Zitat des Tages von Maajid Nawaz:
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.
All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.
Islam will be what Muslims make of it. And it is the sum total of the interpretation that Muslims give to it.
The cheeky ideal I am calling for is that Muslims should be viewed as equal citizens, nothing more and nothing less.
For my own part, once I became a teenager, I experienced severe and violent racism.
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.
To suggest that a Muslim cannot think for himself sounds to me very much like an incident of anti-Muslim bigotry.
Let me make this clear: it is our duty to adopt a policy barring the wearing of niqabs in these public buildings.
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.
What we cannot deny is that there's an association between exclusion, segregation, non-violent extremist thinking, and jihadism.
Societies should be judged by how they treat the weakest among them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was held in the Mazra Tora Prison for my role as leader of the pan-Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir in Alexandria.
I care not to debate which came first, Islamism or anti-Muslim bigotry; suffice to say that both feed into each other symbiotically.
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.
Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.
My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.
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.
Unity in faith is theocracy; unity in politics is fascism.
The only way that we can win over potential jihadists to liberal democracy is by winning the battle of ideas.
I come from an immigrant family, but I know no other nationality apart from British.
After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.
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.
We cannot hope to effectively counter extremism if we just focus on schools, universities and prisons: we need to take this online as well.
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.
Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, women should be free to cover their faces when walking down the street. But in our schools, hospitals, airports, banks and civil institutions, it is not unreasonable - nor contrary to the teachings of Islam - to expect women to show the one thing that allows the rest of us to identify them... namely, their face.
