London, England - 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.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, also calls for the end of Israel and the withdrawal of Western interests from the Middle East, though it says it wants to achieve those goals through nonviolent means. There have been calls in Britain to ban the group, but the government has always stopped short of doing so.
Nawaz's departure from the group, which he announced on his personal blog several days ago and in an interview shown on BBC television Tuesday night, is considered significant because he was such a highly valued member of Hizb ut-Tahrir - one of a handful of men on its executive committee in Britain.
Before being imprisoned in Egypt, Nawaz played a central role in recruiting new members for Hizb ut-Tahrir at home and abroad. Over and over again, he said, he spread the belief that the dictatorships of the Muslim world must be replaced by a caliphate similar to that which held sway after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
But for 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."
Calls in Britain for the banning of Hizb ut-Tahrir usually stress that the group serves as a gateway for some Muslims to turn to terrorism. Nawaz puts it this way: "Hizb ut-Tahrir spearheaded the radicalization of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger."
Although the group explicitly condemns violence, Nawaz said buried in the literature is an ideology that inevitably leads to violence. He wrote on his blog that he was "duty-bound to redress the phenomenon of politically inspired theological interpretations."
He said he helped to found Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan when the group sent him there in 1999, soon after Pakistan declared itself a nuclear state. The leadership believed, he said, that a nuclear Pakistan was essential for the coming caliphate. Over nine months, he formed a cell of 10 members in the area around Lahore. He was so successful, he recalled, that he steered a regional commander of the terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group that fights India over Kashmir, into his group. The Pakistani government banned Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In Denmark, where Nawaz traveled on weekends from Britain after his return from Pakistan, he said he recruited five Pakistani Danes into the group's first cell there. In Britain, Nawaz was a familiar figure on the Islamic circuit, persuading university students in London to join up when he was at Newham College and later at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
One of the basic texts by the group's founder, Taqi ud-Din al-Nabhani, a Palestinian judge, said it was obligatory for Muslims to militarily overthrow "every single Muslim government, then forcibly unite them into one military state even if it means killing millions of people," Nawaz said.
Such beliefs written in the early 1950s were, he said, an ideological corruption of Islam as a religion. But Nawaz does not think the group should be banned, though he would like to help diminish the group's influence. He says he believes in a tolerant society and that he is too much of a liberal to call for the abolition of the group in Britain.
Nawaz is the product of a third-generation British Pakistani family. His father recently retired as an oil engineer and his mother works in a bank; they live in Essex, a middle-class area south of London.
When he was growing up, Islam seemed like an irrelevant, "backward village religion," he said. That attitude changed when he was 16.
On a rare visit to a mosque, he met a Bangladeshi student, a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who he said preyed on his confusion about his British Pakistani identity.
He then enrolled in Newham College, and began aggressively proselytizing for Hizb ut-Tahrir. He became president of the student union, and a little later the group's hierarchy recognized his organizational skills and sent him to proselytize around England and then abroad.
Nawaz said that he was not sent to Egypt in 2001 by Hizb ut-Tahrir, but that he went as a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies to learn Arabic at the University of Alexandria. He admits to proselytizing while there.
In April 2002, he was arrested in Alexandria at gunpoint, blindfolded and hauled off to prison in Cairo. During the four years there, his "doubts about Hizb ut-Tahrir crystallized," he said. But it was hard, he said, when he was released in March 2006 and came home, to immediately turn his back on the group.
This May, he finally told his colleagues at a meeting in a restaurant in the East End of London that he was quitting. "I said, 'I can't do this anymore.' "
So far, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which runs a Web site, www.hizb.org.uk in Britain, with frequent updates on Muslim affairs around the world, has refrained from attacking him. He is not sure what to expect from them, he said.
"I say I haven't lost my religion," he said. "I've lost my ideology."