Offering a personal, insider’s view on Islamist organizations, 31-year-old Husain writes about insidious recruitment tactics and mind games — and raises uncomfortable questions facing British Muslims and the rest of the Muslim world. In short: What lures ordinary Muslims into radical, political Islam? How do we counter it?

The Islamist created waves across Britain and North America in the weeks following its release in May, generating reviews and debates in The Times, The Guardian, CNN and MSNBC. The book, lauded by non-Muslims, has come in for vocal criticism from many leading Muslim voices. Husain has been accused of being a government stooge and of pandering to Islamaphobes. Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group that forms the basis of Husain’s analysis, denies he was ever a member.

Despite receiving a number of death threats, Husain refuses to stay quiet. In June he spoke with Egypt Today via telephone from London.

Ed Husain’s journey begins in East London, in an area where you would be hard pressed to find a white face. As a teenager, he attended a school predominantly made up of male students of Muslim-Bangladeshi origins. It is here where he was first introduced to Islamist organizations.

Husain recalls the options available to a young man looking for acceptance in Tower Hamlets, where he grew up. “I had very little contact with non-Muslims. And even to this day, a young person in Tower Hamlets has just two or three choices: Join a gang, or choose the more glamorous option — join an Islamist organization.”

He speaks of a peculiar void in the lives of Muslim teenagers growing up in mono-cultural ghettoes of Britain, reflecting on his own upbringing as the child of immigrants. “What is it to be British? What unites us? Is it a pint at the local pub? Well, I don’t fit in. Is it dating and the disposing of partners willy-nilly? Well, I still don’t fit in.”

Husain embraced radical Islamism by first joining the Pakistan-based Jamaat-e-Islami, and then finally moving on to the Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) during his college years. Indoctrination into these groups included reading books such as Sayed Qutb’s Milestones and believing in the ultimate goal of a “transnational Islamic caliphate,” with a “policy of jihad.” His fellow group members introduced him to the word kaffir (non-believer). These were the same members who drove around illegally without the compulsory car insurance, simply because it was seen as supporting the “kaffir economy.”

Some of his peers have gone on to become terrorists, including Majid Nawaz, the young Briton arrested in Alexandria in 2002 for attempting to reactivate the HT in Egypt (where the group is currently banned). Husain describes how, within four months of becoming president of the Islamic Society in Tower Hamlets College, he and his compatriots managed to radicalize the entire Muslim population on campus, overtake the student union and create a deeply hostile environment pitting Muslims against non-Muslims.

All this was in stark contrast to the Islam that Husain was raised with by his parents, who leaned toward a softer, Sufi-influenced thinking. Sufficiently forewarned by group members that his parents would attempt to sway him from ‘the right path,’ he resisted all attempts by his family to coax him away from his new lifestyle.

“I remember coming home and seeing my mother constantly praying. I would hear my father crying out for my guidance after his prayers,” he recalls. His father ultimately told him to make a choice: Islamism or the family. Husain, age 16, chose the former: He ran away from home and ended up seeking shelter at the mosque.

Ultimately, he says, it was the persistence of his family (his mother would call the mosque, accusing members of kidnapping her son) and a number of life-changing events that led to his move away from Islamist organizations. In his book, Husain describes the experience as culminating in an event that shook him and his adopted beliefs to the core.

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 murder made Husain realize that there was something deeply wrong with the worldview he had so intensely adopted. “Luckily,” he says, he ended up leaving HT just two months before he was to become a “lifelong member. I say luckily because leaving a group like HT isn’t easy,” he explains, adding that the group is run in an almost cult-like manner. Husain describes the difficulties faced by those who have tried to leave but failed because their lives are so deeply entrenched within the organization. Many marry into the organization, and leaving can mean a forced divorce. Members are expected to give up to 10 percent of their monthly income to the group, meaning that leaving becomes the loss of a major long-term financial investment, among other things.

Even if one were to leave, says Husain, it does not guarantee one’s mind will be “free of the contamination the organization wreaks on it.” Years after he had left HT, Husain recalls asking friends why they were not celebrating September 11th on its anniversary. He believes it took him 6 years to finally leave HT behind truly and spiritually.

In 1997, Husain attended a lecture by Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, widely described as one of Western Islam’s most popular scholars. “It took me three years to trust Sheikh Hamza,” he remembers. Taught not to trust these “scholars for dollars,” he did not accept the sincerity of the sheikh until 2001. He also looked to other traditional scholars such as Sheikh Nuh Hamim Keller and Sheikh Abdul Hakim Murad, along with Middle Eastern thinkers such as the Habaib of Yemen. “I started to frequent these circles more and more, while distancing myself from HT ideas.” This ultimately led to the deep passion for traditional Islam he holds now.

