The Islamist

"The Islamist" by Ed Husain (Penguin books) provides valuable insight into the belief system of an Islamist and in this case his return back to mainstream Islam.
Husain was born in Britain to Bangladeshi parents and grew up in the Whitechapel/Tower Hamlets area of East London. He describes his experiences going to various mosques, including the East London Mosque and that on Brick Lane. What stands out is how quickly as a teenager in the 1990's he was converted to Islamism, the political brand of Islam that is anti-Western, anti-British and anti-Semitic.
Some years ago I was introduced to the teachings of the Egyptian precursor of the Moslim Brotherhood, Syed Qutb, who became an inspiration for the young Muslims in the UK. I found his teachings superficial, violent and sophomoric. But, apparently they appealed to a large group of British-born Muslims, who made common cause with their mainly Arab co-religionists.
Two interesting distinctions arose; although brought up to a spiritual and Bangladeshi/Pakistani version of Islam, the young men gravitated to the more extreme political agenda of the Islamists of Hizb ut-Tahrir. This wave of extremism was aided by Saudi Arabian support for the literal strain of Islam, Wahhabism, that has lead to al Qaeda and other anti-Western organizations.
The foundation of their belief system is that all current Muslim regimes are corrupted by compromise with the West. They must be overthrown in order to bring about the establishment of the universal caliphate, that would then in the pursuance of God's work, use its Muslim army to overthrow and destroy the West. They hate Jews for wanting to "take over the world," while in fact hypocritically they are plotting precisely that themselves! In their hardcore views, noncooperation with the hated Western culture extends to murdering any kuffir (non-Muslim or infidel) who gets in their way. This includes any Muslims who do not agree with or accept their political agenda.
When one person was stabbed to death at a demonstration at his college, Husain realized that he was getting in too deep, and started to retract. In this respect he comes across as incredibly naieve, preaching death to their opponents, but not realising that this actually means spilling blood. His book provides an excellent blueprint of the planning and methods adopted by the extremist Islamists to take over and control most of the Universities, Mosques and Islamic organizations in the UK, and they still do!
One surprising aspect of this book is the superficial understanding of Islam itself displayed by the Islamists. Most of them did not speak or understand Arabic, even though they were trained from birth to repeat long tracts of the Koran. This lack of understanding made them very susceptible to the blandishments of the "politically motivated" Islamists. Also, they showed an incredibly superficial understanding of current events. For example, they used the war in Bosnia to project a cause of Muslim suffering in Europe, never mind that Britain, the US and NATO basically saved Muslim Bosnia from extinction.
Of course, the Iraq war fed directly into their anti-American and anti-British biases, as well as an oft-repeated and strong anti-Israel hatred. During the break between the attacks on the US on 9/11/01 and that on Britain on 7/7/05, the British intelligence services seem to have been asleep. In many cases Husain gives examples of how training for violent activities and contacts with foreign extremists were overlooked and ignored by the British authorities. As a result of this incompetence, almost all Muslim organizations in the UK are now controlled by (covert) Islamists seeking the overthrow of the democratic system and its replacement with an authoritarian Islamist system ("the flag of Allah will fly over 10 Downing Street"), and this includes those organizations with which the British Govt. regularly consults (including the Muslim Council of Britain).
Ironically, at the end Husain realizes that the Islamist political organizations that are so anti-Western have in fact copied the Communists and Socialists in their mode of cell structure and the Nazis and fascists in their anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda. Another irony is that the intensely anti-democratic Islamist organizations that have thrived in the democratic environment of Britain are exporting their extremism to the Middle East and Indian subcontinent and not vice versa. Clearly Britain has a big job to do in catching up and routing out the hundreds of extremist Islamist cells that exist there today. This is a very worrying and informative book, let's hope MI5 have been studying it.