David Myatt

While, initially, some critics – specifically the anti-fascist Searchlight organization – suggested that Myatt's conversion "may be just a political ploy to advance his own failing anti-establishment agenda", it is now generally accepted that his conversion was genuine.

As a Muslim, he traveled and spoke in several Arab countries, and wrote one of the most detailed defenses in the English language of Islamic suicide attacks – having become an advocate of such attacks and defended the killing of civilians in such attacks. He also expressed support for Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban, and referred to the Holocaust as a "hoax". An April 2005 NATO workshop heard that Myatt had called on "all enemies of the Zionists to embrace the Jihad" against Jews and the United States.

Myatt writes that "the numinous sympathy – συμπάθεια (sympatheia, benignity) – with another living being that empathy provides naturally inclines us to treat other living beings as we ourselves would wish to be treated: with fairness, compassion, honour, and dignity. It also inclines us not to judge those whom we do not know; those beyond the purveu – beyond the range of – our faculty of empathy".

He defines pathei-mathos by saying: "The Greek term πάθει μάθος derives from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (written c. 458 BCE), and can be interpreted, or translated, as meaning learning from adversary, or wisdom arises from (personal) suffering; or personal experience is the genesis of true learning." Pathei-Mathos is thus an aspect of or element in the Numinous Way, although the former term comes to predominate over the latter in Myatt's writings beginning 2012.

Since 2010, Myatt has written extensively about his rejection of both Islam and his extremist past, writing that: "What I [...] came to understand, via pathei-mathos, was the importance - the human necessity, the virtue - of love, and how love expresses or can express the numinous in the most sublime, the most human, way. Of how extremism (of whatever political or religious or ideological kind) places some abstraction, some ideation, some notion of duty to some ideation, before a personal love, before a knowing and an appreciation of the numinous."

In 2010, Myatt publicly announced that he had rejected both Islam and extremism, having developed his own Weltanschauung, writing that "the Way of Pathei-Mathos is an ethical, an interior, a personal, a non-political, a non-interfering, a non-religious but spiritual, way of individual reflexion, individual change, and empathic living, where there is an awareness of the importance of virtues such as compassion, humility, tolerance, gentleness, and love", and that "living according to the way of pathei-mathos [...] means being compassionate or inclining toward compassion by trying to avoid causing, or contributing, to suffering".

According to an article in The Times published on 24 April 2006, Myatt then believed that: "The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West ... For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy... Jihad is our duty. If nationalists, or some of them, desire to aid us, to help us, they can do the right thing, the honourable thing, and convert, revert, to Islam — accepting the superiority of Islam over and above each and every way of the West."

At a 2003 UNESCO conference in Paris, which concerned the growth of anti-Semitism, it was stated that "David Myatt, the leading hardline Nazi intellectual in Britain since the 1960s [...] has converted to Islam, praises bin Laden and al Qaeda, calls the 9/11 attacks 'acts of heroism,' and urges the killing of Jews. Myatt, under the name Abdul Aziz Ibn Myatt supports suicide missions and urges young Muslims to take up Jihad. Observers warn that Myatt is a dangerous man..." This view of Myatt as a radical Muslim, or Jihadi, is supported by Professor Robert S. Wistrich, who writes that Myatt, when a Muslim, was a staunch advocate of "Jihad, suicide missions and killing Jews..." and also "an ardent defender of bin Laden". One of Myatt's writings justifying suicide attacks was, for several years, on the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing) section of the Hamas website.

In 2000, British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight wrote that: "[Myatt] does not have the appearance of a Nazi ideologue ... [S]porting a long ginger beard, Barbour jacket, cords and a tweed flat cap, he resembles an eccentric country gentleman out for a Sunday ramble. But Myatt is anything but the country squire, for beneath this seemingly innocuous exterior is a man of extreme and calculated hatred. Over the past ten years, Myatt has emerged as the most ideologically driven nazi in Britain, preaching race war and terrorism [...] Myatt is believed to have been behind a 15-page document which called for race war, under the imprint White Wolves."

Following the conviction of Copeland for murder on 30 June 2000, after a trial at the Old Bailey, one newspaper wrote of Myatt: "This is the man who shaped mind of a bomber; Cycling the lanes around Malvern, the mentor who drove David Copeland to kill [...] Riding a bicycle around his Worcestershire home town sporting a wizard-like beard and quirky dress-sense, the former monk could easily pass as a country eccentric or off-beat intellectual. But behind David Myatt's studious exterior lies a more sinister character that has been at the forefront of extreme right-wing ideology in Britain since the mid-1960s."

Myatt came to public attention in 1999, a year after his Islamic conversion, when a pamphlet he allegedly wrote many years earlier, A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution, described as a "detailed step-by-step guide for terrorist insurrection", was said to have inspired David Copeland, who left nailbombs in areas frequented by London's black, South Asian, and gay communities. Three people died and 129 were injured in the explosions, several of them losing limbs. It has also been suggested that Myatt's A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution might have influenced the German National Socialist Underground.

