Maajid Nawaz

Maajid Usman Nawaz (born 2 November 1977) is a British activist and former radio presenter.

He was the founding chairman of the think tank 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.

His membership 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 co-founded Quilliam with former Islamists, including Ed Husain.

In 2012, Nawaz published an autobiography, Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism, 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 Democrats parliamentary candidate for London's Hampstead and Kilburn constituency in the 2015 United Kingdom general election.

Since 2020, Nawaz has promoted false claims related to COVID-19 and the 2020 United States presidential election.

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.

After moving to the United Kingdom, Nawaz's father worked for an oil company in Libya, and moved between Libya and the United Kingdom 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.

Nawaz says that racism from classmates, Combat 18 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 British 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 clandestine cells.

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.

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, and this helped him to secure his return to London.

While imprisoned in Tora Prison, Nawaz came across a wide spectrum of Muslims with varying ideological leanings, including jihadists, Islamists, Islamic scholars, and liberal Muslims.

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 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.