Maajid Nawaz

In February 2019, Nawaz was reportedly assaulted in a racially-motivated attack by a white man.

In October 2016, the U.S. Southern Poverty Law Center accused Nawaz of being an "anti-Muslim extremist", a label disputed by various media outlets, and Nawaz himself. The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice wrote a public letter to the SPLC urging it to retract the listing. Nawaz announced his intention to file a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC on the 23 June 2017 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. The SPLC deleted the HTML version of its list in April 2018. In June 2018, the SPLC apologised and paid $3.375 million to Nawaz and Quilliam "to fund their work to fight anti-Muslim bigotry and extremism".

He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast, and his writings have been published in various international newspapers, he appears frequently on television, and has delivered lectures including at the UK Defence Academy and Marshall Center for Security Studies. 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.

In the aftermath of the 2015 San Bernardino attack, during which a debate about profiling occurred, Nawaz said that racial or religious profiling was a "terrible measure" that "does not prevent terrorism".

In 2014, he married Rachel Maggart, an artist and writer originally from the United States who works for an art gallery in London. In February 2017, Nawaz and Maggart had their first child together, a son named Gibreal.

In 2014, Nawaz received death threats after tweeting a Jesus and Mo cartoon alluding to the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Nawaz decided to tweet the cartoon after a BBC programme censored two audience member's shirts displaying innocuous cartoons of the prophet Muhammed. Respect Party politician George Galloway called on Muslims, via a tweet, not to vote for the Liberal Democrats while Nawaz is one of their candidates. By 24 January, a petition to the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg demanding that Nawaz should be removed as a parliamentary candidate for the party had received 20,000 signatures. Petition organisers denied a connection to its alleged originator, Liberal Democrat member Mohammed Shafiq, and condemned the incitement to murder. On 26 January, Clegg defended Nawaz's right to free expression and said that the death threats were "unacceptable".

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 documentary When Tommy met Mo, and subsequently met the EDL's co-leader, Kevin Carroll. Nawaz's personal story of turning back from Islamist extremism, and his counter-extremism work at Quilliam Foundation encouraged Robinson and Carroll to quit the EDL. Later, Robinson also apologised to Muslims for the fear caused by his EDL activism. The move was hailed by Quilliam as "a huge success in community relations in the United Kingdom", and a continuation of combating all kinds of extremism, including Islamism and Neo-Nazism.

Nawaz was selected in July 2013 to stand as the Liberal Democrat candidate for the marginal north London constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, in which he came third.

With the delegation of Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel he visited both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In September 2013, Nawaz and his Camden District team was given the Dadabhai Naoroji Award for support and promotion of BAME (Black, Asian Minority Ethnic groups) party members. The award was presented by party MP Tim Farron. In the same year, he was included in The Daily Telegraph' s list of 50 most influential Liberal Democrats.

In July 2012, he published his autobiography, Radical.

Nawaz has co-founded an activist group in Pakistan, Khudi, which aims to combat extremism. In 2009, with a BBC Newsnight crew and security team, Nawaz embarked on a counter-extremism tour, speaking at over 22 universities and recruiting students all over Pakistan.

His departure from Hizb ut-Tahrir's world view came slowly and gradually. By 2007 he 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.

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.

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.

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: he left Hizb-ut-Tahrir in 2007, renounced his Islamist past, and called for a "secular Islam". After his turnaround, Nawaz co-founded Quilliam with former Islamists, including Ed Husain. He wrote an autobiography, Radical (2012) and has since become a prominent critic of Islamism in the United Kingdom.

Nawaz has opposed racial profiling of Muslims, extrajudicial detention of terror suspects, torture, targeted killings and drone strikes. Nawaz also opposed the Terrorism Act 2000, under which he was himself once detained, and called for the universal Right to Legal Representation and Right to Silence in all cases, and for all suspects. In a talk given at Marshall European Center for Security Studies, he suggested a revisit of the UK Government's historical approach to dealing with terrorism, and called for a more nuanced response to tackling the ideology of Islamism without breaching fundamental liberties of citizens. According to him, security should never debase citizens of their civil liberties. Nawaz was among the 12 advisers to UK Government who, in 2009, wrote an open letter to the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown asking him to hold Israel accountable for its attacks on Gaza. He also opposes Hamas, which he considers a terrorist organisation.

Maajid Usman Nawaz (Urdu: [ˈmaːdʒɪd̪ nəwaːz] ; born 2 November 1977) is a British activist and radio presenter. He is the founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank that seeks to challenge the narratives of Islamist extremists, and the host of a radio show on LBC, every Saturday and Sunday.