students see the Koran as a manual of black and white. It's a techie DIY approach and involves a kind of intelligent ignorance. Their attitude is that they are highly-educated, intelligent graduates so they can go straight to scripture without any scholarly guidance. They will pick one line and ignore the one that comes after it. Fundamentally, I believe, they have failed to understand the message of the Koran.
"When it comes to radicals, most are very normal people. In the case of the doctors arrested this week, their patients would probably remember them as kind individuals. They're not monsters but ordinary human beings who carry ideas of rejectionism, separatism and violence, all of which are rooted in a warped understanding of scripture that promises them a heaven and everything else that comes with it."
All this provides easy prey for extremist networks looking for new recruits. It is in identifying ways of combating such networks that Husain makes his most controversial assertions.
He wants Hizb ut-Tahrir and similar organisations banned, a move considered by the British government after 7/7, but later dropped. He wants mosques and bookshops to stop stocking the works of seminal Islamist ideologues, and says British Muslims should distance themselves from extremist movements in south Asia and the Middle East. He wants the government to get tough on radical groups and says a culture of political correctness has blinded many to a growing menace.
"The fact is there is an active network out there looking to recruit and we are not prepared to identify, speak about or challenge those networks," Husain says.
He is equally scathing when it comes to those who excuse violent extremism as being simply the by-product of anger stoked by western foreign policy, particularly the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Many of the thinkers radicals look up to were declaring a war against the West in the 1940s and 1950s, well before the invasion of Iraq. Let's not lose our sense of historical perspective here. The World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, bin Laden declared a jihad against the West in 1997 and we just ignored it," he says.
"Things like Iraq and Palestine give fuel to it, I don't deny that. After all, Palestine and Bosnia radicalised me. But it's what you do with that anger, how you channel it. The left is wrong to say that anger in some way justifies the killing of innocent people. To ignore the ideological fuelling behind it is a huge mistake.
"If we entertain for a moment the idea that a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq or the creation of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel would somehow appease this kind of terrorism and bring about an end to suicide bombings, then we're being very naive. There's no appeasing these people. You just need to read their literature to see what these people are about. Once the political grievances have been dealt with, they will turn to their social grievances, cultural grievances, economic grievances. There is a bigger picture to all this and that should not be ignored."
LIKEWISE, HUSAIN IS critical of those who say extremism is linked to poverty and economic disadvantage. "Look at white working-class or Afro-Caribbean youth in Britain. They feel neglected and ignored, they suffer from disadvantage and low educational achievement, and yet they are not becoming suicide bombers, because there is no ideology telling them 'you're going to heaven if you become a martyr'," he says.
Such opinions have put Husain in a somewhat awkward position, he admits. A devout Muslim, the 32-year-old now finds himself the darling of right-wing commentators and a hero to those many consider hostile to Islam. Some of his fellow Muslims have denounced him as a traitor or government stooge, while a number of non-Muslims on the left say he is misguided and naive about the way his ideas could be used against his own community. But Husain is unapologetic, insisting it is vital people such as him make their voices heard.
"At the heart of it all is a political correctness and liberalism that fears speaking out. I say that as someone who is a member of the Labour Party and a left-winger but who has also been through extremism and knows that people like that abuse and exploit that idea of multiculturalist Britain. That is a real problem. This idea of 'don't rock the boat, don't offend the minorities, all will be well in the end' - all of that allowed these people to get stronger and stronger and stronger.
"And even to this day - despite bombings in London, despite a constant threat, despite more than 1,500 people being monitored and 30 plots ongoing - we still don't have the audacity to speak up."
The Islamist is published by Penguin