Pankaj Mishra Quotes

The Muslim Brotherhood has decades of violent history covertly operating in the United States and is recognized by experts as having 100 times more active members than Al-Qaeda.

The Muslim Brotherhood membership includes designated terrorist organizations like Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists.

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.

True enough, Osama bin Laden is dead and other al-Qaeda leaders have joined him. But, the assassination of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi is a brutal reminder that radical Islamic terror groups have not disappeared and certainly are not dormant.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist group.

Just as not all socialists were proto-Stalinists, not all Islamists want to implement a theocratic regime.

The party no longer accepts the label of "Islamism"—–a concept that has been disfigured in recent years by radical extremists—–as a description of their approach.

One of the themes of 'The Longest War,' my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.

'Islamist terrorism.' The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world's population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.

In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed.

We can see that immigration has become favorable terrain for the development of Islamism.

The Obama administration has turned a blind eye to radical Islam since before they came to office. If you look at everything that's transpired since the famous Cairo speech in 2009, it's all been an embrace of those who are the most radical elements in that part of the world. That is not a good sign for America's foreign policy.

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.

The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans - farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization of extreme ideology. They are the godfather of all terrorist organizations. They spread it all over the world.

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

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

The jihadists come from many European countries, Russia included, and some even from the United States; hundreds of them - if you take Europe, Russia and the U.S. - are fighting in the ranks of extremist groups.

It will take more initiatives, both from within and beyond immigrant circles, to prevent Salafists and other Islamists from achieving the upper hand with their anti-democratic authoritarianism.

Political Islam is exclusive in its claims.

I am not big on the idea that a rapid injection of democracy will reform radical Moslems.

Islamists want power!

Of course there is a tie between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. These are strong ties, because the Taliban gave up Afghanistan for the sake of Al-Qaeda. There are still Al-Qaeda youth here, in Afghanistan. The Taliban is willing to accompany Al-Qaeda to any country in order to wage Jihad there. they want to establish Allah's law everywhere. Our religion is one, and we will remain together.

It is now abundantly clear the source of Muslim terrorism is situated within the body politic of Islam and its adherents, irrespective of how many times, on the one hand, some Muslim spokespersons try to obscure this reality and, on the other, politicians of whatever stripe for electoral purposes behave as ostriches with their heads in the sand