These don’t sound like radical ideas now, but at the time this wasn’t the story that international news networks and major Western newspapers and magazines were telling. Instead, they carried report after report about the end of Islamism and the outbreak of democracy, as if a giant lightbulb had been switched on across the Middle East and North Africa. And while many liberals and young people in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere wanted more rights and craved more progressive governments, journalists focused on these groups at the expense of other, more sinister forces. Readers and viewers were told that if they looked at Tahrir Square, they would understand what Egypt wanted. But Tahrir Square was not Egypt. Meanwhile, we ignored or failed to see people such as Cuspert and his friends—or we didn’t want to see them because they didn’t fit into the happy narrative of democratic progress.
Where were Al Qaeda and the Taliban in all this? Would some of those disenfranchised people who had once gravitated to Al Qaeda see the Arab Spring as a better opportunity? I began to reach out to some of my militant sources in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and I bought a new unregistered SIM card and a cheap phone to call the Taliban commander I’d had dinner with in Pakistan.
“I heard what happened to you in Egypt,” he said. “Did they do anything to you? Torture or…” He stopped. “You know what I mean. Have they touched your honor?”
I told him that no such thing happened, then asked how he’d found out.
He began to laugh. “Do you think we don’t read the news?”
I asked if he was worried about losing his followers in the Arab Spring countries. He was not. Instead, he praised the opposition forces for rising against “corrupt leaders.” He added, “It’s good that people will have the power, because they will choose the right way, like we had under the rule of the Taliban.”
But that wasn’t what I had seen on the banners the protesters carried. Instead, people were asking for more rights, better living standards.
“That’s not what the majority want,” the commander told me. “People want Sharia. They want no more Western interference and no puppets in power.” He knew this, he said, because some Taliban fighters came from those countries. “Now they are back and make dawah and offer their help to people there.”
In Islamic practice, dawah means preaching and teaching. The men the Taliban commander talked about were essentially jihadi recruiters. “You will see,” he told me. “Brothers from all over the world will travel to those places and teach what was banned before, the right Islam.”
I began to wonder if I should head to the Middle East to learn more. Then a young Muslim man shot and killed two American airmen in Frankfurt, wounding two others. The police said they had arrested the killer, Arid Uka. I dove into reporting the story.
Uka was an ethnic Albanian who had been born in Kosovo and raised in Frankfurt; his family and friends described him as a shy, calm twenty-one-year-old who, along with his classmates, had won a government prize in middle school for a project on how to prevent violence in society. His parents were moderate Muslims, and they and his brothers told me they didn’t understand why he’d killed the Americans. But his older brother, Hastrid, mentioned that Arid spent lots of time on the computer, “playing games, reading posts on Facebook, or watching movies on YouTube. Actually, recently he was listening also to nasheeds with some political messages in German.”
I asked if he knew whose chants they were. He thought for a couple of seconds, and I could see he was trying to remember a name.
“It’s this former rapper, something with like, ‘Dog.’”
When I tried to call Cuspert, a message said his number was no longer in use. I reached out to the imam who had put us in touch and asked if he had the ex-rapper’s new number.
“Sorry, I don’t,” he said. “Things have changed a lot, Souad. Abu Maleeq no longer comes to me. In fact, he called me a traitor because I told him his views were extreme and far from Islamic teachings.”
He was hanging out with a different group now, the imam said. “He doesn’t want to hear what the truth is. He just wants to hear what his truth is.”
Since I didn’t know how to reach Cuspert, I decided to dig into what he’d told me. I traveled to London to meet with three older militants originally from Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Two of them had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and had witnessed the beginning of the era of global jihad; all had been members of domestic Islamist movements that had called for overthrowing the government and implementing a system based purely on Sharia law. As a result of their unpopular views, some of these men had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom, though they knew they were closely watched by British intelligence.
We met in a coffee shop in Knightsbridge, an area popular with rich Gulf Arabs. Although the men I met weren’t wealthy, they told me they felt safer there because their ethnicity was less likely to draw attention. I had known the Egyptian and Tunisian men for some time, but was just meeting the Libyan. All three seemed happy with the developments in their native countries.
“The people have finally shown the world that they are fed up with the corrupt regimes,” the Libyan said. He was very soft-spoken, and his dark brown eyes looked kind. “When people in Libya have the free choice, they will choose Sharia.”
“What if they don’t?” I asked.
“Everybody will chose the right way if they finally have the chance to see what the right way is,” the Tunisian said. “And nothing can be better or more right than the law of Allah.”
What would this mean for women in Tunisia? I asked. The country had long been very liberal and had granted women equal rights. Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, was seen as perhaps the most progressive leader in the Arab World in this regard. In the 1960s he introduced a series of reforms that included a ban on polygamy and guaranteed the rights of women to freely choose their husbands, to divorce while retaining primary custody of their children, and to obtain legal abortions. Bourguiba ultimately banned the veil, which he called an “odious rag.” His approach came to be called le féminisme bourguibien.
To some Bourguiba was a hero for pushing these reforms through, while others, such as the man I was sitting with, called him a “dictator.”
“This was by force,” the Tunisian told me angrily. “Women had no choice. They were forced to give up Islam because of him and other traitors. We will liberate the Tunisian women.”
“What about women who don’t want to wear a head scarf?”
“Any woman who is really Muslim will be happy to cover her hair and face.”
“The face too?” I blurted out.
If his wife and daughters, who had been born in the United Kingdom, wore the face-covering niqab, he told me, then surely a Muslim woman in an Arab country would do the same.
“But wearing hijab or niqab isn’t what people are demanding in this Arab Spring,” I answered.
“This is not an Arab Spring,” the Egyptian interrupted. “This is a spring for Islam and Muslims.”
He told me that many of his friends who had been freed from prison in Egypt were actively doing dawah. “This is a very good time for all the Muslim ummah,” he said, referring to the Muslim people collectively. “We can now bring the right teaching of Islam into our countries, and soon the ummah all over the region will be stronger.”