Activist

Any item of clothing that covers the face and makes it impossible to identify individuals is open to abuse.

I come from an immigrant family, but I know no other nationality apart from British.

The fact is that there is a serious problem of extremism with minority groups within Muslim communities.

The rise of ISIS in Iraq is a wider threat to the stability of the Middle East and the West than many realise.

America did not invade Iraq because Iraqis are Muslims. Oil, money, economic interests. Who knows? But it was not because Iraqis are Muslims.

De-radicalisation begins by breaking down the logic which once seemed unassailable and rethinking what you are fighting for and why. That is hard to do when Islamists and Islamophobes feed off each other's hateful cliches.

Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition.

Back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism - and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost.

Islamism is an ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society.

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.

There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand.

Unity in faith is theocracy; unity in politics is fascism.

I was in prison with pretty much the who's who of the jihadist and Islamist scene of Egypt at the time, and Egypt was the cradle of Islamism for the world - it's where it began and where jihadism began as well.

The way to tackle Muslimphobia is to tackle prejudice against Muslims. What it is not is to pretend that Islamist extremism does not exist.

We cannot hope to effectively counter extremism if we just focus on schools, universities and prisons: we need to take this online as well.

Muslim communities themselves, as they expect mainstream society to stand down racists, must do more to also stand down the Islamist extremists.

All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.

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.

Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is the politicisation of Islam, the desire to impose a version of this ancient faith over society.

As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated.