Top 66 Maajid Nawaz Quotes

I care not to debate which came first, Islamism or anti-Muslim bigotry; suffice to say that both feed into each other symbiotically.

Let me make this clear: it is our duty to adopt a policy barring the wearing of niqabs in these public buildings.

The way to tackle Muslimphobia is to tackle prejudice against Muslims. What it is not is to pretend that Islamist extremism does not exist.

Academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them.

Poking fun at other people’s beliefs, while it may seem frivolous and offensive, is a non-negotiable right. It is a principle that underpins free speech, the basis for progress.

I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

The conclusion that I have come to is that actually, no religion, whether it’s Islam, Christianity or any idea based on scripture or texts, is a religion of ‘anything,’ really.

I was imprisoned in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when Egypt’s state security was rounding people up in unprecedented numbers.

The cheeky ideal I am calling for is that Muslims should be viewed as equal citizens, nothing more and nothing less.

Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots.

If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.

Imams must ridicule Caliphate fantasies. Exchange programmes between Muslim-only schools and non-Muslim-majority schools should be initiated. Community-based debates around these themes must no longer be shut down from fear of offence.

I was held in the Mazra Tora Prison for my role as leader of the pan-Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir in Alexandria.

The truth is that just as the ‘West’ is not a homogenous entity with one view on foreign and domestic policy, nor are Muslims.

The niqab, for some, has become an antiestablishment symbol around which one can rally and relish in the opportunities for confrontation that it provides.

The University of Westminster is well known for being a hotbed of extremist activity.

In an open society, no idea can be above scrutiny, just as no people should be beneath dignity.

By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.

The rise of ISIS in Iraq is a wider threat to the stability of the Middle East and the West than many realise.

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.

Having our fundamental assumptions about life challenged is never a comfortable thing.

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college.

The positive is I’m delighted at the way the Liberal Democrats as a party have supported me and the way in which the work I’m doing, through the Liberal Democrats, has abled to broaden some of the work I work on.

I think I would encourage leaders to start working with communities in order to inoculate angry, young teenagers.

Muslim communities themselves, as they expect mainstream society to stand down racists, must do more to also stand down the Islamist extremists.

The only way we can challenge Islamism is to engage with one another. We need to make it as abhorrent as racism has become today. Only then will we stem the tide of angry young Muslims who turn to hate.

Language that is designed to dehumanize has consequences.

Quilliam will remain a priority for me because its values shape my beliefs and outlook.

The truth is, ‘Charlie Hebdo’ is not a racist magazine. Rather, it is a campaigning anti-racist left-wing magazine.

Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives, originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious fundamentalism.

The Islamist ideology took decades to incubate within our communities, and it will take decades to debunk.

Islamism is an ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society.

I was, by the way – I’m an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K.

Broader social concerns within Muslim communities, such as discrimination, integration or socio-economic disadvantages, should be treated distinctively and not as part of counterterrorism agenda, which has been counter-productive.

What we cannot deny is that there’s an association between exclusion, segregation, non-violent extremist thinking, and jihadism.

I say I haven’t lost my religion. I’ve lost my ideology.

The only certainty we have is that those who are certain of a way to arrive at worldly salvation, are committed enough to organize around this, and seek power to enforce it, will invariably descend into a bloody totalitarian fascism.

I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

De-radicalisation begins by breaking down the logic which once seemed unassailable and rethinking what you are fighting for and why. That is hard to do when Islamists and Islamophobes feed off each other’s hateful cliches.

I used to MC a bit when I was young – 14 or 15 years old.

Chance explorations on search engines do not ‘accidentally’ lead users to extremist websites.

Rather than allowing jihadists to shut down debate, it must proliferate so much that they simply cannot kill us all.

I was filled with hate and anger. But during my trial, something decisive happened: Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and it was an unbelievable feeling to know that there is someone fighting for you on the outside. Amnesty’s ‘soft’ approach made me seriously consider alternatives to revenge.

Hip-hop in the ’90s began moving towards the Nation of Islam and the 5 Percenters, black nationalist movements; very much so, these movements embraced a form of Islam: Malcom X’s form of Islam prior to his change.

What’s my audience? British society. Am I received relatively well? Yes. Is there within that… if you break it down, challenges with Muslim communities? Of course there are.

In current times, our moral uproar is best reserved for those who aspire to stone men or women to death, not those who consensually watch women – or men, for that matter – dance.

In today’s Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities’ constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

The first point of contact for radicalisation is almost always a personal one. Prisons and universities, for example, tend to be easily and regularly infiltrated by radical groups, who use them as forums to propagate their ideas.

I worked my way through the education system and was treated as though I had value.

Expressing myself through language was always something that I had had to learn to do more so than others.

There are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of Al-Qaeda without the terrorism.

I really didn’t grow up religious, and I didn’t grow up acknowledging my Muslim identity. For me, I was a British Pakistani.

To suggest that a Muslim cannot think for himself sounds to me very much like an incident of anti-Muslim bigotry.

Increased sympathy for an Islamist cause, lack of integration, and the absence of acceptance of Muslims into British society makes it harder for Muslims to challenge Islamism and tough for non-Muslims to understand it.

The best revolutions are unplanned, and the most democratic are leaderless.

Not all Muslims wish to express themselves in public through a communal religious identity. Identities are multiple, and some may wish to speak instead just as citizens in their professional capacity, through their political party, or their neighborhood body.

Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition.

The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.

Yes, women should be free to cover their faces when walking down the street. But in our schools, hospitals, airports, banks and civil institutions, it is not unreasonable – nor contrary to the teachings of Islam – to expect women to show the one thing that allows the rest of us to identify them… namely, their face.

Before someone can change his ideas, he has to open his heart.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren’t executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.