I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

The University of Westminster is well known for being a hotbed of extremist activity.

I think I would encourage leaders to start working with communities in order to inoculate angry, young teenagers.

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.

I say I haven't lost my religion. I've lost my ideology.

Hizb ut-Tahrir spearheaded the radicalization of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger.

Wherever I've been, I've left people who joined Hizb ut-Tahrir. I have to make amends. What I did was damaging to British society and the world at large.

The positive is I'm delighted at the way the Liberal Democrats as a party have supported me and the way in which the work I'm doing, through the Liberal Democrats, has abled to broaden some of the work I work on.

I joined a radical group at the age of 16 because I'm a passionate man; the good news is that I turned myself around since then. But my character is still quite free and passionate.

I can say with a level of confidence that Islam is not a religion of war, only because the majority of Muslims don't subscribe to that perspective, not because there's something inherent in the text that tells me it's a religion of peace.

The conclusion that I have come to is that actually, no religion, whether it's Islam, Christianity or any idea based on scripture or texts, is a religion of 'anything,' really.

What's my audience? British society. Am I received relatively well? Yes. Is there within that... if you break it down, challenges with Muslim communities? Of course there are.

Hip-hop in the '90s began moving towards the Nation of Islam and the 5 Percenters, black nationalist movements; very much so, these movements embraced a form of Islam: Malcom X's form of Islam prior to his change.

I really didn't grow up religious, and I didn't grow up acknowledging my Muslim identity. For me, I was a British Pakistani.

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

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

We cannot hope to effectively counter extremism if we just focus on schools, universities and prisons: we need to take this online as well.

Chance explorations on search engines do not 'accidentally' lead users to extremist websites.

By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.

Academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them.

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

I was filled with hate and anger. But during my trial, something decisive happened: Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and it was an unbelievable feeling to know that there is someone fighting for you on the outside. Amnesty's 'soft' approach made me seriously consider alternatives to revenge.

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.

For my own part, once I became a teenager, I experienced severe and violent racism.