Maajid Nawaz: Stealth Jihadist Exposed

While many will not recognize the name, they may recognize the organization he ran, and of which Tommy Robinson, formerly of the EDL, was a temporary partner.

This is a must read, must spread article.

From Gates of Vienna:

Maajid Nawaz is a prominent “moderate” or secular Muslim and the founder of the Quilliam Foundation in Britain. His organization was featured briefly in this space two years ago, when Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll left the EDL and teamed up with Quilliam just before Tommy’s trial (see these three posts from October 2013 for more on Tommy Robinson and Quilliam).

The following exposé by Vikram Chatterjee examines the extensive use by Maajid Nawaz of untruths, dissimulation, evasions, and misleading statements in his writings about Islam. In these he reveals himself to be a practitioner of taqiyya, tawriya, and kitman, the time-honored Islamic doctrines of lying and sacred misdirection.

Update: Mr. Chatterjee has cross-posted this article to his own blog, where you will find his further thoughts on Maajid Nawaz.

Maajid Nawaz: Stealth Jihadist Exposed
by Vikram K. Chatterjee

Thanks in part to the help of Douglas Murray, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, Prime Minister David Cameron and others, Maajid Nawaz has acquired an undeserved reputation as a secular liberal. Despite his outward facade of secularism and liberalism, Nawaz is in fact a deeply devout Sunni Muslim supremacist, operating far behind enemy lines in the Dar al-Harb, the House of War. Nawaz, to fulfill his duties as a Muslim, is waging a campaign of stealth Jihad in order to further the cause of Islam by making himself appear friendly and open to the Infidels of the West while simultaneously carrying out a campaign of mass deception about Islam itself. His goal is to weaken any resistance to the conquest of the Infidel lands of the West by publicly spreading disinformation about the faith, about its many ways of conquest, and deceiving his audience about the doctrinal details of Islam itself. While this may seem like a preposterous claim to make, it merely reflects the ordinary reality of stealth Jihad.

In what follows, Nawaz’s campaign of deception will be demonstrated.

Maajid Nawaz’s not-so-subtle threats of decapitation

The first thing to be said is that Nawaz is easily shown to have deployed threatening, jihad-tinged language after he supposedly became a secular liberal. In July of 2012, Nawaz’s book Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism was published by WH Allen. The book purports to be a memoir in which Nawaz describes his youth in Essex, how he joined the Sunni supremacist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and how he became a political prisoner in Egypt where he supposedly had a revelation in which he saw that “Islamism”, or variously “Islamist extremism” was a divisive political ideology, and decided to leave it (but not, crucially, Islam itself), becoming a secular liberal. Fifteen months later, in October 2013, a year and a half after the UK publication of Nawaz’ memoir, Tommy Robinson quit the English Defense League, the organization which he started, out of fear that its ranks were swelling with neo-Nazis. He embraced Maajid Nawaz and Quilliam Foundation instead, accepting at the time their claims of secularism to be genuine. In an email obtained by Huffington Post Assistant News Editor Jessica Elgot, Nawaz described this event as the “UK’s largest right-wing street movement — the EDL — is being decapitated.”^[1] (emphasis added)

Interesting choice of words, no? Why would the “former Islamist extremist” Maajid Nawaz use such threatening, jihad-tinged language? Could his secular liberalism be a clever sham? As we shall see, turning to the book he co-authored with Sam Harris, the evidence shows Nawaz is cold and calculating in his bald-faced telling of untruths, repeatedly deploying outrageous falsehoods about Islam.

The lies of Maajid Nawaz in Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

Published in October 2015, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue purports to be a conversation between two liberals, one an acknowledged atheist and secularist, the other a supposedly nominal Muslim. The goal of the book seems to be to find a way of talking about Islam and its attendant problems in a polite way, and search for a path for a kind of Islamic secularism. Harris, apparently convinced of Nawaz’ liberalism and secularism, entered into the “dialogue” with him in October 2014. In an article entitled “Can Liberalism Be Saved From Itself”, Harris wrote what will prove to have been a fateful sentence:

Whatever the prospects are for moving Islam out of the Middle Ages, hope lies not with obscurantists like Reza Aslan but with reformers like Maajid Nawaz.^[2]

Harris called Aslan an obscurantist, yet turning to his book with Nawaz, on page 44 we find Nawaz saying, of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood leader, theologian and author of Milestones, and In The Shade of the Qur’an, whose zealous career was a primary force in creating the modern Islamic movements to restore the Caliphate, that “the Egyptian regime killed him for writing a book”.

This is a straightforward falsehood. Notoriously, Qutb was executed by the Egyptian state for his alleged involvement in an attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.^[3] By saying that Qutb was executed for merely writing a book, Nawaz portrays Qutb as a devout Muslim as an innocent victim, a tried and true tactic of Islamic propaganda. It seems highly unlikely that Nawaz is unaware of the real reason for Qutb’s execution, given that Nawaz spent four years at the same prison in which Qutb was held, Mazra Tora.

Moving on, on page 61 of the book, Harris brings up the important point of Qur’anic literalism:

I want to ask you about this, because my understanding is that basically all “moderate” Muslims — that is, those who aren’t remotely like Islamists, or even especially conservative, in their social attitudes — are nevertheless fundamentalists by the Christian standard, because they believe the Qur’an to be the literal and inerrant word of God.

Excellent question, Sam. Do mainstream Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the literal and inerrant word of God? What is Nawaz’s reply?

Please read the rest at Gates of Vienna