This Online Group of Former Islamic Extremists Deradicalizes Jihadists

Hannah, a British woman of Indian descent, joined a militant Muslim group when she was 18. Raised Hindu, she began studying Islam during her first year at a London university. On the suggestion of a fellow student named Rashad Ali, Hannah attended a campus meeting of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that espouses nonviolence in establishing a unified Islamic state but has been linked to murder and praises jihad. She fell hard for the rhetoric: She converted to Islam, quit a student job at International Business Machines Corp. to become a housekeeper for a woman who belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir, and stopped wearing Western clothes. “Basically, I was going through a brainwashing,” says Hannah, now in her 30s, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Over the next decade, she rose through the group’s ranks by recruiting others, mostly on campuses, at mosques, and later, while taking her three kids to day care. Eventually, Hannah became Hizb ut-Tahrir’s West London regional manager, overseeing 20 fellow radicals. But she grew weary of the deaths that came with jihad. She began to openly question the group’s tactics and left, a pariah. Soon after, she met Ali a second time, and again he radically changed her life.