Radical by Maajid Nawaz

Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters. What mattered was that these sorts of endorsements from young, streetwise rappers made me rethink my identity. The faith I had inherited was no longer some backward village religion to be ashamed of or apologetic about. It had been re-branded as a form of resistance , as a self-affirming defiant identity. On the back of such groups, the black conversion rate to Islam was going through the roof. Even members of the nascent British hip-hop band Cash Crew ended up converting. All of a sudden, it was cool to be a Muslim.
    That September, in 1989, I enrolled at Cecil Jones High School, at precisely the time that hip-hop was starting to really kick off. If rap was the form, hip-hop was the culture. Dr. Nasir’s little “Fuck tha Police” intervention couldn’t have been better timed. I had left primary school intent on never letting anyone pick on me again. At Cecil Jones I changed my dress style, wearing a baggy uniform with my sweater tied round my waist. I also changed my hair, closely clipping it to a “grade one” on the sides while leaving it long on top, and I got my ear pierced.
    On my first day at school, age eleven, I remember consciously talking myself up to people as someone you didn’t want to mess with. In fact, I got so carried away that someone even tried to call my bluff and I nearly got hit again. A very crude ranking system operates in school playgrounds, the “hardest” kids are known, and a pecking order is quickly but firmly established as kids jockey for position in the first few weeks of the term. I soon realized that merely talking myself up would not be sufficient. I needed the right friends, the right “crew,” and I ruthlessly began to seek them out.
    The fact that I was one of the first kids from my year to get into hip-hop made my task of building a crew easier than expected. White kids were lining up to talk to me, not just about rap music but the whole hip-hop scene. Hip-hop was something that could more than compensate for my absence from football games. My skin color was suddenly something that kids wanted to be associated with. Very quickly, Aron and Martyn, respectively the first and second toughest kids in our school year, had become my closest friends. I was to be their very own trendsetter, teaching them the ways of the B-boy, or someone living a hip-hop lifestyle.
    It instantly bonded me with all the popular kids in the older classes, too. In my school year there were no black kids, and only two other Pakistanis, one being my cousin Faisal. But in the year above was a boy called Michael, whom we all called Moe. He was Kenyan British and had a group of friends in his year, including Faisal’s older brother Yasser. There was a kid called Mark, who was West Indian and equally respected, and friends with Osman. In those early days, we were a small community and hip-hop was our way of life. We had a certain style of dress, spoke in a specific slang, and we clipped our hair very short on the sides, sometimes carving patterns into it, and then left it standing long on top. We believed that we had discovered “cool” where all others had failed, and we quickly bonded with each other over the music.
    I’ve never been one to do things by halves, and once I got into hip-hop, I bought into the scene big time: not just the music but also the look, the clothes, everything. I’d wear what we called “Click” or “Extreme” suits, named after the brands. These were a pair of matching jackets and trousers, the trousers being as baggy as you can imagine—almost Aladdin genie-type—and we would fold them in at the bottom with what we called “pin-tucks.” The top would be baggy too and come complete with a hood. The trainers would be Adidas, big and fat to match. Wearing the right labels was everything, and we’d travel up to London to buy the gear.
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