Radical (18 page)

“And how do I get in contact with you?” she asked. “Who are you, anyway?”

The agent smiled a little patronizingly at my wife.
As if I carry a badge,
he seemed to say. He wrote down a number and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

The number would turn out to be a false one. What she didn't know was that our phone socket had been ripped out. A number that wouldn't work, to be called on a phone she couldn't use. I later learned that she had to go out into the streets at 4 a.m., knowing no Arabic, begging people to let her use a phone to call the consul.

Rabia's questioning stirred up something within me.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “You can't just come in here in the middle of the night like this. You haven't told me what I am being arrested for. You haven't read me my rights. I haven't seen any ID. Do you even have a warrant to search my flat?”

The agent listened to my diatribe with a look of faint amusement. When I had finished, he laughed and shook his head, like I just didn't get it.

“Welcome to Egypt, Maagid. We do as we please,” he said with a sneer.

The calmness of his demeanor then cracked. Ammar's crying, which had been incessant, was the last straw. He came over to me and wrenched Ammar from my arms. It was a flash of temper, all the more brutal for the fact that it was the little boy who bore the brunt of it. To have Ammar's hand ripped away from me like that in those final moments was the most painful thing. He looked me straight in the eyes, bawling, his arms outstretched as the
zaabit
shoved him toward Rabia. That image is still scorched in my memory. This was to be my parting image, and the last time I was to see him, or his mother, for a long time.

The
zaabit
then grabbed my arm, quite aggressively, and I remember thinking that this was the first time since the police had burst in that anyone had touched me.

“Right,” he snapped. “Let's go.”

There was no chance to say goodbye, not even a final glance back as he half pushed me through my front door, frog-marching me down the stairs to the police van below. She didn't know it yet, but that night Rabia was to lose her husband forever.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The
Ghimamah
Has No Rules

The cold of the night air smacked me in the face. I could see that the whole area had been cordoned off: there were more armed police standing at the front of my building, further vans and cars sealing the road. The
zaabit
spat an instruction in Arabic to a
shaweesh
—police conscript.
Kalbishuh
—cuff him, he said, and my arms were duly shoved behind my back. I could feel the sharpness of the metal scoring my wrists as I was shoved into the van. A heavy hand pushed me forward on the back of my head, and it was a balancing act not to stumble on the steps as I got in. A horseshoe of wooden benches ran along the sides.
U'ad
—sit, someone barked. I sat in the middle as the benches filled up with
shaweeshiya
, the van swaying each time another jumped in.

The
zaabit
shouted another instruction as the back doors of the van slammed shut, “
ihna mashiyeen, ghammimooh
.” I didn't understand this but soon found out. The
shaweesh
next to me pulled out a rag, a dark, dirty, stained piece of cloth, and motioned at me to lean forward. It was a blindfold, and now, for the first time, as the gift of sight was taken from me, I began to feel petrified, complete fear—the kind that cannot be described but only felt. The rag was wrapped tightly round my face, tied roughly at the back. I could feel the pressure of the cloth pushing against my eyeballs, the unpleasant odor battling the lingering traces of Ammar's baby talc.

Most of all, there was the unremitting blackness as the driver started the engine and began to pull away. It now dawned on me that in the back of this van, with heavily armed
shaweeshiya
surrounding me, I was powerless to use my hands to stop them if they attacked me, and I would not see it coming. This was helplessness. My remaining senses began to strain for any clues of sudden movement. The flicker of confidence I'd had in the flat seemed part of a different world. I was totally at their mercy, and I knew it.

The
ghimamah
, or blindfold, answered the question that the
zaabit
had ignored. I knew now that I was in the hands of Aman al-Dawlah. If they had been ordinary police, I'd have been starting down the civil jurisdiction route. I'd be processed and deported, my rights as a British citizen granting me some semblance of respect. Egypt, however, was a country with two parallel judicial systems; the second, the Emergency Law track, wasn't bound by any rules. The
ghimamah
told me this. You don't blindfold someone unless you're taking them to a place that's off the radar.

My mind, as always, began wondering about details:

The
ghimamah.
It's a filthy, torn piece of rag; it's not even a proper blindfold. That offends me. I'm worth more than a rag.

I wonder where it's been. I wonder how many other petrified souls have shared this yard of cloth. Their sweat and mine will now share a common foe.

Actually the fact that it's a rag frightens me. Rags are unofficial, unaccountable.

Real blindfolds have to be purchased and processed with receipts, in the cold light of day. Rags are free of rules.

My body began to tremble uncontrollably. As if the odor of my
ghimamah
had finally defeated Ammar's last act of defense for me, the scent of his baby talc on my neck, and the odor assaulted my brain, my nervous system.
I am in deep trouble.
Subhan Allah!
I am in serious deep trouble.
As it began beating its war drums my heart didn't want to surrender to the rag. Preparing to defend my body from whatever may come, I began breathing out, deeply, to try to calm myself.

