DAR AL HARB - U.K.: AN EX JIHADIST

Ex-radical turns to Islam of tolerance
By Jane Perlez

LONDON: Ed Husain remembers the man as a kindly soul, not the sort you would suspect of recruiting for a radical Islamic group. As a teenager already in rebellion against his upstanding middle-class parents, who had raised him as a sort of Muslim choirboy, young Mohamed - his original first name - was an easy target.

They met in the early 1990s at the elaborate Muslim wedding of a distant relative.

"He was a medic at Royal London Hospital, and he invited me to lunch," said Husain, whose recently published memoir, "The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left," has caused a ruckus in the newspapers, on television, on talks shows and in blogs.

"He was asking me questions and then saying: 'White Muslims are being killed in Bosnia. What chances do we have as brown people in England?' " Husain recalled in an interview. "He was creating doubts."

His new friend had "black and white" answers to the world's problems, and gave him books by Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, a Palestinian judge who, dissatisfied with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s, set up his own Islamic party, called Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation.


Thus began Husain's journey into the world of British Islamic radicalism. He joined a university campus branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir and said he was hooked on an ideology that calls for a caliphate in Muslim countries and the end of Israel, though in nonviolent ways. Membership made him feel important, even though he was only a cog in a larger movement.

"You feel a few cuts above an ordinary Muslim," he said.

He left the group in 1995 after two years, dismayed after a fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir member fatally stabbed a Christian student.

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