HE STOOD out from the rest of our class for being so small and frail.
Sure, he could run like the wind, which kept him out of trouble. And he won friends with his bright, wide smile. Yet he was also awkward, easily teased and slightly old-fashioned. Perhaps it was his pinstriped trousers and his platform shoes. Or his dark talk about his mother’s grave. But while most of us obsessed about Starsky and Hutch or Star Wars, he could be deadly serious. One close friend recalls him staging an intense debate about religion. Islam, he said, was superior to all other faiths because it valued charity so highly. It was a remarkable comment for any ten-year-old schoolboy. But Moazzam Begg stood out for another reason. He was a Muslim boy in a Jewish school.
Muslim charity carried Begg a long way from Birmingham, from our middle-class neighbourhood in Middle England and the school that first shaped us. Begg is now in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, one of six detainees heading towards a military trial among 680 suspected foot soldiers of al-Qaeda held in Camp Delta. While some of my classmates grew up and emigrated to Israel or the United States, Begg packed up his wife and three young children in the summer before the 9/11 attacks and went to live under Taleban rule in Afghanistan. His family says that he just wanted to help his impoverished fellow Muslims by opening a school there. The US Government believes that he was a part of something far more sinister.
Begg’s journey from Hebrew lessons to what authorities say was terrorist training is as perplexing as it is extraordinary. How could the quiet, earnest son of a bank manager, a Muslim boy educated among Jews, take such a dramatic turn toward Islamist radicalism? In Washington there is plenty of talk about fighting terrorism by transforming the Muslim world with Western values, starting with school reforms. Yet in the Midlands, where Moazzam and I were born and brought up within yards of one another, there was no shortage of Western values and modern schooling. It has been 24 years since I last saw Moazzam. Recently I went back home to our old neighborhood to piece together his story, and to try to answer a nagging, troubling question: What went wrong with Moazzam Begg?
For many in Britain, especially Begg’s family, the simple response is to blame the United States for his incarceration. Like his defence lawyers, his family has no knowledge of the evidence against him. They claim he has been tortured during his 18 months in American captivity and say that he is the innocent victim of a reckless manhunt. Yet I have seen intelligence documents which suggest that Begg has told interrogators about activities that go far beyond any charitable work in Afghanistan. According to these internal FBI reports, Guantanamo detainees told the United States about a plot to fly remote-controlled model airplanes, packed with explosives, into the White House. In particular, Begg has allegedly detailed to interrogators how terrorists could build such a plane.
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My classmate’s alleged confessions have placed President Bush and Tony Blair in an awkward position. While the two leaders stand shoulder to shoulder in the war on terror, they have parted ways over Begg and eight other Britons in Guantanamo Bay. Among many government ministers there is a distinct sense of outrage that the United States — which preaches the rule of law around the world — could devise a secretive court with few avenues of appeal. Still, when Blair sat down with Bush in the White House last month, the President laid out a simple challenge. “I want to help you,” he told Blair. “But think through the implications. If they get released and end up killing American people, that will be a problem for all of us.”
While the world’s leaders grapple with Begg’s fate, his family — including his wife and children, now back in Britain — can communicate with him only through censored letters that take four months to be delivered. Handwritten on Red Cross notepaper, Begg’s letters veer from the mundane to the miserable. In one note, he tells his wife he misses her cooking.
By the end of last year he felt confident enough to mock his captors. “The USA’s major contribution to civilisation” is peanut butter, he sneers. But his letter from May last year is perhaps the most honest. “This is the hardest test that I have had to pass in my life, and I hope I have not caused you too much distress,” he writes. “But I will pass this test by the will of Allah and your prayers.”
The younger of two sons, Moazzam struggled emotionally and physically in his early years. His mother died of breast cancer when he was barely 8. If he swore on his mother’s grave to his classmates, he meant it. Moazzam was so small that he received medical treatment to boost his growth. His father, Azmat, a bank manager who moved from Pakistan to England in the early 1960s, was proud of his family’s generations of army service in the Empire and wanted his son to join the Royal Marines. But Moazzam was too slight to carry on the tradition. His new stepmother would often cook him Western food — sausages and burgers — in an unsuccessful attempt to fatten him up.
Moazzam was not a religious child. His Islamic education consisted of occasional readings of the Koran with an elderly lady living near his home. “They never went to the mosque in their lives,” says his stepmother, Gull.
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Yet when it came to their son’s formal education, the Beggs decided on King David School, the only publicly funded Jewish school anywhere near Birmingham. Moazzam’s father believed that King David was closer to his own culture and standards. “We liked Jews,” says Azmat. “Jews are our brothers. We more or less come from the same family tree.”
