EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,089 words- 0:00 – 2:07
JFK intrigue, assassinations, and why politics breeds deception
- MNMaajid Nawaz
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- NANarrator
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
That story fascinates me, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
The JFK story is like, that has been Oliver Stone's thing. I mean, he's been following that story, he's been chasing it down. We talked about on the podcast that his film, JFK, was essentially 30 years after the assassination, and then this documentary that he just released is 30 years after his film. So he's been chasing this thing down.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I should catch the documentary, I've said-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's very good.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... I've seen the film. I should watch the documentary.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's very good. It's on Showtime.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
But it fascinates me. Um, I mean generally as a ... W- we're, we're live right? We're recording this?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
So generally, the assassination of presidents, it's something which, uh, you know, I've been in prison with people that assassinated Sadat and it's just-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, really?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah, these sorts of ... Th- this intrigue at the top and the plots, um, I actually befriended them, um, I've got a copy of the, of a Quran at home signed by one of them as a gift to me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
A parting gift from, from prison. But, uh, the kind of intrigue, when you get to that level of intrigue at the top, nothing is ever what it seems, man. Nothing is ever what it seems.
- JRJoe Rogan
I can only imagine.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
It's gotta be a stressful way to live. Imagine being a world leader.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah, of course.
- JRJoe Rogan
And all the, the shit you're dealing with and potential assassination and coup plots and ...
- MNMaajid Nawaz
And, and part of how you operate has to be one thing, one face you present to the public, and another thing-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... is what you're really actually doing because you've got all these other people, uh, especially today with the nature of information wars, attempting to subvert what you're trying to do, uh, based on your overt actions. And so you have to truly, uh, hide what you're really actually up to, you know, it's g- it's difficult to navigate that terrain.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, not only that, but when you operate like that, if you're constantly operating in this sort of deception vein, like it's gotta be hard to know what's true and what's not true because you're kind of ... You're full of shit.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah, very. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
When you're full of shit, I think it becomes more difficult to recognize what's true and what's not true.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
(laughs) And you don't get to that position unless you're full of shit in the first place, right? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
You have to compromise, like they don't let you in.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
No, man.
- 2:07 – 4:36
Corruption and censorship signals: Pelosi trades, Twitter takedowns, and information war
- JRJoe Rogan
Like when you find out politicians that earn like $200,000 a year and you find out they're worth $200 million.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
How did that happen?
- JRJoe Rogan
And you're like, "What is going on?"
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Well, I'll tell you what's going on. Just look to Pelosi, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes. Well, that was who I was talking about.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
She's making a lot of money.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's wild.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
But it's not from her salary. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, the, my favorite thing was when she was confronted and, uh, they asked her a question about trading.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
About whether or not s- you know, people that are in Congress and what have you-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... should be able to trade. And she takes a sip of water 'cause she knows this is gonna be a big one.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, and then ...
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Well listen, there was a, there was a, on Twitter, um, uh, and we can probably return to the question of tech and, and speech and censorship, but there was this account called Pelosi Tracker, I don't know if you ever saw it?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
It's been taken down.
- JRJoe Rogan
(gasps)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
It was tracking all her trades. (laughs) I was following the damn thing. I was really interested to learn from it, you know, so they-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's good to invest in what she's investing in.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
(laughs) Well, because that's what they say, right? "You watch m-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... "you watch her moves and you know you're gonna make money." (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Why would they take it down?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
They got taken down. There was two, two accounts, one was called Epstein Tracker, uh, and it was following the Ghislaine trial. Uh, was it Ghislaine Tracker or Epstein Tracker? The other was Pelosi Tracker. Both got taken down.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah, who knows, man?
- JRJoe Rogan
That's ...
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Why does Twitter do anything?
