My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.

European children are educated in a narrative of human tolerance every day, and if you want to be sure to prevent a backlash, you should at least think of bringing Muslim children and teenagers into the fold of that narrative of tolerance.

Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.

There are some mosques with facilities for women; it's usually a back room with a back-door entrance.

You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it's your own child. And that's what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.

By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mindset of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

When I was with the Labor Party, I'd get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn't conducive to their policies or to electoral success.