LOSING IDEOLOGY:

From radical Islam leader to disillusioned ex-prisoner (Jane Perlez, September 12, 2007, NY Times)

For four years, Maajid Nawaz, a British Pakistani university student, was imprisoned in Egypt, enduring months of solitary confinement and the screams of those being tortured.

Nawaz left Britain on his fateful trip to Egypt on Sept. 10, 2001, for a year abroad to study Arabic. In April 2002, he was charged and sentenced by the Egyptians for spreading the beliefs of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Islamic group that is legal in Britain but banned in Egypt and other countries because it calls for the overthrow of governments in the Muslim world.

Now, more than a year after his return to Britain, Nawaz, 29, has defected from Hizb ut-Tahrir, saying that he learned from scholars he met in jail that the ideology he so fervently espoused runs counter to the true meaning of his religion. [...]

[F]or the past year, he has felt nothing but regret, he said in an interview with The New York Times in a Bayswater Road coffee shop on Tuesday before his BBC appearance.

"I gave talks in Pakistan, Britain and Denmark," he said.

"Wherever I've been I've left people who joined Hizb ut-Tahrir. I have to make amends. What I did was damaging to British society and the world at large." [...]

"I say I haven't lost my religion," he said. "I've lost my ideology."