Islamist Quotes & Sayings

President Erdogan is aiming Turkey at a Sharia nation. That's where he wants to go. He is a Sharia law, full-fledged, one percent Islamist. — Rush Limbaugh

The greatest threat facing humanity is a radical Islamist regime meeting up with nuclear weapons. — Benjamin Netanyahu

Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable. Their common view that life is expendable explains the left's embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don't hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings. — Gary Bauer

Any Westerner can now buy a Koran for a dollar and burn it, while any Muslim with a platform can transform that act into a fighting offense. As passions rise on both sides of the divide, Western provocateurs and Islamist hotheads have found each other, as confrontations occur with increasing frequency. — Daniel Pipes

I can't just go up to people standing in the snow at the German-Austrian border and ask them: "Are you an Islamist?" When people flee to us from war zones, we first have to help. But we also have to be quick to look very closely at who it is that is coming. — Alice Schwarzer

The fact that this organisation is called the Islamic State reveals something even deeper. In fact, it implies that every single Islamist party in Egypt, Iraq or Tunisia are not really representing Islam and Muslim people. Nowadays, political Islam is going through a crisis, however this crisis is necessary, for it will lead to a changing way of thinking. In order to make it out of this dead-end, reviewing political Islam becomes mandatory. — Tariq Ramadan

Muslims are the main victims of Islamist inspired terrorism around the globe. ISIS have and other Islamist extremism group have killed thousands of Muslims across the middle east, including some Sunnis who have refused to pledge loyalty. Its members have executed imams who have denounced their activities. Their sectarianism has even spawned deadly attacks on civilians simply because they are shi'i. These extremists have determinedly created divisions to wipe out the 'grey zone' of reason and tolerance. They have conflated religion and politics and thereby poisoned Islam. — Tony McMahon

I was held in the Mazra Tora Prison for my role as leader of the pan-Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir in Alexandria. — Maajid Nawaz

For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against communist or Western oppression. The urgent thing was communism, but the next target was America ... This is an open war up to the end, until victory. — Osama Bin Laden

How do we know when someone like Hasan is going to make his move and do we know he's an Islamist until he's made his move? He makes a phone call or whatever, according to Reuters right now. Apparently he tried to contact al-Qaida. Is that the point at which you say, "This guy is dangerous?" That's not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy? — Chris Matthews

Some Westerners [ ... ] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. — Samuel P. Huntington

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

Islamist terrorism has declared war against us, against France, Europe, the entire world. — Francois Hollande

I have for some time now been deeply troubled by the growing difficulties faced by Christian communities in various parts of the Middle East. It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants. — Prince Charles

After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier. — Lawrence Wright

The Egyptian military plays positive and negative roles in Egypt, but the most significant single thing it did under Mubarak was to guarantee an Islamist victory once he left the scene. — Elliott Abrams

When actresses jump on the anti-Iraq bandwagon, they often combine down-home momism with an ignorance of Islamist intent which is truly awesome. — Julie Burchill

Islamophobia,' the thought-crime that seeks to suppress legitimate criticism of Islam and demonise those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression. — Melanie Phillips

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. — Maajid Nawaz

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. — Maajid Nawaz

I think many thinkers and activists, even in the Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, and the people who left the Muslim Brotherhood to follow Abou el-Fatouh, these people do have an understanding that the relationship between religion and the state must be re-thought and re-assessed. They're not going to use the concept of secularism in any straightforward way, because the concept of secularism is still far too loaded in that part of the world. — Tariq Ramadan

Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret "kill list," President Obama's administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang - disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist "fellow-traveler" lobbies had been in influencing Obama's campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was "al-Qaeda inspired extremism," and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. — Sam Harris

Islamist-jihadist terrorism-a plague that has spread to almost every corner of the world-creates painful dilemmas for the peoples and decision makers who confront it. Its rapid, shape-shifting advance has sometimes confounded efforts to comprehend its origins, motives, and aims. Its sophistication in exploiting liberal values poses challenges and difficulties for the Western world, and for liberal democratic states in general, in attaining effective and balanced counter-terrorism policies. — Boaz Ganor

An Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose Shariah on others, including many 'cultural' or secular Muslims. — Dennis Prager

