If anyone has the street cred and chops to comment on radical Islam, and on the shameful capitulation of Western liberals to the canard of “Islamophobia,” it’s Maajid Nawaz. Born in England, Nawaz became a radical Muslim early on, dedicated to establishing a caliphate with nuclear weapons. To this end he traveled in the Middle East to get converts for Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Muslim group. And for that he was ultimately jailed in Egypt. During his five years in prison, he became de-radicalized, and ultimately returned to England to found Quilliam, a think tank dedicated to fostering humanism and eliminating extremism. (I’m not sure whether Nawaz is still a believing Muslim, though I think he is.) Quilliam’s statement of purpose is this, and is largely instantiated by countering the narrative of extreme, radical, and violent Islam:

Quilliam is the world’s first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the unique challenges of citizenship, identity, and belonging in a globalised world. Quilliam stands for religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy.

Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members of society. Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to advance liberal democratic values.

I admire him immensely.

So when Nawaz, who’s walked the walk of radical Islam, writes an article for The Daily Beast called “The British’s Left’s hypocritical embrace of Islamism,” it’s best to pay attention. He defines “Islamism” as “an ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society.” (When violent, he calls it jihadism.)

Nawaz calls out the Left for ignoring the frequent and violent abrogations of civil liberties by Islamists, and for the way that liberal British organs like The Guardian ignore these, or, when they pay attention, blame them all on Western colonialism. For instance:

But for those who I have come to call Europe’s regressive-left how could Islamist tyranny—such as burying women neck deep in the ground and stoning them to death—possibly be anything other than an authentic expression of Muslim rage at Western colonial hegemony? For don’t you know Muslims are angry? So angry, in fact, that they wish to enslave indigenous Yazidi women for sex, throw Syrian gays off tall buildings and burn people alive? All because… Israel. For Europe’s regressive-left—which is fast penetrating U.S. circles too—Muslims are not expected to be civilized. And Muslim upstarts who dare to challenge this theocratic fascism are nothing but an inconvenience to an uncannily Weimar-like populism that screams simplistically: It is all the West’s fault.

It is my fellow Muslims who suffer most from this patronizing, self-pity inspiring mollycoddling. And just as American Muslims, with some reason, fear becoming targeted by right-wing anti-Muslim prejudice, British Muslims are being spoon-fed regressive-left sedatives, encouraging a perpetual state of victimhood in order to score their petty ideological points against “the West.” In the name of cultural diversity, aspiration is being stifled, expectations have been tempered and because Muslims have their own culture don’t you know, self-segregation and ghettoization have thrived.

In the first paragraph, Nawaz is referring indirectly to himself, for he’s not an angry Muslim, but a conciliatory one—a Muslim who challenges theocracy. As he notes in the piece, the Guardian misled him a while back by flattering him with blandishments, praising his work, and then sabotaging him in a new hit piece that paints him as David Cameron’s lap dog. (Given what Nawaz does, the piece is pretty vile.)

He goes on to fault the Guardian further for not only publishing (apparently with approval) the rants of Islamists, but marginalizing liberal Muslims, adding this:

Like the Daily Mail of old, which to its eternal shame appeased the rise of Nazism, the Guardian is blinded by its infantilizing approach to minority communities, promoting the most regressive of theocrats, simply to “stick it to the man.”

It’s perhaps understandable that Nawaz, whose ideas the Guardian neglected in favor of his dress and taste in coffee, is a bit defensive about his credentials, and reiterates his background, though I would have preferred him to leave out the snarky comment about “champagne socialists”:

The great irony is that, unlike many of today’s champagne socialists and shisha-jihadists my entire life has been a prototype of their archetypal aggrieved Muslim. Unlike the Guardian’s private school, Oxbridge-educated journalist David Shariatmadari, I am a state school-educated Muslim and racial minority. I have been stabbed at by neo-Nazis, falsely arrested at gunpoint by Essex police, expelled from college, divorced, estranged from my child, and tortured in Egyptian prison, and mandatorily profiled. I’ve had my DNA forcibly taken at Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 Laws, which deprive terror suspects of the right to silence at UK ports of entry and exit, among much else. I’ve been blacklisted from other countries. I am every grievance regressive leftists traditionally harp on. Yet their first-world bourgeois brains seem to malfunction because I refuse to spew theocratic hate, or fit their little “angry Muslim” box. Yet they talk to me about privilege, and non-fat lattes?

To defuse the unfair charge that he’s a lackey of the Conservatives, Nawaz also reprises his activities. And, I have to say, the man is trying to do good work:

There is a natural fear among Europe’s left, that challenging Islamist extremism can only aid Europe’s far-right. But the alternative to this fear must not be to instead empower theocratic fascism. There is a way to both challenge those who want to impose islam, and those who wish to ban Islam. It has not escaped me, nor other liberal Muslims, that while challenging Islamist extremism we must remain attentive to protecting our civil liberties. We are born of this struggle, after all. Over the years I have opposed past UK government ministers on ethnic and religious profiling, opposed Obama’s targeted killings and drone strikes and opposed Senator King in the UK Parliament over his obfuscation and justification for torture. I have been cited by the UK PM for my view that though Islamist extremism must be openly challenged, non-terrorist Islamists should not be banned unless they directly incite violence. I have spoken out against extraordinary rendition and detention without charge of terror suspects. I have supported my political party, the Liberal Democrats, in backing a call to end Schedule 7. It is due to this very same concern for civil liberties that I vehemently oppose Islamist extremism and call for liberal reform within our Muslim communities, for our Muslim communities. We believe civil liberties cut both ways, for and upon minority communities, and it is due to this same passion for human rights that my organization Quilliam put out this anti-ISIS video only a day after the Guardian’s unfortunate sting. We chose to let our work speak for itself.

Here’s the long version of Quilliam’s anti-ISIS video; the thick British accent is a bit hard to understand to American ears.

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Two addenda:

1. Read Nick Cohen’s new piece (ironically, in the Guardian), “Islamism prevails even as we suppress free speech.” An excerpt:

Compare the bravery of Bangladeshi intellectuals with the attitude of the bulk of the western intelligentsia. Whole books could be written on why it failed to argue against the fascism of our age – indeed I’ve written a couple myself – but the decisive reason is a fear that dare not speak its name. They are frightened of accusations of racism, frightened of breaking with the consensus, frightened most of all of violence. They dare not admit they are afraid. So they struggle to produce justifications to excuse their dereliction of duty. They turn militant religion into a rational reaction to poverty or western foreign policy. They maintain there is a moral equivalence between militant religion and militant atheism.

2. I’m reading in page proofs the exchange between Sam Harris and Nawaz that will come out as a short book in October, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: a Dialogue. It’s very good, and is already the #1 New Release in the “Islam” category of Amazon books.