Here’s why you should come and hear him:
For myself, though I would wish to eschew controversy among the ostensibly like-minded and cease throwing lead downrange, the dinner-party conversation struck me as evidence of how such divisions over the nature of Islam create a crippling discord amongst conservatives. The meliorists discriminate between a “good Islam” and a “bad Islam,” accusing those with whom they disagree of a perilous conflation of incompatibles. This “bad Islam,” apparently, is the product of a grievous misinterpretation of the primary documents and historical lore on the part of those who have “hijacked” the faith. It is not really Islam.
But the point is, as Anjem Choudary, head of the radical al-Muhajiroun (“the immigrants”) movement in Britain, assures us, the division between moderates and extremists is a “classification [that] does not exist in Islam.”
