I’ll begin by quoting myself on a post I did about Maajid Nawaz this summer—a post about how the British left has vilified him:

“If anyone has the street cred and chops to comment on radical Islam, and on the shameful capitulation of Western liberals to the canard of “Islamophobia,” it’s Maajid Nawaz. Born in England, Nawaz became a radical Muslim early on, dedicated to establishing a caliphate with nuclear weapons. To this end he traveled in the Middle East to get converts for Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Muslim group. And for that he was ultimately jailed in Egypt. During his five years in prison, he became de-radicalized, and ultimately returned to England to found Quilliam, a think tank dedicated to fostering humanism and eliminating extremism. (I’m not sure whether Nawaz is still a believing Muslim, though I think he is.[JAC now: yes, he is]) Quilliam’s statement of purpose is this, and is largely instantiated by countering the narrative of extreme, radical, and violent Islam:

Quilliam is the world’s first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the unique challenges of citizenship, identity, and belonging in a globalised world. Quilliam stands for religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy. Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members of society. Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to advance liberal democratic values.

I admire him immensely.”

That’s what I said, and I stand by my admiration of Nawaz. Lately he’s co-authored a nice book with Sam Harris, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, and engaged with Sam in a dialogue at Harvard University (watch the enlightening conversation here). As Sam said, after their interaction his opinions changed more than Nawaz’s.

For all of his efforts, Nawaz hasn’t received approbation, but rather vilification, which he documents in a saddening piece at The Daily Beast: “Don’t call me porch monkey.” For that’s one of the degrading names he’s been called for trying to reform Islam. First, here’s some vilifcation by journalist and scholar Nathan Lean, who first simply writes Nawaz out of his conversation (and book) with Harris. Apparently Lean didn’t bother to look up the book:

When reminded that Harris wasn’t the only author, Lean doubles down, calling Nawaz Harris’s “Muslim validator.” That’s ironic in light of Nawaz’s report that “[Sam] feels our dialogue influenced him more than me.”



And then Lean calls Nawaz a “lapdog.”

To which Dave Rubin, comedian and political reporter, gave the only decent reply:

This is the vile filth that @MaajidNawaz has to put up everyday from these regressives. Who is the bigot here? pic.twitter.com/LVO2SulnBo — Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) September 22, 2015

Here’s an excerpt from Nawaz’s “porch monkey” piece, which includes a few select instances of bigotry from the Left.

To suggest that a Muslim cannot think for himself sounds to me very much like an incident of anti-Muslim bigotry. A curious position to take for someone whose book is on “Islamophobia,” and who now sits on the advisory board of a UK-based “anti-Muslim hate” watchdog called TellMama. Indeed, who is watching the watchers. Over at CNN’s blog, Haroon Moghul laid the blame for young Ahmed Mohamed’s profiling in Texas at my feet, tracing a line from anti-Islam activists Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Glenn Beck directly to me. Let us put aside the fact that Glenn Beck considers me a closet Jihadist and that I had already publicly expressed sympathy for Ahmed, I have been an opponent of racial and religious profiling for years, challenging left-wing, Muslim, UK Labour government ministers on this practice since 2010. But Murtaza Husain at Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept site felt so aggrieved, so agitated, so angry at my decision to talk to those with whom I disagree, about my own religion, that he posted a photo of Sam and me in conversation using the words “nice shot of Sam and his well-coiffed talking monkey.” When challenged the writer doubled-down, deciding that I was in fact a “native informant,” and nothing but Sam’s “porch monkey.” Language that is designed to dehumanize, has consequences. And as secular bloggers are being hacked to death in Bangladesh, and secular writers such as Raif Badawi are being lashed in Saudi Arabia, merely for questioning their own culture, reforming voices must no longer acquiesce to this rising tide of intimidation and de-legitimization.

Indeed. The more I see this kind of stuff—liberals going after those Muslims who criticize and try to reform their violent and retrograde coreligionists—the more I despair of the Left. How dare they call Nawaz names like “lapdog,” “native informant,” “house Muslim” (that, of course, refers to “house Negroes”, a derogatory word for slaves who were allowed to work in the Big House rather than the fields), and “porch monkey:? Have we lost our way? Have we no shame, at long last?

And is it any wonder that Nawaz, as he did in his earlier piece in the same venue, spends perhaps too much time defending his bona fides? Yes, he’s a bit defensive, but what else can he do when he’s implicitly being accused by leftists of being anti-Muslim? The man is a Muslim! It’s quite sad that he has to say this kind of thing over and over again, and yet the liberals never hear it:

And finally, a message for my fellow Muslims: The truth is, Sam Harris has already—and generously—stated that he feels our dialogue influenced him more than me. I am not your enemy. Since co-founding my counter-extremism organization Quilliam as well as opposing UK ministers on ethnic and religious profiling, I have opposed President Obama’s targeted killings and drone strikes. I challenged Senator King in the UK Parliament on his obfuscation and justification for torture. I have been cited by the UK Prime Minister for my view that non-terrorist Islamists must be openly challenged, but not banned. I have spoken out against extraordinary rendition of terror suspects and against detention without charge of terror suspects. I have supported my political party, the Liberal Democrats, by backing a call to end Schedule 7, which deprives terror suspects of the right to silence at UK ports of entry and exit, something I have also been subjected to, whilst having my DNA forcibly taken from me among much else. What I require, dear Muslims, is your patience. For it is due to precisely this concern of mine for universal human rights, that I vehemently oppose Islamist extremism and call for liberal reform within our communities, for our communities. I merely express my opinion about the future of our religion. I am not your enemy. I am not your representative. I am not your religious role model… but I am still from you, and I am of you. I have suffered all that you suffer. And I refuse to abandon you.

If Islam is to purge itself of its violence-prone, bigoted, and misogynistic elements, the reform will have to come from within Islam itself—from non-extremists like Nawaz. Non-Muslims like me and Harris, or even ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, may influence people’s opinion about the dangers of radical Islam, but Muslims are surely most receptive to messages from other Muslims. For someone like Nawaz, who’s preaching a kinder and less violent version of his faith, one more in line with liberal values, it’s stupid to call him names for simply engaging in dialogue with critics of Islam like Harris. For if Islam and the West are to achieve any rapprochement, it is surely this kind of dialogue that we need.