“I am everything I am today, because of my past.”

It’s not always the case that Muslims have been theocrats.

There are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of Al-Qaeda without the terrorism.

Preying on the grievances of disaffected young men is the bedrock of Islamism.

No idea is above scrutiny. No idea whatsoever. To criticize, to scrutinize and to satirize my own religion Islam is not Islamophobia.

After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

Within our lifetime, we can remember a time when Islamism wasn’t the dominant form of discourse or the aim should be to minimise the absolutists within any religious community and contain them.

Ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.

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

Does freedom of speech give the right to offend?

When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote.

Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and that led to my – it touched me in a way that really led to me opening up my heart, I’ve called it the re-humanisation process.

I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

If we look at Abdel Nasser in Egypt as an Arab leader, he was secular.

We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today.

No form of theocracy, whether it’s manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.

I believe that preventing radicalisation is far more efficient than de-radicalisation, meaning stopping someone joining is a lot easier than trying to pull someone out once they’ve joined.

I knew it was my time to retire, when I saw Messi running past me.

You knew me. You knew that person, but you don’t know the person I’m trying to become… You are not your past!

I don’t have nothing to regret at all in the past, except that I might’ve unintentionally hurt somebody else or something.

If you can use those fears to shape who you will be and push past them, you can do anything.

Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information.

The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.

May the dreams of your past be the reality of your future.

Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!