LAHORE: The founder of ‘Khudi’, a social movement against extremism, Majid Nawaz said, “Extremism has been existing since partition, and it cannot be washed away within days. Pakistan is considered as a failed state because of lack of ideological consensus, which needs to be promoted to build a peaceful and democratic Pakistan.”
Quilliam Director Majid Nawaz expressed these views in an interview with Pakistan Today. He said Khudi had a comprehensive programme to eliminate extremism from society. “We have focused on the Pakistani youth, which makes 60% of the total population and is equipped with determination to change the ideological image of Pakistan,” he said.
He stressed that the movement was against elements that used religion for political motives. “Our aim is to promote non-political democratic culture in the civil society to eliminate extremism and we are trying to change the way an extremist thinks. We are in touch with different groups that are struggling against extremism,” he said.
He said that he had been a member of Hizb-ul-Tahreer for thirteen years while he started his activism at the age of sixteen in England. In 1999, he started the activities of Hizb-ul-Tahreer in Pakistan with a few people from UK for this purpose. He was arrested in Egypt on extremism charges from the platform of Hizb-ul-Tahreer and was convicted five years imprisonment.
He said he analyzed Hizb-ul-Tahreer’s activities and found out that the demand of caliphate’s restoration was only ‘propaganda’ and the party was promoting extremism. He said that after four years of imprisonment he was released when the Amnesty International offered him the organization’s membership.
He said Khudi was organizing an international youth conference and festival in Islamabad with the coordination of Ministry of Information. PIA, You Tube and Google will sponsor the event in which over 100 delegates from abroad will participate and this event will focus to point out the reasons for extremism, he said.
He said, “Various schools of thoughts are separately demanding their own political systems; socialism, military rule or democracy, at the same time and this is why Pakistan is not going ahead.”
