Earlier this month, the Southern Poverty Law center, a distinguished nonprofit organization which deals with hate crimes and discrimination, released a "Field Guide of Anti-Muslim Extremists." This list identifies 15 different authors, scholars, and public figures and provides a brief description of each of them. Among this list, however, are Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born ex-Muslim human rights activist.

Maajid Nawaz is a practicing Muslim who, after spending years as a recruiter for the radical Islamist group Hizbut Tahrir and subsequently many years in an Egyptian prison, whose entire mission has been to help reconcile Islam with liberalism and divorce it from the violent and problematic elements within it. His organization, the Quilliam Foundation, is a think tank based in Britan which focuses on issues of anti-extremism, deradicalisation, and counterterrorism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born human rights activist and former Dutch MP. Ali, an ex-Muslim atheist, is a vocal critic of such hardline and fundamentalist Islamic practices as female genital mutilation, –– which she herself has had to endure –– and honor killings, and is a strong advocate for women's rights in the Islamic world, who she maintains are among the most oppressed women in the world.

By including liberal reformists and human rights activists in its list of "Anti-Muslim" extremists, the Southern Poverty Law Center has effectively chosen to silence and ignore many very important voices from whole groups of marginalized people, and in doing so, are inadvertently accepting the most hardline and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam which chooses to remain divorced from liberal and humanitarian values. The Southern Poverty Law Center, like the actual radical Islamists themselves, has shown the world that they too do not want people like Nawaz and Hirsi Ali to be allowed a platform. While on the surface, it may seem like a well-intentioned and sympathetic gesture as to shield Muslim communities from uncomfortable truths to which they may take offense, but in actuality, is doing exactly what the Islamists want to happen.

Speak up for the minorities within the minorities, and stand up for the rights of the atheists, ex-Muslim apostates, homosexuals, women, blasphemers, and religious minorities in the Muslim world and demand that the Southern Poverty Law Center remove Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali from their Field Guide of Anti-Muslim Extremists!

https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/field-guide-anti-muslim-extremists