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Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism by Maajid Nawaz is a memoir of the famous activist and former Jihadist. Mr. Nawaz is the founding Chairman of Quilliam, a think tank focusing on integration, and religious freedom.

A few weeks ago I read Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby, and in it she mentions this book and its author, whom she has befriended. I checked out the book and it sounded fascinating, right up my alley, and very relevant even though it was written in 2012.

Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism by Maajid Nawaz starts in England, where Mr. Nawaz was forced to protect himself against far-right racists. He and his friends started carrying knives daily as the threat of violence escalated. As he fell into the Muslim victimhood echo chamber, he joined a militant Hizb it-Tahir (HT), an organization dedicated to establishing a Muslim Caliphate.

Mr. Nawaz became one of HT’s most prominent recruiters and was soon assigned to duties in Denmark, Pakistan, and Egypt. He spent time in Egypt as a political prisoner where he discovered that Jihadism doesn’t represent Islam and dedicated the rest of his life to erasing extremism and helping Muslims integrate around the world.

This book is well written, telling a compelling story. I found much of it fascinating, especially where the young Maajid Nawaz was radicalized, and his time spent in Egyptian jail. Mr. Nawaz does not shy away from difficult subjects to talk about, admits mistakes, and makes it clear that this is a cautionary tale.

The part I found most amusing is that upon escaping from the Egyptian internal security services, the only country in which this extreme jihadist felt safe was Israel. The author doesn’t dwell much on it, except his spiritual journey to Jerusalem, but in these troubled times, I wish to highlight that passage.

In this day and age, any person who changes their mind based on facts they learned needs to be applauded. Mr. Nawaz’ rejection of Jihadist ideology, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories are no exception. ( )

This guy has a hell of a story and I learned a lot from reading it. I don't know what, exactly, my assumptions were about people's pre-islamisist lives, but it wasn't hip hop. I've gotta say, their tactics sound sooooo similar to communists.

BUT he could have written this better, could have made it richer. Instead, 2/3rd of the way though, he switches narrative to what he's up to now, name dropping all over the place and talking himself up. Damn that spoiled the book as a whole. ( )

I expected to love this book and I am very disappointed in it. Nawaz is very impressed with himself. He's full of the drama, self-importance and the certainty that overly religious folks tend to drift toward. I realize that later in his life he broke away from this, but it doesn't make his early life any easier to read about. I read as far as I could before I just couldn't endure the hubris any further. I like Nawaz in his current role in the world, but his younger self was an insufferable twat. ( )

To the white majority, who even now think of this country as a placid place, it will seem extraordinary that the author of this dramatic memoir was born in Southend. Maajid Nawaz is still only in his mid-thirties. He was brought up in a prosperous, middle-class, anglophile household of Pakistani origin. In his teens, he became an Essex ''b-boy’’, and got into fights with Paki-bashing skinheads. In college in London, and later at its renowned School of Oriental and African Studies, he was an extreme Islamist activist. He was present when one of his fellow extremists stabbed an African student to death. He married at 21, and had a son.
Nawaz was a leading firebrand in Hizb al-Tahrir (HT), the militant organisation that wishes to overthrow all infidel regimes and establish a new Muslim Caliphate. Although it is not itself a terror organisation, its ideology legitimises violence. The author traces what he calls its ''snail’s trail’’ all the way to al-Qaeda.
Nawaz did not agitate in Britain alone. He went first to Denmark, and then to Pakistan, where HT was stirring up students and recruiting army officers of that newly nuclear nation to bring about an Islamist coup. Then he went to Mubarak’s Egypt to spread the HT word there. He was arrested, tortured and spent more than four years in prison. His arrest took place after September 11 2001. There is some suggestion that the British authorities were complicit.
When Nawaz was released in 2006, he returned to Britain and a hero’s welcome from the militants. But while he was in jail, a different story had been ''unfolding inside my own head’’. Starting with his doubts about the motives of the HT leaders, he began to ask himself deeper questions. Despite his rhetorical devotion to Islam, he had been obsessively political, and knew little about the religion in whose name he had struggled and plotted. In jail, he studied. He also met lots of other people, including secularists, imprisoned for beliefs quite unlike his own. He found that he respected them. He concluded that his zealotry had not been truly religious, but a Muslim-coloured version of Western student revolt: ''We Islamists were the bastard children of colonialism.’’
So Brother Maajid broke away from HT, even as he was being offered its British leadership, and even though the break brought his marriage to an end. Temporarily homeless, and sleeping at night in his Renault Clio parked in Tavistock Square, near the scene of the July 7 bombings of 2005, Nawaz conceived a mission to bring ''democratic awakening’’ to Muslims here and abroad. He set up Quilliam, the first Muslim organisation dedicated to confronting the extremists. Nowadays, he is trying to create political pluralism in Pakistan, Egypt and Libya. He helped David Cameron with his important Munich speech on countering extremist ideology. ( )

Nawaz is a British man of Pakistani descent who turned to Islamism in his teens and was a successful recruiter for the international Islamist (not terrorist) organization Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). Later, during 5 years in an Egyptian prison, he rethought his position and after returning to England co-founded Quilliam, a group which works to turn people away from extremism.

Nawaz is very blunt about his success in turning disenchanted Muslims to HT as well as recruiting numerous radicals, most notably the man who killed Daniel Pearl. His time in prison is sometimes nail-bitingly tense, especially the time he spent in the Egyptian equivalent of the Lubyanka, where he witnessed, and expected to receive himself, repeated torture. The last sections of the book, in which he describes the founding and purpose of Quilliam, could have been greatly condensed.

I had mixed feelings after reading this. It's certainly interesting, especially for a Westerner and non-Muslim who questions the hold extreme Islam has taken among young people living in Europe and North America. Perhaps I read too few autobiographies, but I just got tired of Nawaz's voice. Still, it's a story of great value to read and I encourage others to pick it up from their library and check it out. ( )