- 4:36 – 10:04
Maajid’s origin story: growing up Muslim in the UK amid racist violence
- JRJoe Rogan
... what I want to do for people that don't know you, I want to go into your past.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, you know, and your book and who you were in a, you know, in the previous life and who you are now and why you're recognizing this and you're so fiercely resisting this shit more than a lot of people are. Because a lot of people are scared of blowback. Like they see what's going on with governments and with lockdowns and all these things and they're, they're scared of the blowback and so they're kind of keeping their mouth shut, but you're not doing that at all. And I think a lot of that has to do with your past.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I've seen worse, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So will, will you ex- just give us a s- uh, like a rundown-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
... of what happened with you?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
So I, um, for your listeners, I was born in Essex, UK, and, um, had a very normal, integrated childhood until I kind of hit my teenage years, um, and from my teenage years ... We were the first generation, by the way, of, um, Muslims born and raised in the West. My parents were immigrants, and why that re- why that's relevant is we, uh, my age group now, I'm 44, we had to navigate a place for Muslims in the West. Prior to that point, of course, um, that hadn't been done and there's a long history with, uh, sort of this whole Huntington model of a clash of civilizations, which is a bit caricature, but there's a long history sort of between Islam and the West and, and relations and, and mixing. Some of it's good, a lot of it involved war with the Crusades, so we are now born and raised in the West as British citizens. Now, to put that into context, in Europe-If you look with the US and you have minority communities, a lot of the, um, room for improvement exists in, say, African American communities, right? In Europe, the equivalent is with Muslim communities. Wherever you go, whether it's in Britain with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, whether it's in France with the North Africans, in Morocco, uh, uh, in the Netherlands with North Africans, Moroccans, in Germany with Turks, uh, across Europe generally, Albanians who also majority happen to be Muslim but more cultural, not really that religious. But across Europe, the- the- the largest minorities are Muslims. And so that same question about, uh, integration, uh, cooperation, um, equal opportunities, social, uh, mobility, whereas in the US it applies specifically, I don't know, say for example, with African Americans and Mexican Americans or Latino Americans, in the- in- in Europe generally and in the UK, it's a Muslim question. So when I began, sort of hit my teenage years, we experienced a lot of tension around that. And, uh, there was a lot of racist violence that I experienced go- growing up with some sort of neo-Nazi racist violence. And when I say violence, I'm talking, um, severe, severe shit like machete and hammer attacks, screwdriver attacks. I've had to watch friends of mine get stabbed before the age of 16. Many of my friends stabbed. Uh, we had running street fights with these guys, knives, machetes, everything. I mean, this is like a... It was really bad. (exhales) Um, one particular occasion, this guy tried to help me. I was surrounded by a group of them, and, uh, they all had their big kebab knives. Um, and I thought I was gonna die, man. And then this- this guy was just walking past, random guy walking past, he saw that I was surrounded by these guys and he tried to step in to defend me. (inhales) And what they did is they... I was 15 years old. They held me back and they basically started stabbing this guy all over his body, forced me to watch it, and they called him a Paki lover.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, geez.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
And the idea was that he's a traitor to his skin for trying to defend me. Um, so of course I became very angry. Yeah. Uh, but by the way, I- I met that guy, uh, about two years ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
He lived?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
He lived. He had a punctured lung.
- JRJoe Rogan
(exhales)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Turns out he was with the army. He's a hero for me, man. He's a hero. And, uh, I put out a public appeal to see if I could get, uh, reunited with him. He wants to stay anonymous, but I met him and he's still alive and he still, still lives in the, in my hometown. He's still, you know, local to the area-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... in my home county. But that made me very angry. At the same time, if you wanna think back the timeframe we're talking about, early '90s, uh, the genocide in Bosnia was happening. The Bosnians are also Muslim. And so we- we felt that, uh, that could come to Britain. We felt very isolated, we felt very, uh, uh, very vulnerable. And so we were looking in that context for some form of belonging, feeling rejected from those, from society around us. Uh, the guys that, the guys that attacked us, by the way, they would boast about having connections and links with the police. And, uh, it turns out to be the case that- that there was a- a problem in those days with the police. There's a famous case of, uh, the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK who was, uh, stabbed to death in a similar way while waiting at a bus stop. And his killers were never brought to justice for over 20 years. And, um, there was a government inquiry commissioned into that, it's called the MacPherson inquiry, and it eventually became famous for coining that phrase "institutional racism." And it was talking about how police were not looking into these sorts of crimes. So nobody was ever brought to justice for what happened to us. And everything I described was a year before Stephen Lawrence was murdered, but that became the pivotal case in the UK. It became like a George Floyd, only because huge... Except he wasn't... You know, I know George Floyd had some background. This guy had... He was clean. He was just a, a young kid, no background. He was just at a bus stop. So in that context, we became very angry and we became, uh, began looking for belonging and identity outside of the mainstream that we felt rejected us. And so at the age of 16, why that's all relevant
- 10:04 – 14:44
Joining Hizb ut-Tahrir: recruitment methods and coup-focused Islamist strategy
- MNMaajid Nawaz
is, um, I ended up joining a- a revolutionary Islamist organization. Uh, I didn't trust society. I didn't trust authority. I didn't trust the West generally. Uh, looking at the genocide in Bosnia with the UN troops, one of the, uh, the most searing memories for me was at Srebrenica where the UN, the Dutch UN soldiers were standing by as- as the Bosnian Muslims were killed and put in that mass grave. And they didn't have the mandate to intervene. So we really didn't trust institutions to defend us, whether it was foreign policy or even domestic at home. So at the age of 16, I joined this group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, which means the Party of Liberation. And, uh, it's, in a nutshell, the... Before Al-Qaeda and definitely before ISIS, this was an organization that wanted a caliphate globally around the world. But instead of using terrorism in the conventional means we understand it today, blowing things up, our purpose, our method was to recruit army officers in Muslim majority countries and instigate military coups to try and come to power. I joined this group at 16 and I spent, um, about a decade, uh, well, yeah, more, just over a decade in this organization. I rose to the leadership in the UK. I set the group, I exported it from the UK and set it up in, uh, Pakistan. I was part of the first move in the wave that went from Britain to Pakistan to found the group there. In that, in that vein, I ended up recruiting some army officers there in Pakistan as well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can I ask you how that happens? How do you, how do you make contact with the army officers and how could you recruit them and, like, how would you go about doing that?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Well, there's this, uh, military academy in the UK that globally countries send their, uh, officers to for training. It's called Sandhurst. And, uh, we would... Because of the Pakistani community, we knew friends who had relatives or whatever that would be coming from Pakistan to study at Sandhurst. It's an, it's a, it's like an officer's training academy. And then through relatives, you- you know, you get, begin conversation. And then really the rest of it is, what's- what's really important is being trained, uh, in- in techniques as to how to, uh, convince people of your aim.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, like, what do... What- what would happen?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
So, a lot of that involves around first, so- so we used to say that you have to first destroy before you build.And so whatever you believe in at the moment has to be removed before we can replace it with our ideological framework. And so if you believe in, say you're coming from Pakistan, uh, a thing you're gonna, generally, obviously there are exceptions, but you're gonna have some form of belief in the international order, in the international system, in, uh, democratic governance. Uh, because Pakistan, for most of its history, has been a democracy. And so we'd have to pick apart those ideas first by, uh, focusing on the flaws and the holes in these ideo-. So take the international community, very easy to do. You've got the UN standing by while a genocide is going on in Bosnia, and you're speaking to a Muslim who's from a country that was founded to protect Muslims after partition in 1947. It, uh, and, you know, you just say, "Look, you thi- you think these institutions are gonna protect you when you see what happened in Bosnia?" So the failure of the international order was something that we could poke to try and make the-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
"... you know, make those fissures bigger."
