I saw Nawaz in New York in September, while he was in town fund-raising for Quilliam’s American chapter. We had made plans to meet at a Soho hotel for a drink, but he was running late. When I asked after him, the concierge either didn’t know his real name or pretended not to. Nawaz and Benotman have been targeted by Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, and he travels under an alias. When he finally arrived, we went down to the bar, and he was in wonderful spirits. He’s been criticized in the British press for drinking and receiving a lap dance at a strip club, but in situations like this, it’s strange to think of Nawaz as having been anything like a humorless extremist. Yet the bind he has made for himself is a real one: He has to prove that liberal, moderate Islam can be “cool,” while not coming off as too hip to convince the left of his Muslim authenticity. He runs the very real risk of satisfying no one.



It reminded me of an observation that had been running through my head since the previous winter, when Quilliam opened an art exhibit in London called “The Unbreakable Rope.” Billed as “an exploration of sexuality in Islam,” the show was co-curated by Nawaz’s second wife, Rachel Maggart (the couple had their first child in January), a lanky 32-year-old brunette from Tennessee by way of N.Y.U. In addition to the regular Quilliam bodyguards, there were plainclothes counterterrorism officers monitoring the site. Inside the venue, a shirtless, tattooed Kuwaiti performance artist did preparatory stretches with his assistant and a crystal ball. He would eventually be tied up in a corset and left on the floor for guests to contemplate. The crowd sipped wine and soft drinks and milled about the sparsely hung, mildly provocative artwork, which was in fact beside the point. The point, of course, was that they were even daring to do this in the first place.

I fell into conversation with Nawaz’s mother and little sister and lost track of time as the space filled up all around us. There were whites, blacks, Persians, Arabs; people looked devout and nondevout, gay, straight, young and old. Standing next to me was a man with the voluminous beard of a cleric, turned out in an ankle-length djellaba, ironed as crisply as a bedsheet at the Ritz, a pair of Nike Air Force 1s and a flat-brimmed New Era cap printed with a four-letter expletive. He looked like a cross between the leader of Hezbollah and the Bay Area rapper Lil B. The room darkened and quieted, and Nawaz, brimming with life, stepped into the middle of the crowd, whose diversity he lauded, and thanked them all for coming. Like the B-boy he once aspired to be, he thrills to the sound of his own voice flowing through the microphone. “The first thing they do is try to silence us, and the first to suffer are the creators!” he told the room to enthusiastic applause. “But while you throw gays off the rooftops, we who are Muslims want to respond like this!”

As I watched Nawaz bask in the applause of his most earnest admirers and glanced back at the walls adorned with such unbearably unhip art, the enormity of his task pressed itself upon me. After all, Islamism, like good art, is innately subversive; it captures diffuse feelings of alienation in a way that is difficult to fabricate. And therein lies the biggest challenge confronting Quilliam in Europe and, as it seeks to expand, in America: Though Nawaz himself is a star, there is something both noble and perilously square about this kind of eat-your-peas forced secularism.

Yet I’m convinced that Nawaz really does have his finger on the pulse of one of the most urgent problems of the contemporary era, a problem that is far too often mishandled or greeted with flat-out denial, through ignorance, hatred and fear, certainly, but also as a result of the very best of intentions. Without having planned to, I found myself at the hotel bar in New York opening up to Nawaz about a recent train ride my wife and I made in France. I watched an agitated young Arab man and his wife, in full abaya, shut themselves inside the bathroom along with all of their luggage. When they opened the door, the hair on my neck stood up, and I braced myself for a fusillade that never came. Even as I chastised myself for overreacting, I was convinced that the man continued to behave strangely. My shame increased with each moment nothing happened.

Nawaz listened intently to my story, but his eyes showed he’d long since arrived at his answer. “You’re caught in a classically Catch-22 situation,” he said. “You’ve got two competing forces, which are entirely legitimate. One is not wanting to racially profile, and the other is not wanting to be the neighbor of the San Bernardino shooter who didn’t want to profile and, as a result, people lose their lives. Or, more urgently, [you] just don’t want to be the first person to catch a bullet! On a human level, that is a perfectly natural reaction. The fact that you’re having these doubts is a good thing.”

Though he meant this defense of human prejudice to reassure me, it did not. I almost wish he had accused me of Islamophobia — at least then the conversation might have achieved a certain black-and-white clarity. But Nawaz, the consummate in-between thinker, then took care to layer on several more shades of gray. “I literally just tweeted, five minutes before coming to see you, a picture of a blond ISIS child — a child with blond hair — helping to execute people,” he said, producing on his phone a shocking image of a very young, Eastern European-looking boy holding a gun in the desert. “I said, ‘Trump, how you gonna profile this?’ ”