I feel sorry for Yasmin. Does that sound condescending? I don’t mean it to; I want to encourage her to continue the journey she is obviously on and reach the end-point. As many posters here have remarked, her piece reflects the personal angst that thinking and conscientious individuals who have been brought up as Muslims are going through.

She is plainly a sensitive and caring woman, how else to explain her condemnation for those aspects of her ideology that we also see as homophobic and misogynistic? I applaud her effort, commitment and objective in trying to square the circle of making Muslims realise that secularism and equality of opportunity are valuable and laudable facets of western democracy that should be accepted at the expense of jihad, Sharia and isolation.

I’m equally pleased that she articulates and re-echoes our point that the ignorance of individual adherents should not prejudice our dealings with any other self-labelled Muslims (I wish she would do the same by understanding that not all of us in the West supported the disastrous foreign policy decisions undertaken by Bush and Bliar but maybe that will come over time). For this means that she has much more in common with western secularists (as many have noted on this thread) than the vast majority of literalists of her own religion.

She is so close, soooo close to turning the final corner and realising that freeing herself from the grip of childhood indoctrination far from being a dangerous and frightening step is in reality a liberation. I wish her well and hope she will continue taking one step at a time away from dogma and towards critical acceptance of rational values.

edit.