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Um, and so a lot of it is, uh ... And we'll get back to this, by the way, with the debate today with COVID. But a lot of it was a psychological assault on assumptions that people took for granted, and then you pick those apart. Through discussion, you demonstrate how, how those assumptions don't stand up to the real world, and they require a solution. That solution has to be something that fits what the person wants. Now, if you're speaking to a Muslim, it's pretty much a given that they don't want genocide against Muslims. So we'd go back. Say, take the example of Bosnia, we talk about, "Well, how do you think Muslims who are blond haired, blue eyed even came to Bosnia in the first place?" Well, actually it was through the caliphate, which is true. It was the Ottomans had to- you know, had the leadership of the Muslim world at the time, modern-day Turkey. And the Ottomans used to, uh, provide protection in that area. Now, that last, uh, vestige of a caliphate was destroyed in 1924 after World War I. And that's when, uh, the Muslims who are in modern-day Bosnia lost that protection of the Ottoman Empire. So if you're speaking to somebody that knows his history, which we were trained in ... So remember, I'm 16, I shouldn't be having conversations about the Ottoman Empire and Bosnia unless somehow I'd been, you know, I'd been involved in a form of a, a process of a combination of education and indoctrination. And it's how to use that education for the purposes of indoctrination that we were trained in. So you can, you can kind of have those discussions, and we ended up recruiting people. Uh, as I say, I exported it to Denmark then to Pakistan. I was on the leadership in the UK. Eventually,
- 14:44 – 24:57
Egypt after 9/11: arrest, dungeon torture, and surviving state security
- MNMaajid Nawaz
um, I went to Egypt to try and, uh, re- reestablish the group there in Egypt. Um, Egypt at the time was under Hosni Mubarak. I was doing a, uh, a degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies, it's, um, SOAS, uh, part of the University of London. It's considered, um, one of the leading, uh, kind of radical left-wing colleges in the UK, but for Arabic it's actually one of the best in the c- in, in the world. And I was doing law and Arabic at SOAS, and for my Arabic degree I needed to go to an Arab country for my, uh, language year, my third year. So I chose Egypt. So that was my ostensible reason for going to Egypt. But actually while I was there, I began recruiting again for my organization. The difference between Egypt and Pakistan, Denmark and Britain is Egypt's a, a dictatorship, still is till today, whereas Pakistan wasn't, um, and of course Denmark and Britain weren't. So in Egypt where I tried to start, you know, start building these cells, uh, recruit people to my organization, uh, I arrived one day before the 9/11 attacks not knowing, of course, that was happening, and so that, that changed the security paradigm for the whole world. If you remember Bush saying that, uh ... sorry, Tony Blair saying the rules of the game have changed. Uh, once 9/11 happened, people like us who were not, uh, you know, terrorists in the kind of bombing sense, right? Um, so that I ... that's just the difference between, say, an Islamist, um, to briefly define it, somebody who wants to impose a version of Islam over society as opposed to just the religion of Islam, which is a faith. An Islamist I define, and people can differ with these definitions, just my definition, is someone who wants to impose a version of Islam over society, impose a dogma, yeah? Um, but our methods, our means were not violent. They were more like infiltrating the government and trying to take over from within. But once, uh, 9/11 attacks happened, the security kind of, uh, rules of the game changed. Uh, the Egyptian regime came after us. There was a bit of a, a cat and mouse chase. I was on the run for a bit in Egypt. But, uh, eventually they raided my house at sort of roughly 3:00 AM and they had, uh, machine guns and grenades and everything, came in and I was awake at the time because I had a, uh, I was married and I had a one-year-old. Well, I have a one-year-old. He was one at the time. I, I have a son from that previous marriage and I was trying to put him back to sleep. Uh, they ripped him from my arms, um, they blindfolded me and they, uh, put me in this van, uh, took me to their he- state security headquarters and, uh, the, uh ... A lot of, uh ... I can go into some of the detail, but a lot of atrocities then happened to us. I mean, we were, we went through quite a horrific experience in the dungeons of Egypt. I mean, the first thing they did is they took me up in Alexandria where I was living, they took me up to the top of a building, blindfolded and, and stood me on the edge of the, of the roof, uh, to try and make me believe that they were going to push me over. And I had to stand there very still-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... to see if they were gonna ... It takes a bit of (laughs) it takes a bit out of you, you know what I mean?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
You, you can't see anything and you're standing at the ... And I could feel the wind around me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, Jesus.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
