Counterterrorism Blog

Maajid Nawaz, currently Director of the Quilliam Foundation in the UK, will testify on Thursday before a U.S. Senate committee on the subject of the roots of violent extremism and how to counter it. Mr. Nawaz became famous for publicly renouncing his membership Hizb ut-Tahrir, in which he had become a leader in the UK, and denouncing it as an extremist organization. In a September 2007 op-ed in the Sunday London Times, Nawaz described the allure of Hizbut to him in his youth, his activities in the group, and the events which led to his withdrawal. That account sounds so familiar to anybody interested in the process of homegrown radicalization - Nawaz was a third-generation British Muslim. On the Quillium website, Nawaz describes how he debated with Muslim Brotherhood members while in prison in Egypt and came away convinced, as he wrote in the Times op-ed, that "what I had been propagating was far from true Islam. I began to realise that what I had subscribed to was actually Islamism sold to me in the name of Islam. And it is with this realisation that I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became." Nawaz still suffers from his years in Hizbut and his imprisonment; just today, the Guardian reports that he has been denied permission to train as a lawyer in the UK. The official denial referred to his "knowingly engaging in political activities whilst in a country in which those activities were banned."

Nawaz might be the most senior former leader of an Islamic extremist group to testify before the Congress since the 9-11 attacks. Also testifying with him will be Zeyno Baran, a former Contributing Expert here who coined the term "conveyor belt for terrorists" to describe Hizbut's role in radical Islam. Other scheduled witnesses include the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.

One of the topics for the hearing will be the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in fostering extremism, a topic about which this site has been a leading source of information, from our panel on the Brotherhood's role in the formation of the Holy Land Foundation and other Muslim charities in the U.S. to numerous other posts on the MB's international influence.

The hearing is another in a series on islamic extremism held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The committee issued a report in May, "Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat," and I posted in May on Sen. Lieberman's efforts to convince Google to remove Internet videos produced by terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda, from its YouTube subsidiary.