When I was a student at Newham College in the East End of London in the 1990s, and an activist of Hizb ut-Tahrir, "Islamism", or political Islam, seemed to have answers to difficult questions about identity and belonging. It offered an explanation of the world as I found it.
It offered solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It gave definition and direction to a global social network of savvy, supremacist Muslims, who were in revolt against the status quo at home and abroad. My teenage rebellion was channelled into conflict with my parents' much more sober Islam. [New Statesman] Read more
Ed Husain on 'Islamism' and Mawdudi .... And it is exactly Husain’s deprecation of ‘Islamism’ and of British Muslim organisations like IFE and MAB that blinds him to the fact that the thinkers he champions as benign ideologues for a new generation of British Muslims, Maulana Madani or Imam Shatibi, advocate no more than what these organisations themselves pursue: Maqasid ash-Shari’ah and all that it entails by way of the full participation of Muslims in British society and public life for the collective benefit of all. [ENGAGE] Read more