But that was just a warm up. That was for the purpose of softening me up so that I could, I would believe that they're prepared to do anything so that I'm ready to talk. So once they put me there, then they took me down and they took me into an o- to see an officer. See an officer, I was blindfolded but to, to be confronted by a, um, intelligence officer from the state security and he asked me my story. And we were trained to say one thing in that context as Islamist revolutionaries, and the answer was very straightforward and it's what I said. Uh, I was v- uh, very, uh, programmed, right? So I said, "My name is Maajid Nawaz and I'm a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir from Britain and that's all I've got to say to you." And that's what I said to the officer. So he laughed, but he, he's heard that before from us. There's a long history of this group in Egypt.... so, uh, he said, "All right, let's see what you do next." And then, uh, they put us in this van, drove us through the desert, still blindfolded. Uh, took us to, uh, Cairo, uh, and they took us to the, um, this building called, uh, Al-Gehaz, Al-Gehaz Eminetdola, which is the headquarters of the state security, internal state security, uh, for all of, uh, Egypt. Took us underground and this is where the real nightmare began. Uh, tied our hands behind our backs with rags, um, we were bodies piled on top of each other on the floor in this, I don't know what it was. I call it a dungeon because it was underground in a basement-like structure, and then, uh, that's when the screaming began. They, they gave us all numbers. I was 42 and, um, from, from, from that day when we were... This is now, I think, day two, uh, from that evening, they began a roll call. We weren't allowed to sleep, by the way. If we slept and we didn't answer our name, we were beaten. And they be- they went through the numbers in chronological order, and so I would hear number one, he was called up, taken into a separate room, tortured, and we would hear his screams, uh, electrocuted, and then they'd say, "Call number two." Number one is brought back, collapses in his spot, brings number two, number three, and they go through, everyone is being tortured one by one.
- NANarrator
(sighs)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
And of course, I have to wait my turn, 42.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
So I've (laughs) I've heard 41 other people. So number 41 who's next to me, there's this- there's a- there's a moment I write about in Radical, which is the story of all of this. It's my autobiography, it's called Radical. And, uh, this poor guy, I, I still don't know who he is till this day. But he turned to me and he was crying because he's n- his turn was next. And he said, "Help me." (sighs) I didn't know what to do, I mean, I'm in the same position. So I just read some passages of the Quran to him. There's a, there's a passage about a boy, um... Because Muslims believe everything, you know, in the, in the, um, Old and New Testament, we believe that's from the same tradition, the same God. And a bit like, the best way I can explain it for an American or a world audience is just as Christianity views Judaism as part of their tradition, Islam views Christianity and Judaism as part of our tradition, right? So there's a story in the Quran about a Christian boy who tried to, uh, uh, proselytize for monotheism and this pagan king didn't like him, and he put him in a ditch, and he burned everyone in this ditch. It's called Surah Al-Buruj, The Story of The Trench, um, and it's about suffering in the face of truth. And so I just started, uh, reciting this passage to him. (Arabic) Was samaa' idhah til-buruj. I started reciting this passage, um, a- and there's a very specific way of reciting the Quran. It soothed him. Um, all I remember him saying to me was, "You're a good man. Thank you." And then he was taken, his number was called, he was taken. And then eventually, he was, he collapsed. He was brought back and he was just unconscious and then my number was called. So I had to walk, imagine that, I had to walk towards this, uh, uh, room where they're gonna torture me. And, um, the guy said, uh, "Right, you're gonna have to speak." And I had, still had my hands tied behind my, uh, my back. But I had managed to, to get the rags loose and I'm not the kind of guy that's gonna... I mean, I, I, honestly I, at that moment, I decided I'd rather die than be humiliated in this way and, and then also then, uh, uh, telling him a story about my friends, you know? So because my hands were loose, I, honestly, I decided I'd, I'd rather just attack the guy and then they're gonna have to shoot me dead. Um, but then something unexpected happened, um, there were four of us from the UK. (inhales deeply) Uh, instead of electrocuting me, he, uh, electrocuted my friend who was also in the group with me, who's from London, who was also in Egypt. Uh, they tortured him in front of me and, uh, then he said, "Right, your turn. You have to speak. Tell us why you're here. Tell us what, what you're doing here in Egypt." I gave him the answer I, I had, the stock answer I gave in Alexandria. I said, "My name is Maajid Nawaz, I'm a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir from Britain. Do what you want." And, uh, by this time my hands were loose, but I was still pretending they were still tied and honestly, Joe, I, like, people are going to think this is, um, this is barbaric, but y- you haven't been in that situation to know what happens to the brain. But, uh, I took the view that if they touched me, I'm just gonna bite down on his neck and they're gonna have to shoot me dead because I was just going to basically just, just attack the guy with my teeth. That's all I had. Uh, lucky for me, uh, for whatever