Let me make this clear: it is our duty to adopt a policy barring the wearing of niqabs in these public buildings.

Any item of clothing that covers the face and makes it impossible to identify individuals is open to abuse.

In the United Kingdom, we need to promote an inclusive British identity that involves and empowers people from all ethnic and faith backgrounds.

Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

Not all Muslims wish to express themselves in public through a communal religious identity. Identities are multiple, and some may wish to speak instead just as citizens in their professional capacity, through their political party, or their neighborhood body.

Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives, originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious fundamentalism.

Islamism is an ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society.

Being veterans of the struggle to push back against fundamentalist Christians, American liberals are well acquainted with the pitfalls of the neoconservative flirtation with the religious-right.

There were people who had sampled my voice from speeches when I was an Islamist and made them the chorus of pro-Islamist rap songs who then began talking about me as an apostate.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.

In current times, our moral uproar is best reserved for those who aspire to stone men or women to death, not those who consensually watch women - or men, for that matter - dance.

My feminism, as intended by me, extends to empowering women to make legal choices, not to judge the legal choices they make. My fight is for rights.

I am a Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents. I have a Muslim son. I have been imprisoned and witnessed torture for my previous understanding of my religion.

To suggest that a Muslim cannot think for himself sounds to me very much like an incident of anti-Muslim bigotry.

To be forced to defend oneself is an inherently undesirable position to be in. The focus shifts from ideas to the person conveying them.

Back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism - and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost.

I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact.

My upbringing was completely liberal from the start. In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity.

I worked my way through the education system and was treated as though I had value.

Before someone can change his ideas, he has to open his heart.

I became, suddenly, not just a Muslim in faith. I became a Muslim in politics. Somebody whose politics were pre-defined by one interpretation of Islam.

All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college.