Yakoub Islam
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Yunus Yakoub Islam is a UK Muslim anarchist and cyber-activist who created the Muslim anarchist charter and is one of a small number of Muslim anarchists on the internet. Online, he is also known as Julaybib Ayoub, after the companion of the Prophet (aws) believed to be born with the life-long medical condition achondroplasia.
Yakoub was born Julian Hoare in 1963, but changed his name to Julian Anderson in 1982 prior to marrying his then girlfriend, Julie Harte. He discovered anarchism in the 1980s through the works of the punk band Crass, but distanced himself from the anti-religious, drug-enfeebled British punk scene in the late 1980s to explore academic learning, eventually converting to Islam in 1991. A lack of commitment and understanding saw him retreat from religious practice during 1990s, returning to Islam only at the turn of the millennium when he began working with Muslim children in inner city schools. Over the last two years, Yakoub has become an increasingly visible cyber activist at the same time as caring for his teenage son, who is profoundly autistic. He has two other children.
Almost from the beginning of his journey into the Muslim faith, Yakoub was disturbed by the authoritarianism dogging much Islamic thought and practice. After discovering the writings of the radical progressive Muslim Farid Esack and later Mohammed Arkoun, Yakoub began to explore anti-authoritarian interpretations of Islam, and consequently initiated an online project based on Carolyn Ellis's concept of autoethnography called Tasneem Project.
One of the outcomes of this journey has been the possibility of a radical Islamism which is closer to the modern anti-globalization movement than to the Islamism of Sayyid Qutb. This postmodern Islamism rejects the traditional Islamist notion of a 'vanguard' of pious activists, in favour of a universal individual action at every level of society and draws on the concept of 'witness' developed by Mawdudi to articulate its mode of influence. However, in this new Islamism, piety is informed by the Sufi concept of 'Ishq (passionate love of Allah), and there is an emphasis on regular education and self-improvement. It also assumes a vehement commitment to non-violence in tradition of Badshah Khan. However, this is one of a number of possible avenues of religious understanding under consideration.
Yakoub has written for the Muslim World Book Review, Q-News and Muslim Wake Up. He is an erratic correspondent to national newspapers, and his letters have been published in The Times, Guardian and Telegraph. His personal blog/journal for the Tasneem Project is Anarcho Akbar.