reason he said, "Right, I'm gonna give you 24 more hours to think about your answer. Go back to your spot and if you, if you don't answer, you saw what we did to your friend and we're going to do that to you." Now this is the fourth day, so they took me back to my place, uh, and then, um, I was kind of, there was some hints that they were going to rape me or whatever, um, talking about, "Oh, this one looks..." You know, talking about my physical features and, "Maybe we should treat him in a different way." And then I think they were trying to scare me with that too. And they, they have, by the way, they, they were rape- they were raping wi- wives in there, they were torturing children in front of their fathers, uh, just to try and force the father to confess. I mean, there's, just imagine no rules, yeah? Anything is possible and nobody's ever gonna find out about it. Now, lucky for me, that was the fourth day. The British Consul is meant to make contact within 48 hours, so four days, they're already late, but however they managed to do it on that fourth day, because I, I was a student of Arabic and I could understand, I heard a phone ring in the dungeon and one of the officers picked the phone up and I could hear him speaking in Arabic and he said, "Yeah, the foreigners are here with me." And then I could hear him say, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Okay. All right. Today, sir." And that's when I realized that, you know what, we might be taken out of here. So, um, I, it was, it was the case. On the f- uh, that evening, so I was due to go back to that officer and he'd given me the warning, but before I was due back, they sent some, uh, pickup truck, military truck to come and collect the four of us that were from the UK and they took us from there. And I imagine the ambassador was making a big stink. They took us from there and instead took us to a prison called Mazra'at al Har prison, which is where I eventually met the assassins of Anwar Sadat, the former prime minister and former president, and they put us into solitary confinement for three and a half months roughly.
- NANarrator
(sighs)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
The Egyptians we left behind there, the Egyptians continued, they continued treating them in a really brutal way, those that were arrested with us. But we were then put into solitary confinement, I was then, as a result, I was never electrocuted. My friend, as I said, was in front of me. He was in the next cell to me.And, uh, after... So that cell that we were put into solitary confinement, there was no, there was no toilet, there was no bed, bedding or anything. It was just a bare concrete cell. We had to, uh... Forgive me, but, you know, I suppose this is your show, we can speak like this. But we had to shit on the floor, we had to piss on the floor, and then they'd come 15 minutes break, they'd come with a bucket, and they'd just wash it down and then we're back on that, in that same cell.
- JRJoe Rogan
(exhales)
- 24:57 – 30:17
Prisoner of conscience: Amnesty International, emergency laws, and rights suspended forever
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Uh, 300... Three months or so later, we were charged. Um, I remember the charges still in Arabic. I can still quote them for you.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
The s- uh, the first charge was intima , which means membership, uh, lijma'atin ghair mushrooa , of a, of a prohibited organization. The second charge was tarwijb bil qawli wal kitaba , propagation by speech and writing (laughs) -
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... of banned ideas. And, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Banned ideas.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
It was beautiful because that's what convinced Amnesty International to adopt us as prisoners of conscience, the charges. Now, why that's beautiful is imagine I'm... By the way, ah, forgot to say, so I was 24 years old by this time, yeah? Imagine an angry Muslim, 24, at the peak of the war on terror, yeah? Iraq hadn't yet been invaded, but 9/11 had happened. I hated the West, I hated what I called the kuffar, infidels, and I existed to overthrow the Western order, and I was prepared to die for that, I was prepared to be tortured for it. And along come Amne- Amnesty International and they say, "He doesn't deserve to be in jail for his ideas unless he's committed a crime," and we hadn't committed any crime in Egypt. All we were doing was speaking about these ideas, these kind of revolutionary ideas. And because the, um, Egyptian, uh, constitution had been suspended under an emergency, uh, since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, by the guys I eventually met in that same prison, the Egyptian constitution does protect ideas, but it had been suspended in the name of an emergency for over 20 years. Uh, and I'd like to, when we get to the current day, come back to the, the nature of how emergencies work when they suspend your rights, okay? So this is they'd suspended the rights of Egyptians and it was meant to be temporary, and that temporary situation lasted over 20 years, which is why we ended up in jail for our ideas.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the initial emergency?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
The assassination of the president.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, so because of that emergency-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... they used that to-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... justify...
