Confessions of a Former Jihadist

Mubin Shaikh grew up in Toronto, in a devout Muslim family, caught between two worlds he couldn’t reconcile. By day, he was a public school kid with non-Muslim friends, playing sports and going to parties. At night, he sat in Quran class, where he was beaten with a stick for mispronouncing Arabic words. The identity crisis that built slowly through his childhood came to a head at 19, sending him on a four-month trip to India and Pakistan—and leading to a chance encounter with the Taliban. They had AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and belts of ammunition piled at their feet. When Shaikh gave them his rehearsed religious pitch—that success in this life and the next came from following God’s commandments—one of them picked up his rifle and said: Success comes from this. In that moment, something that had been theoretical and abstract became viscerally, thrillingly real. Shaikh was captivated. When he returned to Canada, he began recruiting young men into jihadist networks—targeting the isolated, the angry, the spiritually searching. He groomed some of them for foreign conflict zones. On the morning of September 11, 2001, driving to work in Toronto, he heard the news on the radio and his first instinct was to cheer. Then something shifted. Today, Mubin Shaikh is one of the world’s leading counterterrorism and de-radicalization experts, and has worked with Canadian intelligence services and with the U.S. State Department’s coalition against ISIS. He now spends his days working for Parents for Peace, trying to pull young people back from the same edge he once stood on—including a 14-year-old autistic boy in Ohio who was plotting to behead a Jewish classmate, in a case I reported on earlier this month. In this conversation, Shaikh is unflinching about what makes young people so susceptible to extremist ideologies. It isn’t, he argues, simply about religion. It’s about meaning, belonging, and identity—a hunger that transcends culture, nationality, and faith, and that radical ideology is uniquely engineered to satisfy.