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

You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties. — Giles Foden

Like many muslims I believe that, at its core, Islam calls for justice, mercy and peaceful, compassionate coexistence. It is distressing therefore, to me as a Muslim, to see extremists from within the faith practise brutality and hatred against others. They provide ample material for anti- muslims bigots who then seek to degenerate and dehumanise all Muslims- including those who are working to build bridges in our society and who defending universal human rights. While Islamists terrorist seek out Muslim human rights activist in order to kill them, anti Muslim bigots act as if we do not even exist. For the bigots, all Muslims and Islam are deemed to be the problem. Such an attitude is little to defend and protect the middle ground that Islamist extremism seek to destroy. — Tony McMahon

Vice President Joe Biden believes that illegal immigrants are citizens. Obama believes that some Americans who join Islamist groups are citizens, while others are not. Who is an American? Whomever the executive branch deems an American. Who isn't? It depends on whether Obama ate his Wheaties or not. — Ben Shapiro

Chechnya is a pressure cooker of Islamist anger — Dennis Prager

During my teenage years as an Islamist recruiter, I moved to live in self-contained communities in the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets. — Maajid Nawaz

From a political perspective, it is important to uphold certain universal principles so that, for example, you can condemn both Islamist forms of violence and injustice as well as forms of violence and injustice from other groups - some superpowers, for example, or the English Defence League, as other examples. — Alison Assiter

If democracy succeeds in Egypt, other countries will follow. Should the democratic experiment in Egypt be hijacked by the military or anti-democratic Islamist groups, the revolution will fail elsewhere. — David Ignatius

Growing up in Egypt, I never saw the country as divided as it is today. We now have two main political groupings: the Islamist parties and the civil, or liberal, political parties. — Ahmed Zewail

Unlike other Taliban groups, the Haqqanis' approach to mayhem was worldly and sophisticated: they recruited Arabs, Pakistanis, even Europeans, and they were influenced by the latest in radical Islamist thought. — Anand Gopal

Britain has become a net exporter of Islamism and jihadism. My former Islamist group didn't exist in Pakistan until we exported it from Britain. — Sam Harris

Iraqi Kurds, out of desperate necessity, have forged one of the most watchful and vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Terrorists from elsewhere just can't operate in that kind of environment. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society did a better job protecting me from Islamist killers than the U.S. military could do in the Green Zone in Baghdad. — Michael Totten

The repeated demand for "justice," incorporated into the names of many Islamist parties, reflects not so much a demand for social equality as a demand for equal treatment under the law. — Francis Fukuyama

In Egypt, a civil state means a modern nationalist state that is compatible with Islamist provisions. — Ali Gomaa

The driving force behind today's terrorist threat is Islamist fundamentalism. The struggle we are engaged in is, at root, ideological. During the last century a strain of Islamist thinking has developed which, like other totalitarianisms, such as Nazi-ism and Communism, offers its followers a form of redemption through violence. — David Cameron

The people who start howling the minute Charlie Hebdo publishes a drawing of a self-styled Islamic terrorist toe a particular line. They suggest that by caricaturing an Islamic terrorist, the cartoonist is really symbolizing all Muslims. So long as the terrorist is identifiable as a Muslim, the cartoonist must be mocking all Islam. If you draw a jihadist doing what jihadists do, you are dragging the billions of faithful through the mud. If you draw Muhammad denouncing the extremists among his followers, you're insulting all Muslims. The terrorist must be stripped of any element that could identify him as a Muslim, while it is quite simply forbidden to represent Muhammad at all. If portraying an Islamist terrorist as grotesque is Islamophobic, that's the same as saying that all Muslims are terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. — Charb

What we're seeing at the moment is people being radicalised or adopting Islamist, murderous Islamist ideology very, very quickly so that you have people that are not on the counterterrorism radar screen who then often, as a result of mental illness, will then attach themselves to this murderous ideology and then act very quickly. — Malcolm Turnbull

Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world. — Christopher Hitchens

What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat. — David Cameron

The bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself - not Islamism - is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities. — Sam Harris

Well, human rights defenders, freedom of speech advocates, lawyers that we spoke to said this is really an expansion. After the military ouster of Egypt's unpopular, but elected Islamist president in 2013, we saw political opponents being arrested by the thousands, really. Then we saw a popular comedian go off the air out of fear of retribution. — Leila Fadel

Our country since its inception has been at war, every 15 or 20 years. But the war that we are fighting against radical Islamist jihadists is one that we must win. Our very existence is dependent upon that. — Benjamin Carson

