Maajid Nawaz
Khudi was founded by Maajid Nawaz in 2009. How and why this movement was born is actually quite a story – one that began several years ago from today.
Living in the UK as a young Pakistani boy in the 80s, Maajid was often a victim of racist abuse. Fuelled by the violence and discrimination he faced, at the age of 16 Maajid got mixed up with the wrong crowd. In this case the ‘wrong crowd’ happened to be an extremist organisation (albeit not a terrorist one), whose ideology seemed to provide Maajid with answers to crucial questions about his faith and identity for the first time in his life.
The next 13 years of Maajid’s life were dedicated to spreading the ideology of this organisation – an ideology that rejected democracy as ‘kufr’ (apostasy) and called for military coups in Muslim-majority countries in order to erect a single expansionist ‘Khilafat’. In 1999, Maajid was tasked with setting up the first cells of this group in Pakistan, for which he travelled up and down the country, spreading their message of division and intolerance. All the while Maajid believed he was working for the cause of Islam, until he was eventually arrested in Egypt and sentenced to 4 years in jail for belonging to this group (which is banned in several countries).
It was this time in jail – years spent in reflection, study and debate – which marked the beginning of a fundamental process of change. After gaining fluency in Arabic and actually studying Islam from its original sources for the first time, Maajid came to realise how wrong his message had been. He also had the benefit of spending hours debating his ideas with a variety of Muslim minds. In the prison cells of Egypt, his fellow debaters were some of the world’s first-known ‘jihadis’ (people such as the assassins of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadaat) who had since renounced their extremist ideology and urged Maajid to do the same. The more time that passed, the more convinced Maajid became that extremism has no place in Islam, and in fact what he had been propagating for several years was a totalitarian ideology that had hijacked the Islamic faith.
But it wasn’t enough just to know this – with everything going on in Pakistan today it was important to do something about it. The next question of course, was what exactly should be done? The army was waging war with the militants in the Northern Areas; the Government was churning out daily statements expressing its commitment to resolving the issue. And the attacks on the towns and cities of Pakistan were continuing unabated.
This is where Khudi came in the picture. It was obvious that military means and security measures alone would never eliminate the menace of terrorism, unless the extremist ideology that fuels such violence was challenged.
What was needed was a societal response from ordinary Pakistanis to reject the arguments of extremists, to denounce their calls for totalitarianism and to stand firm for the values of democracy, pluralism and human rights – values on which the foundations of this country were built. Maajid was in a unique position to help start this as he was well aware of the arguments used by extremists to recruit people – after all they were the same arguments he himself had used for over a decade. But more importantly, after years of debate and study, Maajid was also well equipped to discredit these ideas and to expose their weaknesses and contradictions.
In 2009, Maajid teamed up with a number of young Pakistanis to start a social movement through which Pakistanis could reclaim the meaning of Pakistan and the meaning of Islam from those who had hijacked it. Through the power of education and debate, and through the magic of the arts, Khudi seeks to act as a counter-force to the darkness of extremist thought that threatens to engulf this country today. It also works to improve the image of Pakistan on the international stage, on a people-to-people level, so that the citizens of Pakistan can better understand and be understood by the rest of the world.