Islamism (Islam+-ism; Arabic: الإسلامية al-ʾislāmiyyah) also Arabic: إسلام سياسي‎ ʾIslām siyāsī , lit., "Political Islam" is a set of ideologies holding that Islam is "as much a political ideology as a religion". Islamism is a controversial term, and definitions of it sometimes vary (see below). Leading Islamist thinkers emphasized the enforcement of Sharia (Islamic law); of pan-Islamic political unity; and of the elimination of non-Muslim, particularly Western military, economic, political, social, or cultural influences in the Muslim world, which they believe to be incompatible with Islam.

Some observers suggest Islamism's tenets are less strict, and can be defined as a form of identity politics or "support for [Muslim] identity, authenticity, broader regionalism, revivalism, [and] revitalization of the community". Following the Arab Spring at least one source has described Islamism as "increasingly interdependent" with democracy in much of the Arab Muslim world, such that "neither can now survive without the other."

‎

Brigitte Gabriel (a.k.a. Nour Saman, born October 21, 1964), is the pseudonym of a Lebanese American journalist, author, and activist. Gabriel says that Islam keeps countries backward, and that it teaches terrorism. To promote her views, she founded the American Congress For Truth and ACT! for America so that others may "fearlessly speak out in defense of America, Israel and Western civilization."

She frequently speaks at American conservative-leaning organizations such as The Heritage Foundation, Christians United for Israel, Evangelicals and Jewish groups.

Stephen Lee, a publicist at St. Martins Press for Gabriel’s second book, has called her views "extreme". Gabriel claims she gives voice to "what many in America are thinking but afraid to say out loud, for fear of being labeled a racist, bigot, Islamophobic, or intolerant."

Brigitte Gabriel was born in the Marjayoun District of Lebanon to a Maronite Christian family when her mother was fifty-five and her father was sixty as their first and only child after over twenty years of marriage. She recalls that during the Lebanese Civil War, Islamic militants launched an assault on a Lebanese military base near her family's house and destroyed her home. Gabriel, who was ten years old at the time, was injured by shrapnel in the attack. She and her parents were forced to live underground in all that remained, an 8'x10' bomb shelter for seven years, with only a small kerosene heater, no sanitary systems, no electricity or running water, and little food. She says she had to crawl in a roadside ditch to a spring for water to evade Muslim snipers.

Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of several of Britain's best-known novels, including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Maryam Namazie (b. 1963) is an Iranian-born activist, commentator and broadcaster.

Namazie was born in Tehran but left with her family during the 1979 Iranian revolution. She has worked as the executive director of the International Federation of Iranian Refugees. and is spokesperson for the One Law for All Campaign against Sharia Law in Britain. The campaign is opposed to faith based laws and promotes citizenship rights and one secular law for all. She is Spokesperson of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain which aims to break the taboo that comes with renouncing Islam and to oppose apostasy laws and political Islam. She hosts and produces a weekly TV International programme broadcast in the Middle East via New Channel TV.

Moreover, she is a National Secular Society Honorary Associate and the NSS' 2005 Secularist of the Year award winner; spokesperson of Equal Rights Now: Organisation against Women's Discrimination in Iran; Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association; Central Committee member of the Worker-communist Party of Iran and co-editor of WPI Briefing. She is involved in the Third Camp against US militarism and Islamic terrorism among other things. Her blog has been rated one of the top 100 atheist blogs and she was selected one of the top 45 women of the year 2007 by Elle Quebec.

Maajid Nawaz (ماجد نواز, born 1978 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex) is a British Pakistani and former member of the Islamic political group Hizb ut-Tahrir. He holds a B.A. (Hons) from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies and a M.Sc. in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Quilliam (think tank), the world's first counter-extremism think tank. He is also the co-founder of Khudi, a counter-extremism social movement working towards the promotion of social democratic change in Pakistan.

Nawaz cites racism whilst growing up and feeling divided between his Pakistani and British identities as important factors in his struggle to find his own identity. The Nation of Islam and genocide in Bosnia also influenced him. Maajid's experience of Islamism began at the age of 16 when he left home to pursue a design course in London - it was then that he was recruited to Hizb ut-Tahrir (The Liberation Party). Maajid very quickly became a national speaker and international recruiter for the party, travelling first to Pakistan and then to Denmark to export the party's ideology and set up cells from London. He resigned from Hizb-ut-Tahrir in May 2007.