I thought of how odd my twenty-four years of life had been. Essex, Newcastle, London, Lahore, Raheem Yar Khan, Copenhagen, Cairo, Alexandria, Amman, and al-Quds all flashed before me. I thought of
Tai Ammi
and her stories, Patrick, and the unintended path that his small act of racism had set that scared, lonely boy upon.

I thought of my first girlfriend Sarah crying on that first day at Cecil Jones after I told her there were too many new girls to choose from.

I thought of N.W.A, and “Fuck tha Police,” and my stomach turned as it struck me that only those with the luxury to speak could afford to be so defiant, and to get rich out of being so.

I thought of the white friends I'd abandoned, my companionship with Sav and Marc, with Dan, who was stabbed for us.

I thought of my crew, Chill, Ricky, Ade, and Paul, and the mad times we'd had as every other girl wanted to get in on our scene.
Had I really ever been that youthful teenage B-boy bopping to those beats in Southend's clubs?

Then I saw Abi beating her womb, pleading with me not to go, not to go, and I began to long for Abi's smile. I remembered Osman and Yasser, and how proud they were of my activism. I thought of Ed Husain at Newham, Uncle Qayyum in Raheem Yar Khan, Ash at SOAS, how are you all?

And now I wondered if Rabia had managed to call that number and knew instinctively that I would not be back in three days. And so I prayed, I prayed and felt close to Allah in my loneliness as I begged Him to protect me from these
zalimun
—these tyrants:
Allahumm Inni aj'aluka fi nufurihim . . .

We stopped. I assumed we were still in Alexandria, but I had no idea. It was the middle of the night. Everything was eerily quiet. I assumed, again, that we were at the Aman al-Dawlah building. But we could have easily pulled up somewhere else: a disused factory, a deserted warehouse. My mind, now defeated by the odor of my
ghimamah,
was ready to suggest, in despair, any number of nightmare scenarios.

I was taken out of the van and guided into a building. Up we went, stumbling up some stairs that became impossible to navigate without the aid of sight. A door opened in front of me, and the cold slap of night struck me again. A second or two, and I worked out that I must be on the roof of a building.
Why had they brought me up here?
Pushed along, I was eventually guided to what felt like a precipice, the wind rushing against the front of my body, my feet sensing an edge that I dared not test. And then with rather more care than I had experienced until now, I was positioned into a spot and told to stand perfectly still.
Ya Allah,
the thought came to me as fast as the wind rushing past my hair:
They're going to push me off the top of the building.

The
shaweeshiya
were laughing at me now. They'd done this before; they knew exactly what I was thinking. They could probably see my knees trembling as I struggled to stay perfectly still.

“Don't move,” a
shaweesh
said, with a sneer. “You really don't want to move.”

I could hear him retreat, his steps getting quieter as he crunched gravel behind me. I didn't dare move a muscle. I didn't dare feel anything. I didn't even dare to think.
Focus on keeping still. Focus on keeping still. Nothing else exists.
I willed time to move fast for me, I wanted this moment to be over, regardless of what came next, and as if to say, “Who are
you
to ask me anything?” time stretched out and took a yawn. It seemed to me that I was standing there for fifteen or twenty minutes, but it could just as easily have been two.

Eventually, I heard the gravel crunch behind me again. I tensed up, petrified that I might be about to get a shove. Instead, though, the
shaweesh
grabbed me and pulled me back. I tried not to buckle as he did so, the rush of relief loosening my limbs. Not that the relief lasted for long. When there are no procedures, there's no knowing what might happen next. They're softening me up, I thought to myself as I was dragged back across the roof, barely able to walk from the tremor in my legs. That's what this is all about. To make me more susceptible, more suggestible, to weaken me.
Come on, Maajid! You're not weak, you're never weak! Ya Allah, give me strength!

I was taken up some more stairs, and back inside. Through the darkness of my
ghimamah
I caught the glimmer of a lamp. Positioned in front of what I assumed to be a desk, a
zaabit
began to address me. I assumed this was the same
zaabit
who'd led the raid on my flat, but he was speaking Arabic now; there was so much I was no longer sure of that it almost didn't matter. Everything was uncertain: where I was, whom I was talking to, what was going to happen next. Reality was starting to fray at the seams.

“Maagid Nawaz,” my interrogator said.

“Yes,” I replied in English. “That's my name.” I wondered if he could see through my attempts at trying to sound strong and confident.

My Arabic wasn't bad. Having been in Egypt for seven months, I'd picked up the basics, but here I was struggling to understand every word of what my interrogator said.

