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

Hip-hop in the '90s began moving towards the Nation of Islam and the 5 Percenters, black nationalist movements; very much so, these movements embraced a form of Islam: Malcom X's form of Islam prior to his change.

I really didn't grow up religious, and I didn't grow up acknowledging my Muslim identity. For me, I was a British Pakistani.

In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

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

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.

If our hard-earned liberty, our desire to be irreverent of the old and to question the new, can be reduced to one, basic and indispensable right, it must be the right to free speech.

If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.

In Bosnia, the case was there were white, blond-haired, blue-eyed Muslims who were being slaughtered and identified as Muslims. That really touched me.

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.