Have you ever wondered why so few moderate Muslim voices are heard in the public debate? I used to, until I started to defend my faith against its extremist defamers. I then found out that any Muslim who ventures into this arena to stand up against hardliners is subject to fierce and immediate character assassination.
The process is exposed in a Civitas pamphlet, out this month, entitled ‘The No True Muslim’ fallacy. It provides examples of the attempts to silence people like Sara Khan and Fiyaz Mughal by those who have appointed themselves as Islam’s spokesmen. But I can offer another example: the reaction to a recent event at the last Tory party conference.
.... I flew a 6,700 mile round trip in 24 hours to make one key fact patently clear to the Conservative party: be under no mistake about what is at risk here. They should see the ‘Islamophobia’ campaign for what it is: what the late Christopher Hitchens referred to as a ‘cultural fatwa’, where all discussion of Islam let alone Islamism becomes off limits, followed by the formal criminalisation of exactly such discourse. [The Spectator] Read more
