Candidly Speaking - 01/08/22

On the Strange Decline of Maajid Nawaz

One of the duties of life, I think, is to deal with disappointments. I mean personal as well as political ones. I recently lost a couple of friends because of my stance on abortion, and I may have alienated myself against a whole cohort of people who are anti-theist and politically left-wing. I was very much disappointed when J.D. Vance turned into a raging, pro-Putin demagogue despite his inspiring autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. I can imagine the editors of the magazine National Review, America’s premier conservative journal, eating their words when Ted Cruz, their best hope against Donald Trump in 2016, turned out to be a Trump sycophant and a January 6th apologist.

But my subject in this essay, Maajid Nawaz, turned out to be a personal as well as political disappointment, because for years I counted myself among his supporters and defenders. Not everyone in the West is sober enough to realize that on one hand, Western military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are not achieving their objectives, but on the other, Islamic extremism poses a genuine threat to liberal societies. Those who are right on one issue are very often wrong on the other. Mr. Nawaz’s autobiography, Radical, is a must-read story of how a man, fueled by rage and religiosity, turned to Islamic extremism, only to be imprisoned in Egypt after the September 11th attacks, and came out understanding and appreciating the virtues of democracy, liberty and religious pluralism. But I was first introduced to him via Sam Harris, the noted atheist philosopher. They co-wrote a short volume, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, as a model for necessary dialogue between the House of Islam and the West. For a long time, Nawaz has been a passionate voice of reason (a contradiction in terms, I know, but take a listen). Like the great historian Bernard Lewis, he recognizes the immense cultural and historical significance of Islam but he worries that the Muslim population’s growing intolerance towards Western values (liberalism, women’s rights, religious freedom) may cause more violence and hatred. Just look at what happened in France: terrorist bombings and executions of satirists in France, motivated by Islamic extremism, fueled the grievances of the country’s far-right political elements, represented by the likes of Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.

Maajid was also the co-founder of a counter-extremist think-tank called Quilliam, named after the 19th century British convert to Islam from Christianity. It was the first of its kind: focusing on resisting the tide of radical Islamist ideology, it has also made efforts to combat the home-grown anti-Islam rhetoric of British nativists. Its best-known public achievement comes in the form of convincing Tommy Robinson, founder of a far-right group called the English Defence League, to leave the same group. As the years go by, the results turned out to be mixed - Robinson maintained his extremist views, and found himself in repeated legal trouble. Perhaps it is true that while you can take the child out of the village, you can’t take the village out of the child. Robinson has also alleged that Quilliam paid him to quit the group as part of a publicity stunt. Another public victory for the institution was when Maajid sued the American legal advocacy non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), after the latter named Maajid as an “anti-Muslim extremist”. In a settlement, Maajid and Quilliam was paid 3 million dollars.

And then, Covid hit.

At the time of the onset of Covid, Maajid was hosting a radio show on LBC (Leading Britain’s Conversation) every weekend. He would offer his takes on current UK politics, radical Islam and everything in between, then open his show to callers’ views and opinions. The shows would last for about 3 hours. If I was able to manage between time zones (I was in Canada during the years 2020 and 2021), I would tune in. Maajid’s views are identifiably of the Left, but he regularly criticizes his own side while paying respects to certain ideas and figures of the Right. One of his main grievances during the pandemic is one that the Right certainly cherishes - the opposition to vaccine mandates. That, he claims, is what ended his partnership with LBC in 2022. If you hear from him (maybe on the embedded Rogan podcast), he had been “double-jabbed” (he refuses to call them “vaccines”) before LBC mandated its employees and talents to take the booster shot, or risk being fired. “No jab, no job,” Maajid observes. Right now, he has a Substack page, which he claims to be his “only source of income”.

And what of the think-tank Quilliam? It shut its doors in 2021. Maajid said on Twitter: “Due to the hardship of maintaining a non-profit during COVID lockdowns, we took the tough decision to close Quilliam down for good. This was finalised today. A huge thank you to all those who supported us over the years. We are now looking forward to a new post-covid future.” I certainly hope that that future comes sooner than later, because under Covid, Maajid has lost his capacity to think clearly.

I have stated many times in my podcast that I oppose restrictions of movement, access to indoor locations and employment based on Covid vaccination status. I have taken three doses of vaccine so far and I would recommend it to anyone who has not gone through the process. Nevertheless, the choice to have anything injected into your body should be decided by individuals, not by states. I have spoken to Maxime Bernier, a Canadian politician who was barred from air travel because he has not been vaccinated. I have spoken also to James Topp, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran who walked across his home country to protest the vaccine mandates on frontline healthcare workers. I sympathize with both of them, namely because I have lived through all of these irrational Covid laws, and they did a number on my mental well-being.

However, I draw the line at questioning the efficacy of the vaccine. Maajid Nawaz, along with a number of commentators, has crossed that threshold. If you listen to the Rogan episode, as well as a podcast interview he did with Bret Weinstein, you would see him repeatedly making bad-faith accusations on the pharmaceutical companies responsible for the vaccine, the people who oppose his stance on vaccination, as well as institutions in the US and UK during the War on Terror. He shared his personal story of being forcibly injected by the Egyptian prison guards, as well as a Vox story on the CIA putting up a fake Hepatitis B vaccination drive in Pakistan, to support his position. Nowhere in both of these interviews (totaling 5 hours long) did he research the ingredients, the scientific research, the approval process, or the overall efficacy of the vaccine. Never mind that the Covid vaccine represents a breakthrough in pandemic prevention - it was the first time that a vaccine was created and approved within the first year of an epidemic - Maajid continues to slide down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theorizing, this time directing his ire at the “globalists”, “corporatists” and “Nazis” occupying high office. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you start talking about the “dodgy” Bilderberg conference.

What has happened to the man I used to admire, whose writings I even cited in one of my university papers? Perhaps, as is the case of Tommy Robinson, extremism has never left Maajid Nawaz - it merely took on a different form. It is a sad turn of events, but I have to accept that one of my heroes has fallen from grace, and seek out better heroes to emulate.