[10] Nawaz says that racism from classmates, Combat 18 gangs, and police, and feeling divided between his Pakistani and British heritage, meant he struggled to find his own identity growing up.

[15] He became a national speaker and an international recruiter for Hizb ut-Tahrir, travelling to Pakistan and Denmark to further the party's ideology and set up organisational clandestine cells.

[11] As part of his bachelor's degree in law and Arabic, Nawaz spent a compulsory year abroad in Egypt, arriving just one day before the 9/11 attacks took place.

[16][17] Since political Islamist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir were banned in Egypt, Nawaz was arrested and interrogated in Alexandria by the Egyptian security agency Aman al-Dawlah.

[26] He specialised in the Arabic language whilst studying historical Muslim scholastics, sources of Islamic jurisprudence, Hadith historiography, and the art of Qur'anic recitation.

[30] In an interview with American broadcaster National Public Radio, Nawaz explained how, other than the interactions in prison, George Orwell's novel Animal Farm played a major role in his turnaround.

[33] He also spoke at the Sovereign Challenge conference organised by United States Special Operations Command where he advocated the need to move beyond hard power, and look at new counter-radicalisation strategies.

Nawaz's personal story of turning back from Islamist extremism, and his counter-extremism work at Quilliam Foundation, encouraged Robinson and Carroll to quit the EDL.

[36] The move was hailed by Quilliam as "a huge success in community relations in the United Kingdom", and a continuation of combating all kinds of extremism, including Islamism and neo-Nazism.

[39] In 2009, with a BBC Newsnight crew and security team, Nawaz embarked on a counter-extremism tour, speaking at over 22 universities, and recruiting students all over Pakistan.

[42] In September 2013, Nawaz and his Camden District team was given the Dadabhai Naoroji Award for support and promotion of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic groups) party members.

[45][47] By 24 January, a petition to the Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg demanding that Nawaz should be removed as a parliamentary candidate for the party had received 20,000 signatures.

[46] Petition organisers denied a connection to its alleged originator, the Liberal Democrats member Mohammed Shafiq, and condemned the incitement to murder.

[51] His firing came weeks after fellow host Iain Dale accused him of spreading ‘deranged rubbish’ concerning coronavirus vaccines.

Mr Nawaz wrote that mass vaccination during a pandemic with a jab not tested for long-term side-effects “could be doing more harm than good”,[52] In response, he told his Twitter followers to subscribe to his newsletter, telling them the show was his family's "only source of income".

[60] Nawaz announced his intention to file a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC on the 23 June 2017 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

He has argued that multiculturalism has failed ethnic minorities by not promoting integration, inhibiting social mobility in employment and gender inequality in Muslim communities, and has encouraged bigotry of low expectations.

Nawaz opined that Brexit could enable the country to participate in a CANZUK agreement and forge an era of new alliances to counter the influence of China on the West.

Following Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election, Nawaz argued that the result came in part because of the left's failure to acknowledge white working-class voters who are statistically underrepresented in universities or employment.

[4] Following the murder of George Floyd, Nawaz expressed support for peaceful demonstrations against racism, drawing upon his own experiences of racial prejudice growing up.

[79] He blamed rioting and damage to businesses on the "uniformed, masked, majority-white, far-left", and "spoiled-brat, privileged, gentrifying, Antifa-clad, anarchist rioters."

[80] Nawaz has opposed racial profiling of Muslims, extrajudicial detention of terror suspects, torture, targeted killings, and drone strikes.

[83] In a talk given at George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, he suggested a revisit of the British government's historical approach to dealing with terrorism, and called for a more nuanced response to tackling the ideology of Islamism without breaching fundamental liberties of citizens.

[83] In 2009, Nawaz was among the twelve advisers to British government who wrote an open letter to the then prime minister Gordon Brown asking him to hold Israel accountable for its attacks on the Gaza Strip.

In 2015, Nawaz popularised the term Voldemort effect which pertained to analysts being fearful to call out the ideology of Islamism as the underlying cause of Jihadist terrorism.

[91] He argues that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is out to provoke a Clash of Civilisations, which can be avoided by calling out the underlying Islamist ideology and isolating jihadists from ordinary Muslims.

He expressed his concern that disappointed followers of Trump would "end up joining fascist or far-right groups" and take matters into their own hands against the eight million Muslims in the United States".

[97] In January 2021, Nawaz signed an open letter to the FBI and other Western intelligence agencies asking them to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 lockdowns were a "global fraud" promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party and intended to "impoverish the nations" that implemented them.