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Article

Open Access

Identity and Belonging: Insider/Outsider in Ed Husain’s The Islamist

Author(s)

Jillian Curr

Full-Text PDF Download XML 870 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5526/2016.11.006

Affiliation(s)

University of Western Australia, Australia

ABSTRACT

Since the events of 9/11 and the so-called “war on terror”, “Muslim” has been used synonymously with “terrorist” dividing particularly those Muslims living in the West into either “good” Muslims or “bad” Muslims. Ed Husain in his memoir The Islamist uses this dichotomy as well as that of the “witness” in presenting himself as a credible analyst in answering why some young Muslims become attracted to fundamentalist Islamist groups hostile to the West. Ed Husain is a second generation of British Asian Muslim who rejected the Sufi political quietism of his parents for the revolutionary ideologies of Islamic “ideologues” such as Abul A’la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, and particularly Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, joining Hizb-ut-Tahrir as an active member. Ed Husain’s story is one of a fractured past, manhood, the search for an authentic Islam, and becoming British.

KEYWORDS

Authenticity, identity, Islamist, belonging, “front organisations”

Cite this paper

Sociology Study, November 2016, Vol. 6, No. 11, 721-730

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