Maajid Nawaz has commenced a basis to combat Muslim extremism — and has made a number of enemies within the procedure/italianska.
I met Maajid Nawaz on a drizzly afternoon in March, tucked in a nook of the eating place at the significant London members’ membership he makes use of as a satellite office. He became dabbing the hen from his Caesar salad into a mound of yellow English mustard, which he stopped doing for lengthy enough to load a video on his iPhone and slide it across the table. It showed the Southern Poverty law center’s Heidi Beirich, speaking at Duke university approximately him. “allow me just give you an example of Maajid Nawaz — our hassle with him,” she says. “He believes that every one mosques should be surveilled. In other phrases, his opinion is that each one Muslims are ability terrorists.” Nawaz, a Muslim himself, bristled with frustration on the declare. In fact, he explained, he is on record making the case in opposition to collective surveillance.A former Islamist, for the beyond nine years Nawaz has made a call for himself as an indefatigable anti-extremist activist. nowadays he blends seamlessly into the type of cosmopolitan circles that extremists decry; at his membership, wearing an olive bomber jacket over equipped workout sweats, he could have been a senior marketing exec or a track-video director. At 39, Nawaz is good-looking and vaguely famous searching in man or woman, upfront silver-haired, with a widow’s peak and Mephistophelean soul patch that punctuates a politician’s easy smile. every time I noticed him, he dapped me with one of those handclasp-half-hugs that, to absolutely everyone of a positive age, serves as shorthand for an formative years steeped within the manners of hip-hop.
For Nawaz’s detractors, of whom there are many, it’s this very chameleon first-rate, this at-homeness in disparate roles and spaces, that has earned him a recognition as some thing of a charlatan, a preening opportunist benefiting from his very own sensational travails by way of society’s considerable anti-Muslim bias. This uncharitable narrative has shadowed him from the outset, but his factor of view has most effective grown greater applicable after a very violent 2016 that saw coordinated suicide bombings in Brussels and Istanbul; mass shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando; the ambush and execution of a police officer and his partner close to Paris; a Bastille Day slaughter in first-class; ax and suicide bomb attacks in Bavaria; the throat slitting of a Catholic priest in a church in Normandy; pressure-cooker bombs in long island and New Jersey; and a bloodbath at a Christmas market in Berlin. And on March 22 this yr in London, a person mowed down pedestrians along with his automobile near Parliament earlier than stabbing a police constable to loss of life.
With each grisly new assault — and the threat of Syria and the Islamic country looming beyond it — the voices of hatred and response inside the america and in the course of Britain and Europe observed now not simplest sympathetic ears but additionally inclined fingers to tug levers within the balloting booths. throughout the upheaval and backlash, Nawaz has remained a regular presence inside the media: on “real Time With invoice Maher,” looking to draw a distinction among religion and political dogma; in his ebook, “Islam and the future of Tolerance” (co-written with the outstanding “new atheist” Sam Harris), insisting that Islamism does have some thing to do with Islam and that ISIS in reality possesses a practicable if extraordinarily ungenerous interpretation of the Quran. however whatever role Nawaz enjoys as a public highbrow is inextricable from his private celebrity as a former fundamentalist. His paintings is his story, and his story is his celebrity. if you want to make his case against radicalism, he finds himself in the now not absolutely enviable role of nonstop self-merchandising.
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in this the front, he’s as busy as ever. he is completing a documentary primarily based on his e-book with Harris, but major on Nawaz’s thoughts in recent times is the 2017 starting of the first new chapter of his anti-extremist business enterprise, the Quilliam basis, in the u.s.a.. “masses of Muslims in the us are essentially liberals, however in case you don’t have a visibly anti-extremist presence, then the Trumps of this world win” through worry-mongering and misrepresentation, he says. “Our presence is needed in the us to reassure the mainstream, whereas our presence is needed in Europe to stop radicalization islamist.”