"As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.

Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group - but who was our group?".... From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

"Nobody ever said - you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"

Without an identity, they created their own."

Hari also talks about the effects of both foreign policy and domestic protest on their journey in and out, and it's a mixed bag. My nagging concern is that for someone like Hari, who writes from a Euston Manifesto leftist perspective, the things he takes away confirm a bit too closely to his own beliefs. That may in fact be the picture he's given - but I'd feel better if I saw a few things in these accounts that would be apt to upset him on a personal level. That comes out of Totten's reports from the Middle East, for instance, and seeing that acknowledgment from him is part of what tells me he's a (rare) reporter, instead of an advocate.

I'll throw in one more Hari excerpt:

"Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.... Many of the ex-Islamists discovered they couldn't ignore the fact that whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build a paradise, but hell.

At the same time, they began to balk at the mechanistic nature of Wahabism. Usman says he had become a "papier-mâché Muslim", defining his faith entirely by his actions, while being empty inside. "Wahabis are great at painting themselves [an Islamic] green on the outside, but when it comes to that internal aspect, it's not there. You pray five times a day, but why? Because God's told you to pray five times a day. You pay your charity - why? Because God's told you to pay your charity. This God of yours is telling you a lot. And why does he tell you to do that? Because if you don't do it, you'll end up in a fire. It's all based on being frightened. There's nothing to nourish you."

If this sounds a lot like the ex-communists that played such an important role in throwing the religion of 100 million skulls on the hell-heap of history, well, that isn't a coincidence. Modern Islamism borrows very strongly from 20th century totalitarianism, on a number of levels. Unsurprisingly, it shares some of its predecessor's faults, to go along with its unique characteristics and dynamics.

It was the Islamic Sufi scholar Rabi'a al-Adawiyya of Basra who called on Muslims to join her in serving Allah without fear of hell, or expectation of heaven, but out of love alone.

Still wise words to live by, for any religion.

Many don't, of course. The people Hari interviewed are being threatened, and are seen as apostates by Britain's numerous Islamists (penalty... what else? death), but some of them are also banding together to form The Quilliam Foundation, a think-tank and resource center aimed at countering Isamist radicalization at all levels of society. In its place, they do not offer watered down Islamic supremacism; based on their papers I've read, they're for real - pluralist integrationist, and admirably frank.

Their most recent work has got a fair bit of attention... "Unlocking Al-Qaeda: Islamist extremism in British prisons" says that senior Islamists continue to issue directives and guidance to jihadis from within British prisons. The Times reports that the Ministry of Justice is bureaucratically dismissive, but the report has legs, as well as friends across the political spectrum. I suspect the Ministry will find itself forced to offer more than just airy dismissals before all is said and done.

As Ed Husain notes: "Once a truth is spoken, it takes on its own life." Amidst the avalanche of misunderstanding and outright lies that continue to poison all levels of discourse about Islam and Islamism in our society, The Quilliam Foundation is a badly-needed tonic.

Let us hope it can gather to the level of a therapeutic dose...