Book Review: Ed Husain, 'The Islamist'

Ed's real name is of course Mohammed. The creative Muslim penchant for naming all boys with the same name, reflects a deeper structural malaise about Islam – a cultural malady that Ed Husain usefully reveals. Husain's story is one that millions of Muslims are familiar with. The only complication is that Husain saw radical Islam for the barbarity that it is, and left. Anyone wishing to know how second generation Western Muslims can get caught up with civilisational-hating Islam should read this book.

Husain is a Brit and was born in the Muslim ghetto of Tower Hamlets, London. His parents were recent UK immigrants from Bangladesh and peacefully Islamic. For his parents Islam meant peace, quietness, good manners and faith. Not for Ed. A struggling teenager surrounded by Muslims in a white country, Ed quickly fell under the spell of political Islam and his journey unveils the need for people to belong; to believe in something; and the ability to be completely brainwashed by unscrupulous theories.

Husain fell in with gangs who promoted radical interpretations of Islamic doctrine. He first joined a Saudi funded group, the Young Muslim Organisation or YMO, which believed that the fundamentalist interpretation of the radical Pakistani Imam, Maududi, was the proper path for Islam to follow. Maududi and the Egyptian radical, Qutb, were the founders of extremist radical political parties in Egypt and Pakistan, and are the models for Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. The YMO was thus an offshoot of extremist Islamic interpretation.

They were also violent in their methods to force Muslims and the general British population to accept their doctrine: 'YMO had gained a reputation in Tower Hamlets and beyond as being tougher than the toughest gangsters....They won fights...defied the police, and were bad boys too. They just liked to call themselves practicing Muslims.' The Western media would describe them as 'moderates'.

Like many radical Islamic groups, the YMO preached the superiority of Islam over the West. There was no debate about it, 'Before Islam the world was in darkness. Today the West is proud of democracy, but where did it come from? The first democracy in the world was Medina....' Or so said YMO doctrine. No doubt Western educators would agree with this lie, and also support the Muslim claim that any and all inventions were Islamic and Arab including manned flight [circa 872, Cordoba Spain].

The brainwashing and rewriting of history by these political Islamic groups was unending. Husain went from the spiritual Islam of his family to a very political and activist Islam of the YMO and extremist Maududi Islam. As he laments in the middle of his book, 'Yes, we attended a British educational institution in London, but there was nothing particularly British about it....Cut off from Britain...Islamism provided us with a purpose and a place in life.' The political elite would term this state funded apartheid, multi-culturalism, and pronounce it a gigantic success.

For Husain, radical Islam provided a means to view the world. And a world of white, Anglo oppression, American rapacity and Jew domination it was. Islam had been humiliated and Husain and others had to revive its historic greatness and destiny. To achieve such aims partial Muslims or those who were not politically motivated Muslims were looked down upon as impure and immature and even as quasi-infidels or Kaffirs. As one Imam within the YMO network said at an event, 'It is therefore the primary duty of all those who aspire to please God to launch an organised struggle, sparing neither life nor property....' For feminists and marxists this statement is nothing but an expression of frustration with white domination.

In fact Husain's entire life became one of desperate struggle against the Kaffir. By the age of 16 he was surrounded by Muslim radicals, spent most of his time at the East London Mosque, had no white friends, but a large contempt for British and Kaffir society. He was in short, the perfect radical recruit to Islam and one willing to engage in violence to achieve Islamic aims. Maybe even willing to die for it.

Maududi, the YMO and the radical Imams which controlled many of Britain's mosques were intent on converting as many young people as possible. During Husain's youth – the 1990s – tens of thousands of young people were recruited to Maududi minded and Saudi funded organisations. Husain himself became an important leader first in high school, then at college in promoting radical Islam and gaining adherents. He was so successful in fact, that the YMO organisation at his college had literally hundreds of new members by the time he left it. He had started with a handful and now a small army was radicalised.

