Maajid Nawaz Quotes

#1. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#2. I say I haven't lost my religion. I've lost my ideology.

Maajid Nawaz

#3. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#5. This book is the account of his redemptive journey - through innocence, bigotry, hard-line radicalism, and beyond - to a passionate advocacy of human rights and all that this can mean.

Maajid Nawaz

#6. I joined a radical group at the age of 16 because I'm a passionate man; the good news is that I turned myself around since then. But my character is still quite free and passionate.

Maajid Nawaz

#7. I was, by the way - I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K.

Maajid Nawaz

#8. I became, suddenly, not just a Muslim in faith. I became a Muslim in politics. Somebody whose politics were pre-defined by one interpretation of Islam.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#10. Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is the politicisation of Islam, the desire to impose a version of this ancient faith over society.

Maajid Nawaz

#11. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#12. I'm a progressive. What I find is that a subsection within the left that instead of standing for consistency in progressive values, so feminism as applied to mainstream society, as well as within minority communities, gay rights to mainstream society as well as within minority communities.

Maajid Nawaz

#13. But because of the religious element in our message, and the desire of the authorities not to offend our religious

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#15. In prison I had the opportunity to debate and discuss people that had subscribed to all forms of Islamism.

Maajid Nawaz

#16. Being veterans of the struggle to push back against fundamentalist Christians, American liberals are well acquainted with the pitfalls of the neoconservative flirtation with the religious-right.

Maajid Nawaz

#17. Liberalism will beat totalitarianism by killing it softly, not by mimicking it.

Maajid Nawaz

#18. I come from an immigrant family, but I know no other nationality apart from British.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#21. I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact.

Maajid Nawaz

#22. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#24. If our hard-earned liberty, our desire to be irreverent of the old and to question the new, can be reduced to one, basic and indispensable right, it must be the right to free speech.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#26. The fact that my skin color hadn't been an issue for those early years of schooling says everything about where racism originates: it is a cultural issue, a societal and familial problem that children soak up as they become more aware of the world. But

Maajid Nawaz

#27. Having been raised in a multiethnic and multifaith united India, he lost many of his childhood friends. Those who now belonged to the "wrong" faith were forced to immigrate to India; others left for England.

Maajid Nawaz

#28. Islam will be what Muslims make of it. And it is the sum total of the interpretation that Muslims give to it.

Maajid Nawaz

#29. I used to MC a bit when I was young - 14 or 15 years old.

Maajid Nawaz

#30. Hizb ut-Tahrir spearheaded the radicalization of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#32. All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.

Maajid Nawaz

#33. No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.

Maajid Nawaz

#34. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#35. No idea is above scrutiny. No idea whatsoever. To criticize, to scrutinize and to satirize my own religion [Islam] is not Islamophobia.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#37. The fact is that there is a serious problem of extremism with minority groups within Muslim communities.

Maajid Nawaz

#38. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#39. My identity comprises of more than just my faith. I am a proud Muslim, but I am also a liberal, a Briton, a Pakistani, a Londoner, a father, a product of the globalised world who speaks English, Arabic and Urdu.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#41. After the Islamic State, even al-Qaeda appears 'moderate'.

Maajid Nawaz

#42. My feminism, as intended by me, extends to empowering women to make legal choices, not to judge the legal choices they make. My fight is for rights.

Maajid Nawaz

#43. I believe that preventing radicalisation is far more efficient than de-radicalisation, meaning stopping someone joining is a lot easier than trying to pull someone out once they've joined.

Maajid Nawaz

#44. Does freedom of speech give the right to offend?

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#46. But we're also taught that you're not a martyr if you blow yourself up in a marketplace, because you're killing civilians and other Muslims.

Maajid Nawaz

#47. Language that is designed to dehumanize has consequences.

Maajid Nawaz

#48. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#51. Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.

Maajid Nawaz

#52. Like so many nice people who seek power, I wanted to force everyone else to be nice. It's called totalitarianism.

Maajid Nawaz

#53. Back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism - and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#55. We can't remain silent on gender rights and personal freedoms.

Maajid Nawaz

#56. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#57. I had the assassins of the former president of Egypt, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood was with me in prison, the leaders of my own former group Hizb ut-Tahrir were with me in prison and so by the time I was released at the age of 28, I wasn't the man who went in at 24.

Maajid Nawaz

#58. When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote.

Maajid Nawaz

#59. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#60. I'm yet to discover any form of theocracy that isn't homophobic, that isn't bigoted to the out group.

Maajid Nawaz

#61. I have founded Khudi, in Pakistan, a youth movement which tries to counter extremist ideology through healthy discussion and debate.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#63. To be forced to defend oneself is an inherently undesirable position to be in. The focus shifts from ideas to the person conveying them.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#65. A fatwa is a religious edict. Such edicts bind only those who seek to follow the Imam issuing them but can be regarded as an option for others seeking an alternative view.

Maajid Nawaz

#66. More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#68. As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated.

Maajid Nawaz

#69. Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and that led to my - it touched me in a way that really led to me opening up my heart, I've called it the re-humanisation process.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#71. During my teenage years as an Islamist recruiter, I moved to live in self-contained communities in the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets.

Maajid Nawaz

#72. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#73. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#74. No form of theocracy, whether it's manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#76. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#77. There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand.

Maajid Nawaz

#78. If we look at Abdel Nasser in Egypt as an Arab leader, he was secular.

Maajid Nawaz

#79. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#80. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#81. I'm a Muslim, we come from a Muslim community and we are very critical of western or American foreign policy. So if I've got the right and if other Muslims have got the right to criticize ... likewise everyone else has also got the right to criticize everything else.

Maajid Nawaz

#82. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#84. It's not always the case that Muslims have been theocrats.

Maajid Nawaz

#85. Preying on the grievances of disaffected young men is the bedrock of Islamism.

Maajid Nawaz

#86. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#87. to tell people to stop practicing their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicized youth. Curiously,

Maajid Nawaz

#88. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#91. The truth is, 'Charlie Hebdo' is not a racist magazine. Rather, it is a campaigning anti-racist left-wing magazine.

Maajid Nawaz

#92. We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#94. I am a Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents. I have a Muslim son. I have been imprisoned and witnessed torture for my previous understanding of my religion.

Maajid Nawaz

#95. Ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#97. I am everything I am today, because of my past.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#99. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

#100. For years, Islamists and other extremists have taken advantage of grievances of Muslims in Britain and have successfully identified ways to integrate them under one 'Islamic' banner.

Maajid Nawaz