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Which I can assure you assassinates, uh, assassinating a president is a lot more deadly than the IFR for COVID, which is 0.096%, similar to the flu. So that was a real emergency where a president was killed, and, uh, it was meant to be temporary. The state of emergency existed for over 20 years. It's why they were allowed to treat us in that way, because they had suspended the rights of their citizens as a permanent thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Amnesty International comes along and says, "These guys are prisoners of conscience." When I learned of that, it really, really shook me because I had never in my life up until that point, and I'm 24, I'd never received a positive word from any bastion of Western values, any institution, right? Whether it was Amnesty, governments, media. And it, and it began a process in me through, uh, in that time in prison, to tr- just try and understand why Amnesty cared about defending my rights, because I knew I didn't care about them. We would go around attempting to deconstruct the concept of human rights in order to recruit people to our ideological worldview. But here was this organization who knew that I defined them as a, a soft power enemy. We saw human rights organizations as a soft power tool of Western colonialism. And so they knew I defined them as a intellectual enemy and yet they were defending me and my right and attempting to help get me out of jail. So that began a process. And I've said often, right, where the heart leads, the mind can follow. So I think it's really important when you're trying to change people's minds and help people that they see an emotional connection first because... And we've, you know, we've, we've seen this in science, right, with, with neurological patterns. I've often spoken to Sam Harris about this, that, that often you look at the, the way people think, and actually, we think that we are led by our thoughts, but actually something happens in the brain prior to us actually even acknowledging-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... what we're doing, right? So and that brings up whole questions of free will that Sam talks about. But here in this context, Amnesty reaching out to me softened my heart for the first time in my life. All I'd ever known up until that point in my relationship with the West and the country in which I was born was violence. I mean, I've seen more violence than anybody should have seen at that stage, um, and that was the relationship I had... My, my relationship with society was defined through hate and violence, and that's all I'd known through my adult years, my teenage years and, and, and onto my early 20s. And, um, we're in jail, uh, this is when Iraq got invaded, uh, by Blair and Bush and Blair. Of course, we were really upset with that, um, as Islamist prisoners. We believe this is all part of the war that we were involved in. But Amnesty continued campaigning for us. So what I did is I spent... Uh, we got, eventually got convicted and I, I served five years, uh, which in Egypt was meant to be three quarters of the sentence, but we ended up staying for about four years in jail, just under, and, uh, we were released having completed our full sentence. So it's not that Amnesty got us out, but the mere fact they were campaigning for us. So I spent that time in prison reading everything I could get my hands on. We were eventually let out of, uh, solitary confinement, and I, always having been somebody that appreciated intellectual discussion, I saw around me the who's who of political prisoners in Mazen Al-Ator Prison, and we had everything from
- 30:17 – 36:32
Ideological “Muraja’at”: debates with Sadat’s assassins, political prisoners, and reading Orwell
- MNMaajid Nawaz
communists and socialists, we had Muslims who had converted to Christianity, we had Christians who'd converted to Islam, we had jihadists who'd assassinated the president, and we had Israeli spies who were being accused of being Israeli spies. Everyone was in this jail.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
And we had a joke that under Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, if you change your mind from anything to anything, it's a criminal offense.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Because it didn't make sense, right? You had a Muslim convert to Christianity, throw him in jail. Christian converted to Islam, throw him in jail.
- JRJoe Rogan
For, j- for conversion?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Everything. Uh, any... You change your mind (laughs) on anything and you'd be in jail.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're unreliable.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
No. So you had jihadis-
- JRJoe Rogan
What, what is the logic?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
(laughs) Well, that's the, that's the funny thing. Mubarak didn't want anyone to think.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Right? Just don't think. Just obey.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when he heard that you're just tossing and turning too much in your mind, he just throw you in jail?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Throw you in jail.
- JRJoe Rogan
That guy's too sketchy. Throw him in jail.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I mean, think about it. You've got- you've got people that assassinated-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... Sadat, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Why did they assassinate him? In 1981, Anwar Sadat made a peace treaty with Israel. Egypt and Israel's peace is because of that president. And the- and the- and the- it was military guys that assassinated him. Uh, and they did it because they believed that was treachery. They didn't want peace with Israel, so they assassinated him, right? So you can understand, okay, you've got Jihadis who believe making peace with Israel is treachery. They're in jail. But on the other hand, this guy that... I was with in prison as well, and he'd been accused of being an Israeli agent. Threw him in jail too (laughs) .
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- MNMaajid Nawaz
And the guys that prosecuted and convicted the assassins of Sadat, right, they were in jail with the assassins of Sadat 20 years later.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's the danger of dictatorship-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Everyone ends up in prison.
- JRJoe Rogan
... because you literally can just point at anybody you want and go, "Lock 'em up."
- MNMaajid Nawaz
So I used that opportunity to speak to everyone. I had the advantage that we were young. They were like... The Sa- the Sadat assassins had been in prison for longer than I'd been alive.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I was 24. They'd been in jail 25 years. So we looked at them and thought, "Wisdom." Now, these guys had also changed their ideology in that time. They basically started, uh, advocating for a more peaceful approach.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- 36:32 – 41:35
Leaving extremism: resigning under pressure, losing identity, and rebuilding through spiritual discipline
- MNMaajid Nawaz
alternatives. Now, what I didn't want to do was leave the group or even announce leaving the group while in jail. I- I have a bit more dignity than that. I didn't want anyone to think I've done it because I'm in prison and someone's pressured me. So I left prison still a committed member of the group, on paper. Got back to the UK and even did some interviews as a member of the group. But within that year, um, it became very apparent to me that I was living a contradiction. And I could no longer maintain, in that fervor, the sort of the dogma that I, uh, that I adopted. I had- I had to un- you know, I'd unpicked it in my mind in such a way that it was no longer sustainable for me to, uh, to- to remain on the leadership. And then the group I was with offered me directly to become the leader in the UK.So within that week, I had a choice to make. Either I live a lie and I lead this organization while no longer believing that this is good for anyone's future, uh, or I resign. So I unilaterally and openly announce my resignation from the group, and also my abandonment of my previous ideology in the favor of a more, um, traditional and organic understanding of my heritage.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, how was that met within the group?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Outrage.
