How a British jihadi saw the light

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Ed Hussain
The Sunday Times
April 21, 2007

Ed Hussain, once a proponent of radical Islam in London, tells how his
time as a teacher in Saudi Arabia led him to turn against extremism

During our first two months in Jeddah, Faye and I relished our new and
luxurious lifestyle: a shiny jeep, two swimming pools, domestic help,
and a tax-free salary. The luxury of living in a modern city with a
developed infrastructure cocooned me from the frightful reality of life
in Saudi Arabia.

My goatee beard and good Arabic ensured that I could pass for an Arab.

But looking like a young Saudi was not enough: I had to act Saudi, be
Saudi. And here I failed.

My first clash with Saudi culture came when, being driven around in a
bulletproof jeep, I saw African women in black abayas tending to the
rubbish bins outside restaurants, residences and other busy places.

"Why are there so many black cleaners on the streets?" I asked the
driver. The driver laughed. "They're not cleaners. They are scavengers;
women who collect cardboard from all across Jeddah and then sell it.
They also collect bottles, drink cans, bags."

"You don't find it objectionable that poor immigrant women work in
such undignified and unhygienic conditions on the streets?"

"Believe me, there are worse jobs women can do."

Though it grieves me to admit it, the driver was right. In Saudi
Arabia women indeed did do worse jobs. Many of the African women lived
in an area of Jeddah known as Karantina, a slum full of poverty,
prostitution and disease.

A visit to Karantina, a perversion of the term "quarantine", was one
of the worst of my life. Thousands of people who had been living in
Saudi Arabia for decades, but without passports, had been deemed
"illegal" by the government and, quite literally, abandoned under a
flyover.

A non-Saudi black student I had met at the British Council accompanied
me. "Last week a woman gave birth here," he said, pointing to a
ramshackle cardboard shanty. Disturbed, I now realised that the
materials I had seen those women carrying were not always for sale but
for shelter.

I had never expected to see such naked poverty in Saudi Arabia.

At that moment it dawned on me that Britain, my home, had given refuge
to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan: I had seen them
in their droves in Whitechapel. They prayed, had their own mosques, were
free and were given government housing.

Many Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than
they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia. At that moment I longed to be home
again.

All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. It was only in the
comfort of Britain that Islamists could come out with such radical
utopian slogans as one government, one ever expanding country, for one
Muslim nation. The racist reality of the Arab psyche would never accept
black and white people as equal.

Standing in Karantina that day, I reminisced and marvelled over what I
previously considered as wrong: mixed-race, mixed-religion marriages.
The students to whom I described life in modern multi-ethnic Britain
could not comprehend that such a world of freedom, away from "normal"
Saudi racism, could exist.

Racism was an integral part of Saudi society. My students often used
the word "nigger" to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were
considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in
the world's most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. I
was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm,
something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist.

Part of this local culture consisted of public institutions being
segregated and women banned from driving on the grounds that it would
give rise to "licentiousness". I was repeatedly astounded at the stares
Faye got from Saudi men and I from Saudi women.

Faye was not immodest in her dress. Out of respect for local custom,
she wore the long black abaya and covered her hair in a black scarf. In
all the years I had known my wife, never had I seen her appear so dull.
Yet on two occasions she was accosted by passing Saudi youths from their
cars. On another occasion a man pulled up beside our car and offered her
his phone number.

In supermarkets I only had to be away from Faye for five minutes and
Saudi men would hiss or whisper obscenities as they walked past. When
Faye discussed her experiences with local women at the British Council
they said: "Welcome to Saudi Arabia."

After a month in Jeddah I heard from an Asian taxi driver about a
Filipino worker who had brought his new bride to live with him in
Jeddah. After visiting the Balad shopping district the couple caught a
taxi home. Some way through their journey the Saudi driver complained
that the car was not working properly and perhaps the man could help
push it. The passenger obliged. Within seconds the Saudi driver had sped
off with the man's wife in his car and, months later, there was still no
clue as to her whereabouts.

We had heard stories of the abduction of women from taxis by
sex-deprived Saudi youths. At a Saudi friend's wedding at a luxurious
hotel in Jeddah, women dared not step out of their hotel rooms and walk
to the banqueting hall for fear of abduction by the bodyguards of a
Saudi prince who also happened to be staying there.