“We know everything about you, Maagid. We know you are with Hizb al-Tahrir. We know you are attempting to revive this banned group in Egypt. We know you have tried to recruit people here, that your wish is to overthrow the Egyptian state.” He reeled off each statement like he was flicking dirt from his jacket. “We know about your work in Pakistan, Maagid. It seems you think you're an important man.” He said the word “important” with disdain. “You know what I think, Maagid? I think you should tell me everything you know. That way, this will all be a little easier on you.”

There was a pause, as he allowed what he had just said to sink in. If it hadn't been for Ahmed's warning those few months earlier, I would have been terrified at the mention of Pakistan. That's what he wanted me to feel, that stomach-churning sensation that there's been intelligence gathered against me: Aman al-Dawlah, ISI, MI6—he'd leave me to fill in the gaps. But thanks to Ahmed, I already knew they had this information. My prior knowledge gave me that fractional advantage, just enough to steel myself and respond.

“My name is Maajid Nawaz,” I said in English, sticking to my HT training. “I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in Britain. I am here in Egypt to study.”

A fist came down on the table. The slam sounded close. “Don't you dare play games with us, Maagid!” he snapped in Arabic. “I know you can speak Arabic.”

That flash of temper emboldened me. I felt in some small way that I had gotten under his skin. If I am to be defiant, it means I must stand ready for the consequences.
Ya Rabb
,
my Lord, help me now for I am your humble servant.

“My name is Maajid Nawaz,” I repeated in English. “I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in the UK. I have come from Britain to Egypt to study. I have nothing more to say.”

My use of English was deliberate. It was to emphasize where I was from. I wanted to remind the interrogator at every opportunity that I was a British citizen. This was the strongest card I had to remind him that he couldn't just treat me like he would other Egyptians. Or at least that's what I hoped.

“Tell me about Pakistan!” he shouted in Arabic. “Tell me about your activities there.”

“I have been to Pakistan, yes,” I agreed in English. “I have family there. It is perfectly normal for British-Pakistanis to visit the country to see their relatives.”

“Family,” he spat. “What family?”

“Aunts, uncles, cousins . . .” I was careful not to mention my wife's family. I didn't want to give them any possible reason to arrest her as well.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the interrogator swatted my answer away. “It's not family members I am interested in, it's members of Hizb al-Tahrir.”

In retrospect, he was oddly interested in Pakistan, considering that it had nothing to do with Egypt. Later, when I had time to think things through, it did make me wonder about who exactly this was asking these questions, and for whom. As he snapped and shouted at me, I stuck to my line. I continued answering in English, politely and firmly, emphasizing my British citizenship.

“Tell me about Hizb al-Tahrir in Egypt,” the interrogator changed tack.

“I am in Egypt to study. I am here in Alexandria as part of my university degree to study Arabic.”

Here the interrogator snorted; it's called a
shakheer
and is considered extremely rude. To Egyptians this indicates that you no longer make any pretense of social etiquette. “Whom have you recruited?” he asked. “Whom are you in contact with? Who else is involved?”

“I am a member of Hizb al-Tahrir in Britain,” I reiterated. “I have nothing to do with the organization in Egypt.”

“We'll see about that, Maagid,” the interrogator said. “We'll see about that.” He sighed. “If that's how you want to play it.” I heard a rustle behind me, from where another
shaweesh
must have been standing. “I said that you had the chance to make things easier for yourself.” I felt the
shaweesh
's hand grab my arm. “But I can't help you now,” he said as I was led away.

Taken back down several flights of metal steps outside of the building, I began wondering if I was about to be driven off somewhere else. But instead we went back inside the building, down some more steps, and into what I think was a basement. I heard the click of a key from behind me: my handcuffs were being taken off. Then the heavier clunk of a door opened and I was shoved forward, the door slamming shut behind me. Slowly, carefully, still blindfolded, I used my fingertips to take in my new surroundings. I felt cold bars on all sides and realized I was in a cell. As I finally sat down, legs aching for respite, I began to rub my wrists where the handcuffs had been.

I was kept in that holding cell for hours. Again, I can't be completely sure of timings: your perception of time melts away in such circumstances. And then I heard a shout, more like an appeal, someone in broken Arabic asking to be taken to the toilet. With pangs of rising guilt, I realized it was Hassan. Later on, another call: this time it was Hiroshi. Then I heard the voice of Yusuf el-Qadi, an Egyptian friend of ours, and a Muslim Brotherhood activist. Hearing their voices seared me in a way that the interrogator's questions had failed to do.
They have arrested my friends.
They have arrested my friends because of me. None of them had anything to with any of this. I had never raised the matter of HT with any of them. I sat there, too scared to call out to them, and wondered what they would think of me if they knew the truth.