Maajid Nawaaz

Maajid Usman Nawaz (; born 2 November 1977) is a British activist and former radio presenter. He was the founding chairman of Quilliam. Until January 2022, he was the host of an LBC radio show on Saturdays and Sundays.

Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, to a British Pakistani family, Nawaz is a former member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir which led to his December 2001 arrest in Egypt, where he remained imprisoned until 2006. While there, he read books about human rights and made contact with Amnesty International who adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. He left Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 2007, renounced his Islamist past, and called for a " secular Islam". Later, Nawaz would co-found Quilliam with former Islamists, including Ed Husain. In 2012, he published an autobiography, '' Radical'' and has since become a prominent critic of Islamism in the United Kingdom.

His second book, ''Islam and the Future of Tolerance'' (2015), co-authored with atheist author Sam Harris, was published in October 2015. He was the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for London's Hampstead and Kilburn constituency in the 2015 general election.

Early life and education

Nawaz was born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, to parents of Pakistani origin. His mother, Abi, moved to Southend with her family when she was nine. His father, Mo, is an electrical engineer who had worked for the Pakistan Navy but had to leave on medical grounds after he contracted tuberculosis.Nawaz (2012): pp. 20–30. After moving to the UK, Mo worked for an oil company in Libya, and moved between Libya and the UK until his retirement. Nawaz has an elder brother and a younger sister. In his memoir, ''Radical'', he uses the pseudonym Osman to refer to his brother.

Nawaz was educated at Westcliff High School for Boys, a grammar school in Westcliff-on-Sea, a suburb of Southend. Later he studied Law and Arabic at SOAS, University of London, and earned his master's degree in political theory from the London School of Economics.

Islamist activism

Association with Hizb ut-Tahrir

Nawaz says racism from classmates, C18 gangs and police, and feeling divided between his Pakistani and British heritage meant he struggled to find his own identity growing up.

His elder brother, referred to pseudonymously as Osman, was recruited into Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) by Nasim Ghani, who would later become the UK leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Osman subsequently persuaded Nawaz to attend HT meetings held in Southend homes. At those meetings, recruits were shown videos of Bosnian Muslims being massacred. Watching these videos eventually resulted in Nawaz's formal recruitment in the HT.

While a student at Newham College, and then at SOAS, Nawaz quickly rose through the ranks. By the age of 17, he was recruiting students from Cambridge University, and by 19, he was on the national leadership of HT in the United Kingdom. He became a national speaker and an international recruiter for Hizb ut-Tahrir, travelling to Pakistan and Denmark to further the party's ideology and set up organisational cells.

Imprisonment in Egypt

As part of his bachelor's degree in Law and Arabic, Nawaz spent a compulsory year abroad in Egypt, arriving just one day before the 9/11 attacks took place. Since political Islamist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir were banned in Egypt, Nawaz was arrested and interrogated in Alexandria by the Egyptian security agency Aman al-Dawlah. Like most foreign prisoners, he was not subjected to torture, but faced the threat of torture during interrogation and witnessed other prisoners being tortured.Nawaz (2012): p. 241. He was then transferred to Tora Prison and put on trial. Represented by Sadiq Khan, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. During the trial, he was adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, who helped to secure his return to London.

Disenchantment and exit from Hizb ut-Tahrir

While imprisoned in Tora Prison, Nawaz came across a wide spectrum of Muslims with varying ideological leanings: Jihadists, Islamists, Islamic scholars and liberal Muslims.Nawaz (2012): pp. 262–263.

Among the Jihadists were the members of the terrorist organisation al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, and the assassins of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He met Islamist Dr Essam el-Erian, the spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Mohammed Badie, who in his youth had smuggled the manuscripts of Syed Qutb's Islamist manual ''Milestones'' out of prison, and had it published. Among the Islamic scholars, Nawaz continued his studies sitting with graduates of Cairo's Al-Azhar University and Dar al-'Ulum. He specialised in the Arabic language whilst studying historical Muslim scholastics, sources of Islamic jurisprudence, Hadith historiography and the art of ''Qur'anic'' recitation. He also committed half of the ''Qur'an'' to memory. On the liberal end of the spectrum, he befriended author and sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim. He also benefited from the company of imprisoned Egyptian politician Ayman Nour who was the head of the centre-liberal Tomorrow Party and a runner-up to the 2005 Presidential Elections.

By 2007, Nawaz had renounced his Islamist past and called for a " secular Islam". In an interview with American broadcaster National Public Radio, Nawaz explained how, other than the interactions in prison, George Orwell's novel ''Animal Farm'' played a major role in his turnaround.

Counter-extremist activism

After completing his prison term in Egypt, Nawaz returned to the UK in 2006. In 2007, he resigned from Hizb-ut-Tahrir and resumed his bachelor's degree at SOAS. He then founded the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank. He addressed the US Senate's Homeland Security Committee on the subject of Islamist extremism. He also spoke at the "Sovereign Challenge" conference organised by United States Special Operations Command where he advocated the need to move beyond hard power, and look at new counter-radicalisation strategies.

Nawaz played a major role in Tommy Robinson's exit from the far-right English Defence League (EDL), of which Robinson was the founder. He met Robinson in 2013 during the filming of a BBC
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