Why had the veil and segregation not prevented such behaviour? My
Saudi acquaintances, many of them university graduates, argued strongly
that, on the contrary, it was the veil and other social norms that were
responsible for such widespread sexual frustration among Saudi youth.

At work the British Council introduced free internet access for
educational purposes. Within days the students had downloaded the most
obscene pornography from sites banned in Saudi Arabia, but easily
accessed via the British Council's satellite connection. Segregation of
the sexes, made worse by the veil, had spawned a culture of pent-up
sexual frustration that expressed itself in the unhealthiest ways.

Using Bluetooth technology on mobile phones, strangers sent
pornographic clips to one another. Many of the clips were recordings of
homosexual acts between Saudis and many featured young Saudis in orgies
in Lebanon and Egypt. The obsession with sex in Saudi Arabia had reached
worrying levels: rape and abuse of both sexes occurred frequently, some
cases even reaching the usually censored national press.

My students told me about the day in March 2002 when the Muttawa [the
religious police] had forbidden firefighters in Mecca from entering a
blazing school building because the girls inside were not wearing veils.
Consequently 15 young women burnt to death, but Wahhabism held its head
high, claiming that God's law had been maintained.

As a young Islamist, I organised events at college and in the local
community that were strictly segregated and I believed in it. Living in
Saudi Arabia, I could see the logical outcome of such segregation.

In my Islamist days we relished stating that Aids and other sexually
transmitted diseases were the result of the moral degeneracy of the
West. Large numbers of Islamists in Britain hounded prostitutes in Brick
Lane and flippantly quoted divorce and abortion rates in Britain. The
implication was that Muslim morality was superior. Now, more than ever,
I was convinced that this too was Islamist propaganda, designed to
undermine the West and inject false confidence in Muslim minds.

I worried whether my observations were idiosyncratic, the musings of a
wandering mind. I discussed my troubles with other British Muslims
working at the British Council. Jamal, who was of a Wahhabi bent, fully
agreed with what I observed and went further. "Ed, my wife wore the veil
back home in Britain and even there she did not get as many stares as
she gets when we go out here." Another British Muslim had gone as far as
tinting his car windows black in order to prevent young Saudis gaping at
his wife.

The problems of Saudi Arabia were not limited to racism and sexual
frustration.

In contemporary Wahhabism there are two broad factions. One is
publicly supportive of the House of Saud, and will endorse any policy
decision reached by the Saudi government and provide scriptural
justification for it. The second believes that the House of Saud should
be forcibly removed and the Wahhabi clerics take charge. Osama Bin Laden
and Al-Qaeda are from the second school.

In Mecca, Medina and Jeddah I met young men with angry faces from
Europe, students at various Wahhabi seminaries. They reminded me of my
extremist days.

They were candid in discussing their frustrations with Saudi Arabia.
The country was not sufficiently Islamic; it had strayed from the
teachings of Wahhabism. They were firmly on the side of the monarchy and
the clerics who supported it. Soon they were to return to the West, well
versed in Arabic, fully indoctrinated by Wahhabism, to become imams in
British mosques.

By the summer of 2005 Faye and I had only eight weeks left in Saudi
Arabia before we would return home to London. Thursday, July 7, was the
beginning of the Saudi weekend. Faye and I were due to lunch with
Sultan, a Saudi banker who was financial adviser to four government
ministers. I wanted to gauge what he and his wife, Faye's student,
thought about life inside the land of their birth.

On television that morning we watched the developing story of a power
cut on the London Underground. As the cameras focused on King's Cross,
Edgware Road, Aldgate and Russell Square, I looked on with a mixture of
interest and homesickness. Soon the power-cut story turned into
shell-shocked reportage of a series of terrorist bombings.

My initial suspicion was that the perpetrators were Saudis. My
experience of them, their virulence towards my non-Muslim friends, their
hate-filled textbooks, made me think that Bin Laden's Saudi soldiers had
now targeted my home town. It never crossed my mind that the rhetoric of
jihad introduced to Britain by Hizb ut-Tahrir could have anything to do
with such horror.

My sister avoided the suicide attack on Aldgate station by four
minutes. On the previous day London had won the Olympic bid. At the
British Council we had celebrated along with the nation that was now in
mourning.

The G8 summit in Scotland had also been derailed by events further
south. The summit, thanks largely to the combined efforts of Tony Blair
and Bob Geldof, had been set to tackle poverty in Africa. Now it was
forced to address Islamist terrorism; Arab grievances had hijacked the
agenda again.

