69fi rst met, I wasn’t casting judgment on you person-
ally. Simply living with the moderate’s dilemma
may be the only way forward, because the alterna-
tive would be to radically edit these books. I’m not
such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We
can’t say, “Listen, you barbarians: These holy books
of yours are fi lled with murderous nonsense. In the
interests of getting you to behave like civilized
human beings, we’re going to redact them and
give you back something that reads like Kahlil
Gibran. There you go... Don’t you feel better
now that you no longer hate homosexuals?” How-
ever, that’s really what one should be able to do in
any intellectual tradition in the twenty- fi rst century.
Again, this prob lem confronts religious moderates
everywhere, but it’s an excruciating prob lem for
Muslims.Nawaz Yes, I’d agree with that last sentence. It’s cer-
tainly an excruciating one for Muslims, because it’s
currently, and I’ve said this openly, one of the
biggest challenges of our time— particularly in a
British and Eu ro pean context, as witnessed by the
sad and horrendous atrocities committed against
hostages in Syria by British and Eu ro pean Muslim
terrorists. We defi nitely have to acknowledge that
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