The objectives were clear. Not only did the radical Mosque leaders want to Islamicize Britain but they wanted to Muslimize all of Europe. As Husain records, 'The only acheivement we wanted was a radical shift in perception, to politicize Muslim public opinion, to connect it as an ummah, as One Nation. Then we could destroy the existing political order in Muslim countries and engage in the conversion or coercion of the rest. The unfinished business of Vienna in 1683, when the Ottomans tried and failed to conquer Europe, had to be completed.' The educational system would identify such ideas as bold expressions of cultural difference and who is to say that Europe is better off under a non-Muslim system?

This cultural difference means that for radical Muslims, 'Islam was the solution for all the world's ills.' In this context 'The' entails the only one as in, there are no other ideologies or social constructs which should be allowed. This intolerance is the hallmark of radical Islam. Maududi and others have long preached that Islam must dominate because only Islam is right. Alongside this message of supremacism and outright racism was vitriol which Husain eagerly bought into – hatred of the Jew, an acceptance and enthusiasm for the Holocaust, an admiration of Hitler, and a ferocious antipathy towards America, Britain, France and Russia – the 'powers' which held Islam powerless.

But even that was not enough. Husain ran into Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an even more radical group who viewed YMO and Maududi disciples as a bunch of wimps and losers. For Hizb-ut-Tahrir it was think global, act local. In the UK the establishment of Muslim rule was taken as a given eventuality by Hizb. What they really wanted was to restore the Caliphate, streteching across the lands of the old Ottoman empire to the borders of India and Europe. Once the Caliphate was rebuilt, Islam would never again be powerless, would possess armies and bombs and would be able to wage war against the infidel.

Husain quickly converted to Hizb's vision that democracy was the Kaffir's invention and was the cause of man's ills and that radical violence was necessary to redress the imbalance. In this light Islam was ergo the redeemer of mankind and of society. The UK Kaffir society was in effect an illegal society, an oppressive state, a slave-owning state because it rejected the one righteous truth of Islam. In Hizb's and radical Islam's world only Allah rules and humans have no need to get involved with political and legislative processes.

The key was then to convert people to Allah and to make them serve the Islamic doctrine. The rest would take care of itself. Along with the 5 daily prayers Husain and his growing cohort planned and agitated for jihad and the takeover not only of the UK, but of moderate Arab and Islamic governments in Africa and Asia. Think local, but export Jihad globally.

Husain finally grew up and left radical Islam when he saw the attendant violence, including murder, that such a cult entails. Whilst studying in Syria he converted to Sufism, a mystical Islamic sect, influenced by Persian and Hindu mysticism. Sufis are not as prone to violence and outrage as Wahabbis, Sunnis, Maududi-followers or those like Hizb ut-Tahrir who advocate a new caliphate. Oddly while abroad, he became more British than ever in his life, finally appreciative of the society that he had rejected and had wanted to overthrow. He even made friends with an American. Husain through independent analysis had seen the emptiness, the lies, deceit and dishonesty embedded in radical political Islam. He was lucky to get out.

Husain's book has some themes that the multi-cult fetish crowd will never learn. Setting up ghettos leads to isloation and extremism. Not having a dominant assimiliative culture will ensure violence between disenfranchised and culturally disparate groups. Moderate Muslims do exist, but they are fearful, isolated and in some ways, powerless. Radical Islam is growing and many Mosques are engaged in outright sedition. And Husain's own escape was largely abetted by his independent reading of Western culture, history and philosophy – a story which amazed and excited him. Husain, supposedly educated in a British public school, only discovered the glories of Western civilisation through his own efforts.

Husain's message is clear – radical Islam is a dire threat to the survival of the Western nation state. Ignoring these perils will lead to suicide. As one observer long ago reported, empires and states first collapse from within, not from without. Recent history reinforces that fact. Islamism is a threat, we are more than fools if we choose to ignore it.