Renouncing Islam: To the Brink and Back Again

[Elphaba]

Renouncing Islam: To the Brink and Back Again
by Johan Hari

Hari is an expert in the jihad movement in Britain. Recently he has discovered a new trend: A move by some Muslim jihadists--away from jihad. According to Hari:

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

Here Hari provides some insight into what turns a British Muslim into an extreme Islamist:

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma [one of the Muslims denouncing jihad] – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"
. . . .
Britain's foreign policy also helped tug them towards Islamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for a harder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machine waiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: "Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it's free.

When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I was looking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in the libraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car, open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis, saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?"

He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting to disorientated young Muslims in the West. "It tells you – you're in this state of sin. But the sin doesn't belong to you, it's not your fault – it's Western society's fault. It isn't your fault that you're sinning, because the girl had the miniskirt on. It wasn't you. It's not your fault that you're drug dealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it's their fault."

One of the reason that persuaded these former jihadists to reject the hate a violence was all of the Westerners who came out against the violence against Muslims, including the huge protests against the Iraq war, and demonstrations against torturing Muslims.

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.
. . . .
Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Currently there are only 17 ex-jihadists that have come out, but Hari insists there are more who are afraid what will happen to them if they come out as well. So while their numbers are not great, could it be a start?

Elphaba

[Dravin]

Most interesting. If it becomes a trend it may cut down on western jihadists, we'll still have to worry about those from countries with more limited interaction with sympathetic westerners and even greater expousure to propoganda (free booklets it one thing, an entire goverment run propoganda machine you are completely immersed in is another). I suppose though that X - 17 Jihadists in the world is better than X.