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Maajid Usman Nawaz is a British activist and former politician. He was the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for London's Hampstead and Kilburn constituency in the 2015 general election. He is also the founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank that seeks to challenge the narratives of Islamist extremists.Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex to a British Pakistani family, Nawaz is a former member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. This association led to his arrest in Egypt in December 2001, where he remained imprisoned until 2006. Reading books on human rights and interacting with Amnesty International, which adopted him as a prisoner of conscience, resulted in a change of heart. This led Nawaz to leave Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 2007, renounce his Islamist past and call for a "secular Islam".After his turnaround, Nawaz co-founded Quilliam with former Islamists, including Ed Husain. He wrote an autobiography, Radical, which was published in 2012. Since then, he has become a prominent critic of Islamism in the United Kingdom. He is a regular op-ed contributor, debater and public commenter. He presented his views on radicalisation in front of US Senate Committee and UK Home Affairs Committee in their respective inquiries on the roots of radical extremism.He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast, and hosts his LBC radio show every Saturday and Sunday from 12–3 pm. His writings have been published in various international newspapers including The New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, the Daily Mail and The Wall Street Journal. He has made appearances on programmes including Larry King Live, BBC Hard Talk, Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, Newsnight and Real Time with Bill Maher. He has delivered lectures at the LSE and the University of Liverpool, and has given talks at the UK Defence Academy and Marshall Center for Security Studies.In June 2014, Nawaz became an honorary associate of the National Secular Society. His second book Islam and the Future of Tolerance , co-authored with American neuroscientist Sam Harris, was published in October 2015.

✵ 2. November 1977
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Maajid Nawaz: 14   quotes 0   likes

Famous Maajid Nawaz Quotes

“As he continued to talk to me, I realized one of the fundamental points about Islamism that so many people fail to understand. The way Osman was speaking wasn’t in the orthodox, religious way of the imam with a stick; he was talking about politics, about events that were happening now. That’s crucial to understanding what Islamism is all about: it isn’t a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 62

“For 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

Stop the Jihadi Onslaught Against Atheists and Freethinkers http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/13/stop-the-muslim-onslaught-against-atheists-and-free-thinkers.html?via=desktop&source=facebook (13 October 2015)
Daily Beast Column

“The one reason that I could not ignore, the one reason that grew deep inside me till it consumed me with guilt, was the realisation that I was abusing my faith for a mere political project. After learning in prison that Islamism was not the religion of Islam, but rather a political ideology dressed up as Islam, I no longer felt guilty simply for criticising a political system inspired by modern European constructs, while justified by seventh-century norms.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 210

“If the dangers of racism are apparent, even in a non-violent form, then it was the same for Islamism. Communalist identity politics, self-segregation and group-think are far more damaging to societies in the long run than the odd bomb going off here or there, because it is such a milieu that keeps breeding bomb-makers.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 211

“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

A global culture to fight extremism - Maajid Nawaz | TED-Ed https://www.ted.com/talks/maajid_nawaz_a_global_culture_to_fight_extremism (July 2011)

“I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion.”

Maajid Nawaz

Comments in The Story of God with Morgan Freeman (2016), Episode 2 : Apocalypse
Context: I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion. What I mean by Islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society. Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of Islam and that's what I adopted. I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the UK. I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs. On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old. I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter. I joined a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on. … It's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that ISIS has laid claim to. But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term. I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause. … I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal. Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the Who's Who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood. When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth." Of course, when ISIS eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now.

Maajid Nawaz Quotes

“I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal.”

Maajid Nawaz

Comments in The Story of God with Morgan Freeman (2016), Episode 2 : Apocalypse
Context: I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion. What I mean by Islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society. Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of Islam and that's what I adopted. I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the UK. I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs. On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old. I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter. I joined a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on. … It's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that ISIS has laid claim to. But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term. I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause. … I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal. Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the Who's Who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood. When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth." Of course, when ISIS eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now.

“When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth."”

Maajid Nawaz

Comments in The Story of God with Morgan Freeman (2016), Episode 2 : Apocalypse
Context: I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion. What I mean by Islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society. Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of Islam and that's what I adopted. I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the UK. I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs. On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old. I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter. I joined a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on. … It's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that ISIS has laid claim to. But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term. I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause. … I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal. Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the Who's Who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood. When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth." Of course, when ISIS eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now.

God , Guy , Hell

“It slowly dawned on me that what I had been propagating was far from true Islam. The more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.”

Maajid Nawaz

Hizb ut-Tahrir Refutes Extremism Charges In An Interview With CBS News Before Its Upcoming Conference http://www.khilafah.com/index.php/news-watch/america/7063-hizb-ut-tahrir-refutes-extremism-charges-in-an-interview-with-cbs-news-before-its-upcoming-conference (July 18, 2009)

“A certain neoorientalism has crept upon us, partly in reaction to the failed militarism of the neo-conservative years, but mainly attributable to historical self-critical attitudes towards the British Empire. This neo-orientalism interprets liberalism as a Western construct ill-fitting to non-Western cultures. Struggling, dissenting liberals within minority community contexts find that they have no greater enemy than these neo-orientalists who lend credence to the idea that they are somehow an inauthentic expression of their ‘native’ culture.”

Maajid Nawaz

Source: On Blasphemy (2015), p. 1

Communication , Idea

“In today’s Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest among us 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

Source: On Blasphemy (2015), p. 2

Communication

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

Maajid Nawaz

'I watched a man stabbed in a London street - and felt nothing' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2331021/I-watched-man-stabbed-London-street--felt-nothing.html (25 May, 2013)

Faith

“There is a disproportionate number of convicted terrorists who've come from a conversion background”

Maajid Nawaz

Woolwich murder sparks anti-Muslim backlash https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22664835 BBC News (25 May 2013)
2013

“What we've come to realise is those two extremes - far-right fascism and Islamist extremism - have a symbiotic relationship, where they mutually reinforce the other's very generalised view of the other, and they feed off each other's propaganda.”

Maajid Nawaz

Extremists and gangsters - good meeting for bad company https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13939227 BBC News (28 June 2011)
2011

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