“Political Islam is problematic to me on three levels: the rejection of Muslim tradition, the rejection of fellow Muslims and its political confrontation with the West,” says Husain. “Traditional Islam is the opposite of all of the above, in that it doesn’t set itself up as a political force. It is more about the continuity of a tradition that goes back to the Prophet, peace be upon him, and this can be verified through the isnad system [used to verify the validity of the hadith by documenting all transmission of knowledge in Islamic tradition]. Nothing has been made up as a post-colonial ideology, everything is just the way it has been [for centuries].”

Husain points to Grand Mufti of Egypt Aly Gomaa as an example of someone who, he believes, has “a maqam (good standing) with Allah. He was an activist himself once upon a time. He understands what’s going on.”

Husain is so passionate about the subject that he is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on Sufi orders and politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Sufism itself has had its fair share of criticism and is accused of being unable to offer solutions to contemporary problems, especially political ones. But, as Husain points out, “Sufism is not detached from this world. It actually engages in a constructive way, whereas Islamism is destructive. [Islamism is about] ‘We will overthrow and start from year zero.’ Traditional Islam is about building on what we have from the past, not destroying the past. It is about continuity.”

He lists numerous examples of Sufism engaging with politics in the Muslim world, including “Sheikh Hasan Al-Senussi who was the king of Libya, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah who was the vice-president of Mauritania and even the Sudanese political party set up based on Sufi orders predominant in the 1920s.”

Husain believes that if not for his parents, he would not have “returned to this side. The reason I came back, the reason I lost faith in extremism or Islamism, is that I had parents who raised me in an alternative Muslim tradition. Many of the people I was mixing with didn’t have that background. For them, being an Islamist was equivalent to being Muslim, full stop. For those of us who have had an alternative background, we know that there are 101 ways of being Muslim.”

Egypt has long experience with Islamism. Some would say it is the birthplace of Islamism, with home-grown thinkers such as Qutb and Hassan El-Banna laying the foundations of what is known today as political Islam.

Ironically, Husain points out that although Qutb wrote his book Milestones in Egypt, it cannot be found anywhere in this country. In contrast, numerous Muslim bookstores in the United Kingdom proudly place Milestones in their window displays. “You have Britain’s Yvonne Ridley doing a review of Milestones, whereas the Muslim Brotherhood today do not even want to have anything to do with the book. In both the UK and the Middle East, it is primarily the youth who are filling the ranks of current Islamist organizations, but the general atmosphere in the Middle East is a lot more relaxed. They practice Islam so differently.”

The issues here are very different, according to Husain, who notes that it is now ‘trendy’ to oppose the government through religion. He has mixed feelings about this phenomenon. “The Egyptian government unfortunately did not deal with the Islamists well in the early days,” he claims. “Making Qutb a martyr didn’t help. Filling up prisons with Islamists didn’t help.” But at the same time, Husain believes Egypt has lessons to teach the rest of the world, “The vast majority of the Egyptian ulama remain opposed to Islamism, from Gomaa to Qaradawi downwards — that’s encouraging. Without such scholarly efforts, in the last 50 years, Islamism would have become Islam.

“Without democracy and a plural political culture in the Muslim world, Islamists will persevere,” Husain continues. “Islamists will flourish as long as Muslim governments continue to fail in providing basic social services to their people. People who use Hizb’Allah’s services end up voting for Hizb’Allah. People in Egypt, who benefit from the Muslim Brotherhood’s humanitarian efforts, end up voting for [independent candidates affiliated with] the Brotherhood.

“At the end of the day, I’m all for criticizing the government in a constructive manner. You can criticize the government until the cows come home, but I will not accept the alternative that the Islamists offer — [a totalitarian Islamic state].”

Today, Husain’s book is being read by those in the highest level of the British government. The author is being consulted as an expert on countering Islamic radicalism and is considered a sort of ‘spokesperson for British Islam.’ The attention has been a pleasant surprise, since his intention for writing the book was simply to help people distinguish between Islamism and Islam.

“Four weeks on, it has been very positive in terms of its impact. HT members are leaving. I know of four members who have left. I am not claiming this is due to me, but it shows that the debate is widening. It makes you realize Muslims need to debate with non-Muslims from outside the community in order to create change. Mine is just one contribution, but together I think we can come to a better consensus.”

Is there another book in the offing? “I just had a story to tell, and if it helps people better understand the world then so be it.” For now, Husain holds a simple hope — finishing the PhD he has started. He laughs when asked where he sees himself in 10 years. “Considering I’ve already received two death threats, 10 years is a lot to look ahead to.” et