The fact that hundreds of children die in Africa every day would be of
no relevance to a committed Islamist. In the extremist mind the plight
of the tiny Palestinian nation is more important than the deaths of
millions of black Africans. Let them die, they're not Muslims, would be
the unspoken line of argument. As an Islamist it was only the suffering
of Muslims that had moved me. Now human suffering mattered to me,
regardless of religion.

Faye and I were glued to the television for hours. Watching fellow
Londoners come out of Tube stations injured and mortified, but facing
the world with a defiant sense of dignity, made me feel proud to be
British.

We met Sultan and his wife at an Indian restaurant near the British
Council. Sultan was in his early thirties and his wife in her late
twenties. They had travelled widely and seemed much more liberal than
most Saudis I had met. Behind a makeshift partition, the restaurant
surroundings were considered private and his wife, to my amazement,
removed her veil.

We discussed our travels.

Sultan spoke fondly of his time in London, particularly his placement
at Coutts as a trainee banker. We then moved on to the subject uppermost
in my mind, the terrorist attacks on London. My host did not really seem
to care. He expressed no real sympathy or shock, despite speaking so
warmly of his time in London.

"I suppose they will say Bin Laden was behind the attacks. They blamed
us for 9/11," he said.

Keen to take him up on his comment, I asked him: "Based on your
education in Saudi Arabian schools, do you think there is a connection
between the form of Islam children are taught here and the action of 15
Saudi men on September 11?"

Without thinking, his immediate response was, 'No. No, because Saudis
were not behind 9/11. The plane hijackers were not Saudi men. One
thousand two hundred and forty-six Jews were absent from work on that
day and there is the proof that they, the Jews, were behind the
killings. Not Saudis."

It was the first time I heard so precise a number of Jewish absentees.
I sat there pondering on the pan-Arab denial of the truth, a refusal to
accept that the Wahhabi jihadi terrorism festering in their midst had
inflicted calamities on the entire world.

In my class the following Sunday, the beginning of the Saudi working
week, were nearly 60 Saudis. Only one mentioned the London bombings.

"Was your family harmed?" he asked.

"My sister missed an explosion by four minutes but otherwise they're
all fine, thank you."

The student, before a full class, sighed and said: "There are no
benefits in terrorism. Why do people kill innocents?"

Two others quickly gave him his answer in Arabic: "There are benefits.
They will feel how we feel."

I was livid. "Excuse me?" I said. "Who will know how it feels?"

"We don't mean you, teacher," said one. "We are talking about people
in England. You are here. They need to know how Iraqis and Palestinians
feel."

"The British people have been bombed by the IRA for years," I
retorted. "Londoners were bombed by Hitler during the blitz. The largest
demonstrations against the war in Iraq were in London. People in Britain
don't need to be taught what it feels like to be bombed."

Several students nodded in agreement. The argumentative ones became
quiet. Were they convinced by what I had said? It was difficult to tell.

Two weeks after the terrorist attacks in London another Saudi student
raised his hand and asked: "Teacher, how can I go to London?"

"Much depends on your reason for going to Britain. Do you want to
study or just be a tourist?"

"Teacher, I want to go London next month. I want bomb, big bomb in
London, again. I want make jihad!"

"What?" I exclaimed. Another student raised both hands and shouted:
"Me too! Me too!"

Other students applauded those who had just articulated what many of
them were thinking. I was incandescent. In protest I walked out of the
classroom to a chorus of jeering and catcalls.

My time in Saudi Arabia bolstered my conviction that an austere form
of Islam (Wahhabism) married to a politicised Islam (Islamism) is
wreaking havoc in the world. This anger-ridden ideology, an ideology I
once advocated, is not only a threat to Islam and Muslims, but to the
entire civilised world.

I vowed, in my own limited way, to fight those who had hijacked my
faith, defamed my prophet and killed thousands of my own people: the
human race. I was encouraged when Tony Blair announced on August 5,
2005, plans to proscribe an array of Islamist organisations that
operated in Britain, foremost among them Hizb ut-Tahrir.

At the time I was impressed by Blair's resolve. The Hizb should have
been outlawed a decade ago and so spared many of us so much misery.
Sadly the legislation was shelved last year amid fears that a ban would
only add to the group's attraction, so it remains both legal and active
today. But it is not too late.

© Ed Husain 2007