Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

12

from the beginning of time, and they will exist

until the end of time. Other communities face

them as well, but this par tic u lar ideological phe-

nomenon has arisen only in certain contexts. For

example, people often blame poverty or a lack of

education for radicalization, whereas experts have

long known that a disproportionate number of ter-

rorists come from highly educated backgrounds.^3

So at sixteen I adopted an ideological worldview

that froze my sense of grievance and turned it in-

stead into dogma. I then began recruiting heavily

for Hizb ut- Tahrir; I bear my fair share of responsi-

bility for promoting the notion of a theocratic

caliphate.

Harris Were you seeking to pop u lar ize these ideas in
the UK or globally?

Nawaz Globally. The group spread from Jerusalem to
Jordan, from Jordan to Syria and Iraq, and eventu-
ally to Egypt. It then spread from the Middle East
to the West, and from the West it spread to Turkey

3. See Marc Sageman’s study of convicted jihadists in his
   book Leaderless Jihad (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
   vania Press, 2008).

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