It was a copy of the Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution pamphlet that, in 1999, was discovered by police in the flat of David Copeland, the London nailbomber – who was also a member of Myatt's National Socialist Movement – and thus which allegedly influenced him to plant homemade bombs targeting immigrants in Brixton, Brick Lane, and inside the Admiral Duncan pub on Old Compton Street in London, frequented by the black, Asian, and gay communities respectively. Friends John Light, Nick Moore, and Andrea Dykes and her unborn child died in the Admiral Duncan pub. Copeland told police he had been trying to spark a "racial war."

Before his conversion to Islam in 1998, Myatt was the first leader of the British National Socialist Movement (NSM), and was identified by The Observer, as the "ideological heavyweight" behind Combat 18.

Michael writes that Myatt took over the leadership of Combat 18 in 1998, when Charlie Sargent, the previous leader, was jailed for murder.

In February 1998, detectives from S012 Scotland Yard raided Myatt's home in Worcestershire and removed his computers and files. He was arrested on suspicion of incitement to murder and incitement to racial hatred, but the case later dropped, after a three-year investigation, because the evidence supplied by the Canadian authorities was not enough to secure a conviction.

According to the BBC's Panorama, in 1998 when Myatt was leader of the NSM, he called for "the creation of racial terror with bombs". Myatt is also quoted by Searchlight as having stated that "[t]he primary duty of all National Socialists is to change the world. National Socialism means revolution: the overthrow of the existing System and its replacement with a National-Socialist society. Revolution means struggle: it means war. It means certain tactics have to be employed, and a great revolutionary movement organised which is primarily composed of those prepared to fight, prepared to get their hands dirty and perhaps spill some blood".

Myatt converted to Islam in 1998. He told Professor George Michael that his decision to convert began when he took a job on a farm in England. He was working long hours in the fields and felt an affinity with nature, concluding that the sense of harmony he felt had not come about by chance. He told Michael that he was also impressed by the militancy of Islamist groups, and believed that he shared common enemies with Islam, namely "the capitalist-consumer West and international finance."

In November 1997, Myatt allegedly posted a racist and anti-Semitic pamphlet he had written called Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution on a website based in British Columbia, Canada by Bernard Klatt. The pamphlet included chapter titles such as "Assassination", "Terror Bombing", and "Racial War". According to Michael Whine of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, "[t]he contents provided a detailed step-by-step guide for terrorist insurrection with advice on assassination targets, rationale for bombing and sabotage campaigns, and rules of engagement."

It is also alleged that in the early 1980s Myatt tried to establish a Nazi-occultist commune in Shropshire, although Myatt denies this allegation, claiming that his aim was to establish an agrarian community solely based on the Nazi principles of Blood and Soil and which project was advertised in Colin Jordan's Gothic Ripples newsletter, with Goodrick-Clark writing that "after marrying and settling in Church Stretton in Shropshire, [Myatt] attempted in 1983 to set up a rural commune within the framework of Colin Jordan's Vanguard Project for neo-nazi utopias publicized in Gothic Ripples".

Myatt is regarded as an "example of the axis between right-wing extremists and Islamists", and has been described as an "extremely violent, intelligent, dark, and complex individual"; as a martial arts expert; as one of the more interesting figures on the British neo-Nazi scene since the 1970s, and as a key Al-Qaeda propagandist.

Myatt was the founder and first leader of the National Socialist Movement of which David Copeland was a member. He also co-founded, with Eddy Morrison, the neo-Nazi organization the NDFM (National Democratic Freedom Movement) which was active in Leeds, England, in the early 1970s, and the neo-Nazi Reichsfolk group, and which Reichsfolk organization "aimed to create a new Aryan elite, The Legion of Adolf Hitler, and so prepare the way for a golden age in place of 'the disgusting, decadent present with its dishonourable values and dis-honourable weak individuals'".

Myatt joined Colin Jordan's British Movement, a neo-Nazi group, in 1968, where he sometimes acted as Jordan's bodyguard at meetings and rallies. Myatt would later become Leeds Branch Secretary and a member of British Movement's National Council. From the 1970s until the 1990s, he remained involved with paramilitary and neo-Nazi organisations such as Column 88 and Combat 18, and was imprisoned twice for violent offences in connection with his political activism.

David Wulstan Myatt grew up in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), where his father worked as a civil servant for the British government, and later in the Far East, where he studied martial arts. He moved to England in 1967 to complete his schooling, and has said that he began a degree in physics but did not complete it, leaving his studies to focus on his political activism. He is reported to live in the Midlands and to have been married three times.

David Wulstan Myatt (born 1950), formerly known as Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt and Abdul al-Qari, is a Tanganyika-born British author, poet and philosopher, the founder of The Numinous Way, a former British Muslim, and a former neo-Nazi. Since 2010, Myatt has written extensively about his rejection of his extremist past and about his rejection of extremism in general. Myatt has translated works of ancient Greek literature, translated and written a commentary on the Greek text of eight tractates of the Corpus Hermeticum, and written several collections of poems. He is currently translating and writing a commentary on the Greek text of the Gospel of John.