Maajid Nawaz Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Wherever I've been, I've left people who joined Hizb ut-Tahrir. I have to make amends. What I did was damaging to British society and the world at large.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#4. The message was wrong, I knew that now, but maybe the tactics were right. Perhaps we could use the methods of the Islamist groups to create a counter-Islamist movement, to do da'wah for the democratic culture?

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#6. I can say with a level of confidence that Islam is not a religion of war, only because the majority of Muslims don't subscribe to that perspective, not because there's something inherent in the text that tells me it's a religion of peace.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#9. My upbringing was completely liberal from the start. In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity.

Maajid Nawaz

#10. America did not invade Iraq because Iraqis are Muslims. Oil, money, economic interests. Who knows? But it was not because Iraqis are Muslims.

Maajid Nawaz

#11. Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#13. Non-violent extremism is essentially the increase of intolerant and bigoted demands made by groups seeking to dominate society.

Maajid Nawaz

#14. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#16. Within our lifetime, we can remember a time when Islamism wasn't the dominant form of discourse or the aim should be to minimise the absolutists within any religious community and contain them.

Maajid Nawaz

#17. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#19. The British and French governments have taken a strong stance against 'extremist content' online when addressing their approach to tackling extremism.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#21. 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

#22. There are members - very, very close and dear members - of my family - I'm talking immediate family - who simply don't speak to me anymore and haven't done so for years. My marriage fell apart.

Maajid Nawaz

#23. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#27. 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

#28. Chance explorations on search engines do not 'accidentally' lead users to extremist websites.

Maajid Nawaz

#29. We cannot hope to effectively counter extremism if we just focus on schools, universities and prisons: we need to take this online as well.

Maajid Nawaz

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#35. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#37. Unity in faith is theocracy; unity in politics is fascism.

Maajid Nawaz

#38. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#41. One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#43. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#45. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#47. 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

#48. There were people who had sampled my voice from speeches when I was an Islamist and made them the chorus of pro-Islamist rap songs who then began talking about me as an apostate.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#57. 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

#58. After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

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

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#66. I was in prison with pretty much the who's who of the jihadist and Islamist scene of Egypt at the time, and Egypt was the cradle of Islamism for the world - it's where it began and where jihadism began as well.

Maajid Nawaz

#67. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#74. Islamism. It's an ideology. People are seeking to bring it about, but they differ in their approach.

Maajid Nawaz

#75. 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

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

Maajid Nawaz

#77. As I went between the Islamic Society in my college and university, the mosque, the halal takeaway, and visited the homes of my male Muslim friends, it was entirely possible for me to get through my day without interacting in any meaningful way with a single non-Muslim.

Maajid Nawaz

#78. 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

#79. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

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#81. In the United Kingdom, we need to promote an inclusive British identity that involves and empowers people from all ethnic and faith backgrounds.

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

#84. 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

#85. There was a genocide unfolding against Bosnian Muslims and we, in the United Kingdom, were incredibly angered - a teenager at the time, 15 years old, so my young teenage mind processed that in a way typical to the very passionate and angry and black-and-white way that teenagers often can do.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

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

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#89. 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.

Maajid Nawaz

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

Maajid Nawaz

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

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#92. 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

#93. 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

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

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

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#96. 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.

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

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#98. Societies should be judged by how they treat the weakest among them.

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#99. 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

#100. In Bosnia, the case was there were white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims who were being slaughtered and identified as Muslims. That really touched me.

Maajid Nawaz