Maajid Nawaz
Maajid Nawaz
Maajid Usman Nawazis a British activist, author, columnist and 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...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionActivist
islam i-can
I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.
community criticize foreign-policy
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.
ideas islam scrutinize
No idea is above scrutiny. No idea whatsoever. To criticize, to scrutinize and to satirize my own religion [Islam] is not Islamophobia.
culture movement als
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.
religious community remember
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.
christian challenges violent
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.
groups theocracy form
I'm yet to discover any form of theocracy that isn't homophobic, that isn't bigoted to the out group.
dogma mindset certain
Once you subscribe to an ideological dogma as a solution to certain grievances, it then frames your mindset.
awakening consciousness genocide
The Bosnian Genocide was something that triggered my consciousness and led to an awakening politically for me.
teenage black-and-white years
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.
gay mainstream-society rights
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.
today unattractive communism
We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today.
cases has-beens
It's not always the case that Muslims have been theocrats.
kingdoms found united-kingdom
When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote.