INTERVIEW-Former Muslim jihadi urges UK to act on Islamists

By Luke Baker

LONDON, May 3 (Reuters) - Outwardly, Ed Husain is an urbane, 32-year-old British Muslim studying for his doctorate in London.

But during the 1990s, he spent four years as a student of radical, violent Islam, yearning for a global jihad against the West and believing that all non-Muslims were infidels.

It took him years to escape the grip of the Arab Islamists who indoctrinated him, but now that he has, and has written a book about his experiences, he has some advice: the government needs to be bold enough to crack down on Muslim radicals.

"We need to make it very clear just what we are prepared to tolerate here in Britain in the name of tolerance," he told Reuters in an interview on Thursday, the day his book, The Islamist, is published.

"It should be illegal for Muslims in Britain to plot, plan and finance an Islamist state dedicated to confrontation with Israel, other Muslim countries and the West.

"But that goes on every day. Perfectly law-abiding Muslims are going around advocating these things on a daily basis because, for the moment, it's perfectly legal."

In the week that a British court sentenced five Muslim men to life in prison for plotting al-Qaeda inspired bombings, Husain said such attacks would not just be plotted but would be executed at will if action wasn't taken.

"For me, the July 7th attacks weren't a surprise," he said, referring to the suicide blasts in London in 2005 that killed 52 people -- the deadliest attack on British soil since World War Two.

"The ideology that took root in the 1990s and produced people who were prepared to do that ... that ideology is still entrenched in certain sections of the Muslim community. As long as it's there, we will have more attacks, more suicide bombers."



"ACT NOW"

Husain believes the problems for Britain began during the 1990s, when large sections of the Muslim community were not just disconnected from the mainstream but actively preached to by radical Islamists who had political asylum in Britain.

"They preyed on this young generation of born-and-bred Brits who were very confident in their expression of English but culturally and psychologically out of place.

"Thousands of young Muslims in Britain were led to confuse Islamism, the political ideology, with Islam, a 1400-year-old religion, and that blurring of the lines allowed more and more radicalism to take place."

Husain began his gradual indoctrination at the age of 16, when he attended a small mosque in East London. He eventually joined the radical group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, becoming part of an extremist cell.

For nearly four years, he preached violent jihad. But after a Christian student at his university was murdered almost before his eyes by fellow Islamists, he quickly began to reassess his thinking and tried to loosen his Hizb-ut-Tahrir ties.

It took more than five years, including time spent teaching in Saudi Arabia, where he was stunned by the violent Islamism of some of his students, but ultimately it was successful.

Now he hopes that in time he'll be able to help others escape from radical Islamist groups, and that the British government will have the guts to take on radical leaders without fearing a backlash from Britain's 1.8 million Muslims.

"The government does fear a backlash ... but if you are fearing a backlash today in 2007 and you carry on allowing Hizb-ut-Tahrir and others to recruit and spread that message of separatism, then we will still be at square one, but with a much bigger problem, in 2017 and 2027," he said.