- JRJoe Rogan
What kind of ... outrage?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah. Uh, my marriage fell apart. And my entire identity up until that point had been defined by families and friends around this, uh, ideology and organization. All of that, imagine you, you've been plucked out of your reality and you have to reconstruct yourself from nothing. But on top of that, you've just come out of jail, the war on terror is at its peak, Tony Blair is prime minister, and Bush Junior is president. So the world hates you because everyone thinks you're the enemy. You've just lost all your friends. And you have to build yourself back up again from nothing, with nothing.
- JRJoe Rogan
How did you maintain your resolve during that period? 'Cause I've got to imagine the pull to go back to your old ways is probably very strong because there's community there, and even though you had come to this realization in jail and through all your reading, that there had to have been a great pull to try to bring you back to the old life.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
This is why today, um, when talking about contemporary debates, the f- the stance I've taken against tyranny, and I won't mince my words on it, this is why it's so insulting, it's seriously ignorant, where some voices have come out and said, "Oh, Maajid Nawaz has become radical. He's an ex- radicalized," sorry. I use the word radical myself. Radicalized. "He's become an extremist again." These people have absolutely no idea what extremism is. They have no idea what it takes to inoculate yourself against that, before anyone else was even talking about counter-extremism. They have no idea the inner discipline it takes to pull yourself out of that and lose everything.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was that like?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I mean, it was, it was incredibly difficult. But what gets, what got me through it and what gets me through it today, to, to, to draw that similar analogy, what got me through it then is you have to have a belief in why you're doing what you're doing. And I, I went seeking, and I found people who were far better than the people I was following, who were also consistent to my heritage. Um, and yet believed in finding what we have in common and bringing people together rather than dividing people. Um, there are, again, back to teachers, yeah? Spiritual guides. One of the first things, I needed to land on some form of spiritual and humanitarian, uh, platform. So I went to Sufi, uh, sheikhs, uh, who practice Tasawwuf, or, or, or purification of the soul, of the inside, to try and make sure that you're on a firm foundation. And I went looking. And I got very lucky that, um, one spiritual, uh, uh, guide, Sheik Ali, who I spoke to early on, and he said, "Listen. You're gonna go on a journey. Trust the journey. And the important thing is we stay in touch. But trust the journey, and as long as your intention is good, you will land on your feet." And I remember one of the things he said to me, he said, "We're in this situation now where it's almost like this Muslim-Western divide." As I say, the war on terror was ongoing. Blair was prime minister. Bush was president. And he said to me, "Just imagine you're like Moses in the court of Pharaoh, and you're there and you're gonna speak to these people to try and make them understand what you've understood as to why you pulled back from that brink, to try and help them understand that war isn't the way forward with this. The whole war on terror discourse, the whole paradigm." So I spent the next 10 years of my life on that guidance given to me by, uh, Sheik Ali, attempting to, from the inside, working with the machine, I'm now gonna call it, the machine, right? The system. Working with that machine in an attempt to be like Moses in the court of Pharaoh. Uh, let them see through my example what can be rather than what the bad things that you think are. The good that can be, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- 41:35 – 1:04:12
Working inside “the machine”: Quilliam, meeting Bush/Blair, and the War on Terror’s moral failures
- MNMaajid Nawaz
So I met with Blair, I met with Bush in his house in Texas. I met Blair, uh, a few times. I've met with PM Cameron, met with Trudeau, uh, I've met with a lot of these people in an attempt to show them there's another way. What I realized over the course of that attempt, and we can get into some of this detail, but what brings me here today is that 10 years of being an Islamist revolutionary and then 10 years of attempting to work on, on that high level in governments, in that machine, to try and soften the power of that machine, soften its own self-inflicted blows, such as the invasion of Iraq. Uh, such as, you know, arbitrary kill lists, assassinating people without due process. To try and end that war, and instead bring about a dialogue. Unfortunately, the machine I was trying to work with, I don't believe it's any longer possible to work on the inside and achieve that aim.