We didn’t know it at the time, but Moazzam was at the forefront of a deep cultural shift in our small patch of British life. If Moazzam was a quiet, isolated figure on his childhood streets — he was one of only two Muslims in my class — by the time he was an adult he found himself in an assertively South Asian neighbourhood. As you walk near the Beggs’ home today there are women dressed in full black burkas, men in Afghan hats and shalwar kameez, children in white crocheted skullcaps.
In this part of the city South Asians now represent more than 60 per cent of the residents. In the rest of England, they make up just 4 per cent. Where there was once a strip of stores selling Indian food and clothes, there are now Islamic shops selling religious books and gifts. It was here, on Ladypool Road, that Moazzam Begg opened his own bookshop — and a door to Afghanistan.
Begg had been drifting for many years. At a time when most of his classmates had already graduated, he was struggling to find a purpose. He may have felt conflicted — caught between his father’s old-fashioned Britishness and the newer, more strident Asian life around him. After helping his father to set up an estate agency and a restaurant, he enrolled for a law degree, then unexpectedly dropped out. “I don’t know what possessed him, but he decided that he wanted to get married,” Gull says.
What might have possessed him was the brand of radical Islam being preached in the Birmingham area at the time. One militant group known as al-Muhajiroun, launched in Britain in 1996, staged conferences at universities to call for the creation of Islamic states across the world.
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It’s unclear if Begg himself was drawn to the group, though one of its firebrands was Hassan Butt, a student at Begg’s university in Wolverhampton. It may be just a coincidence, but three of Begg’s fellow detainees were recruited from the nearby town of Tipton.
Begg’s shop, called Maktabah al Ansaar, sold Islamic paraphernalia. It was through the bookshop that he met his wife, Sally — her brother was one of his customers. Sally is the daughter of Palestinian parents and her father made his money in the oil business in the Gulf. She, too, was educated in a religious school far removed from radical Islam: a convent school, run by nuns. At the time they met she had recently chosen to live in purdah, behind a full veil and a wall of silence with most men. Sally admits that she was shocked when she heard her new husband speak fondly of his Jewish schooling. But then, she says, he was shocked to hear of her Roman Catholic schooling.
By 2000, MI5 began to take an interest in Begg’s bookshop. Police raided it in an antiterrorist sweep but released him without charge. The raid helped to raise his profile among local radicals. “Because of that,” says Umran Javed, a spokesman for al-Muhajiroun, “he became quite popular.”
It might also have encouraged him to leave Britain. Moazzam looked to Afghanistan, a place where he believed he could make a difference. A year after the raid he flew to Iran with his wife and children before crossing into Afghanistan in July 2001.
Their dream was to open a school. “You can live like millionaires over there,” says Sally. “I was very scared, but he kept talking about it for many months. I thought I’d have to live in a mud hut. But I was totally surprised. I lived in a palace.”
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Once the war began in late 2001, Moazzam moved his wife and children out of Kabul to Logar province, more than an hour’s drive south of the capital.
Now there was no choice but to live in the dreaded mud hut. Moazzam worked hard to keep his wife comfortable, carpeting the floor and installing an Italian stove. But when the Northern Alliance closed in on Kabul, Moazzam disappeared as he was delivering supplies in his large truck. His wife and children slipped across the Pakistan border at the end of 2001. A month later the family was reunited in Islamabad. There, Moazzam called his father, to find that he was deeply troubled. “Come back now to England,” his father urged him. “Why are you getting into that much trouble, especially with your wife and children there?” Moazzam agreed but replied: “I have come here, so I should do the things that are required and come back in a while.”
On the night of January 31, 2002, Sally told Moazzam that she was pregnant with their fourth child. A few hours later, Pakistani police burst into their four-bedroom house with Kalashnikovs to arrest her husband. They seized three mobile phones, a laptop computer and about £7,500 in cash. It would take a month before his father heard from the Red Cross that his son was in US custody.
His family thought that his language skills might allow him to help his interrogators question other prisoners. Instead, Begg himself will now be one of the first detainees to face a military trial.
FBI documents suggest that new evidence has emerged from Begg’s confessions. “You get these things by beating him and depriving him of food,” Sally scoffs. “I don’t believe any evidence. If they say he’s a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”
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For me and my other classmates trying to fathom what happened to our old schoolfriend, we may never know if we really grew up with a future terrorist. What we never understood as children was how our awkward friend was, even then, struggling to find an identity that he could call his own, and a place where he could feel that he belonged. Islam offered him a compass, as well as a wife, a network of friends and a source of funds. His family says that Moazzam has always wanted to help people. But he might just have ended up helping the wrong people.
© 2003, Newsweek Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.