Not even a single German was murdered in Germany by an Islamist despite the fact that many Muslims were murdered by far-right Germans. — Jurgen Todenhofer

No one can deny that some Islamist groups have credential and popularity. But that does not mean they are a majority. If we are serious about democracy we cannot blame the people for choosing what they want. We must promote the kinds of procedures and processes that are helping the people move ahead. — Tariq Ramadan

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

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college. — Maajid Nawaz

The enemy is not just terrorism. It is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism, by Bin Ladin and others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from religion, and distorts both. — John Cornyn

I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel. — Benjamin Netanyahu

If you trace the history of Islamist terrorism, you see that its founders were great admirers of European fascism. They read the texts of European fascism, they quoted them in speeches and letters. This is not from the Koran - the Koran doesn't teach you how to repress people; there's nothing in there about women having to cover their faces, there's certainly nothing about suicide bombing. — Bernard-Henri Levy

Increased sympathy for an Islamist cause, lack of integration, and the absence of acceptance of Muslims into British society makes it harder for Muslims to challenge Islamism and tough for non-Muslims to understand it. — Maajid Nawaz

Young people in particular need real options to find a decent job and to lift their lives. I'm not sure the new Islamist governments will be the best to promote prosperity and growth. — Jose Maria Aznar

The message was wrong, I knew that now, but maybe the tactics were right. Perhaps we could use the methods of the Islamist groups to create a counter-Islamist movement, to do da'wah for the democratic culture? — Maajid Nawaz

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions. — Noam Chomsky

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

Anti-Islamist Muslims - who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas and violent visions of jihad - are on the defensive and atomized. However eloquent, their individual voices cannot compete with the roar of militant Islam's determination, money (much of it from overseas) and violence. As a result, militant Islam, with its West-phobia and goal of world hegemony, dominates Islam in the West and appears to many to be the only kind of Islam. — Daniel Pipes

Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. He's not a radical jihadist. He's not a radical Muslim. I mean, he was a - he was a Baathist. He was a secular - even though he professed to be a good and devout Muslim. — Rick Santorum

The Islamist ideology took decades to incubate within our communities, and it will take decades to debunk. — Maajid Nawaz

The key to tackling Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism from the Islamist community is in the hands of moderate Muslims. — Gijs De Vries

America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization. — Newt Gingrich

It does make a broader point which is the fight against Islamist terror is not just one that we can wage by the police and border control, it needs every school, every university, every college, every community to recognize they have a role to play, we all have a role to play in stopping people from having their minds poisoned by this appalling death cult. — David Cameron

Ever since taking office, the Obama administration has sought to accommodate Islamist demands that freedom of expression be curbed, lest it offend Muslims and stoke violence. For example, in 2009, the administration co-sponsored a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution along those lines. — Frank Gaffney

After the dismissal of Hamrouche and until 1999, the state underwent a severe financial crisis and was on the verge of stopping all payments. Loans had to be negotiated with international financial institutions, particularly with the IMF, which required a structural adjustment program. State finances were saved by credits from the IMF and the European Union. Algerian negotiators, who played on the fear of the European states about the Islamist threat, said in effect, "It's either us, with all our defects, or an Islamist republic just one hour's flight from Europe." Alarmed to the point of panic, the West paid up without any conditions on how their credits were to be used. Policy thereafter fluctuated between rhetoric and laxity in letting deficits mount. — Ellen Lust

There were people who had sampled my voice from speeches when I was an Islamist and made them the chorus of pro-Islamist rap songs who then began talking about me as an apostate. — Maajid Nawaz

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

You've got problems in Central Asia. And you've got problems within our own communities back home. So if we end up saying, look, this has nothing to do with Islam or it's got no connection with that broader question, then we look, frankly, as if we're in denial about the problem. And the interesting thing in the Middle East is that they have absolutely no problem there in identifying that as Islamist extremism and calling it that. — Tony Blair

Remember, the Islamist view of democracy is: one man, one vote, one election, and that's it. — John Fund

What often happens with these Islamist regimes, there are differing philosophies in terms of how fast to go in getting to where everybody wants to end up, which is Sharia. That is the ultimate objective for all of these places. But they have different strategies on the speed with which they're going to get there, and the strategies involve foreign policy. — Rush Limbaugh

It's a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions. — Steven Pinker