- JRJoe Rogan
How so?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Mission creep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mission creep?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah. So I, so you may know, but for your listeners I'll say that after leaving that organization, I set up a group called Quilliam in an attempt to be that, you know, what the guidance that was given to me. And, uh, and I don't think I'd be where I am without that guidance. You ask about how I did it. You have to have strong people around you. And you have to have an understanding of who you are and not lose that. And it's very difficult. But 10 years I'm trying to work with that machine to say, look, yes, there's a, uh, I can help you on the ideological side of how to, how to speak to those Muslims who have gone down that path. But on your side, there is some responsibility. You've got to respect the civil liberties values that you claim you're fighting for. So if you're saying, "They hate our democracy, they hate our freedoms," that's not gonna wash if you're invading countries. If you say, "They hate our democracies, they hate our freedoms," that's not gonna wash if you're torturing people, or you're outsourcing your torture-... to dictators that you support financially. Now, this is true with the UK as well as the US, right? It's now established. It's not, it's not... What I'm saying now isn't any longer in dispute, but it used to be when I first started talking about it. There's a guy called Abdul Hakeem Belhaj from Libya, who it's now been established that the British, um, authorities outsourced his torture. And that's now not even in dispute anymore. And they relied on the intelligence that they knew they got through him being tortured in a third country. It's called extraordinary rendition, when Western countries outsource torture to dictators and then rely on that intelligence to make their next move. And my point is, if you're fighting for your values, right... Joe, if you're, if you're reacting because you're a father and you want to defend your children, the last thing you're going to do that is consistent with that is harm other people's children, if you're fighting to defend children. So you're saying to me you're, you're fighting for your values, but then don't outsource torture. Don't invade countries. Don't arbitrarily kill people from the skies without due process, like a 17-year-old American, Anwar al-Awlaki's son, who was bombed, uh, under Obama's presidency, in Yemen because they wanted the father. They knew the 17-year-old was there next to him, and they decided to bomb anyway. And the thing is, if you start behaving like this, of course, every action causes a reaction. And there's me in the middle, trying to, trying to say, "These guys are wrong, but this is also wrong."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Now that machine, it took me a while, 10 years of attempting to try and, you know, rein in the excess on both sides. Of course, doesn't earn you any friends.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can I ask you more about the process?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, how do you go about meeting these people? Like, how does this set up? Like, how do you meet Trudeau? How are you meeting Bush? How is this, uh, how is this facilitated?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
At the time, I was the only one publicly speaking about any of this. And so they were all desperate to hear from me.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause you were someone who was radicalized at one point-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... in time and then converted over. And they trusted you, or-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Every single one of these was an invitation.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I didn't ask for any of these invitations.
- JRJoe Rogan
And how did they know of you?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Uh, I... Uh, when I left, uh, Hizb ut-Tahrir, um... So it's, it's interesting because we forget what the media world used to look like with the internet today.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
I did all the kind of, you know, the prime time. So I did, in the UK, BBC Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Here, I did CBS 60 Minutes, um, Larry King. So, what used to be the prime time shows (laughs) . They're not anymore, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
But, um, so people would, would, would see this guy on their, on their, you know, on the CBS 60 Minutes. Like, "Who the hell's this guy who's just like... He's been in jail, he's now speaking against this stuff?" So I would be invited. I was invited to Bush's home.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Um, in fact, I-
- JRJoe Rogan
What, what was that like?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Well, I'll tell you a story because, uh, he sat me down and like you, you did, he said, "Well, tell me about yourself." And I got to the point of, um, when I said, "Oh, they tortured us in prison," and he said, um... I opened my book with this story, by the way. He says, "Stop right there." I said, "All right. Okay." If you remember, Bush was... That whole waterboarding and redefining torture, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- 1:04:12 – 1:19:37
From foreign terror to “domestic extremism”: January 6, entrapment concerns, and weaponized labels
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Now, the interesting thing is, again, y- that whole ISIS problem was playing out under Biden, uh, under Obama, sorry. Yeah? But what, what I began witnessing is I'm gonna call ... So that machine, I'm gonna call it mission creep. You've got to a situation now, under Biden, where even those that, who are Trump supporters, who question the US election and its, you know, transparency, are now being defined as domestic extremists or domestic terrorists. And this is where I have to exit. Because I'm, I'm saying, "Okay, hold on. You guys, first of all, you have no idea what extremism is. You have no idea what terrorism is. And if you're gonna weaponize that language and start applying it onto people that question an election-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
"... I cannot be a part of that." So I shut Quilliam down. Unilaterally just shut the thing down. I will not be used to, to stigmatize Trump voters as domestic extremists. Extremism, terrorism is a very specific thing. And you gotta ... It's like racism. You disagreeing with me isn't racist, right? But that's how it's being used often-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
... these days, right? And you're gonna use that. People like me that has to actually dodge hammer attacks, machete attacks, screwdriver attacks, watch friends get stabbed over that thing called racism. I will stop you misusing that word because I know that if the boy cries wolf, then when some little kid, like me, is trying to run away from the real racists, no one's gonna believe them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Would you categorize people like the January 6th attack, at, at the very least, there are some amongst them that are extremists? There was people that showed up at the Capitol with zip ties.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and they were looking for politicians.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
There are some amongst them that most certainly were extremists.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Absolutely. That's like there's some among Muslims that were extremist.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah. But, but the language is the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you see the concern though from the administration that they're, at the very least, there's the beginnings of something that could be absolutely awful?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah. And that's where you've gotta be accurate in your language.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. But they're-
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Because-
- JRJoe Rogan
I think that's the problem, right?
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That they, they use hyperbole.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They use exaggeration, and also they use agent provocateurs.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Precisely. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
That conversation where Ted Cruz was speaking to the woman from the FBI. I'm sure you've seen that.
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah, yeah. Very, very often.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where she said, "Uh, have you ever incited ... Has the agency incited violence?" "I can't answer that."
- MNMaajid Nawaz
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
When, when th-
Episode duration: 3:05:21
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode ARaqe-0MKmI
