Maajid Nawaz Quotes
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For my own part, once I became a teenager, I experienced severe and violent racism.
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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.
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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.
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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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Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.
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All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.
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Chance explorations on search engines do not 'accidentally' lead users to extremist websites.
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Muslim communities themselves, as they expect mainstream society to stand down racists, must do more to also stand down the Islamist extremists.
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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.
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The Islamist ideology took decades to incubate within our communities, and it will take decades to debunk.
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I care not to debate which came first, Islamism or anti-Muslim bigotry; suffice to say that both feed into each other symbiotically.
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The truth is, 'Charlie Hebdo' is not a racist magazine. Rather, it is a campaigning anti-racist left-wing magazine.
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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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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.
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I think I would encourage leaders to start working with communities in order to inoculate angry, young teenagers.
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Language that is designed to dehumanize has consequences.
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I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.
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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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My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.
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Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition.
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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.
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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.
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I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.
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Societies should be judged by how they treat the weakest among them.