“I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.”

My brother thinks it is very, very bad that I left Islam. My half-sister wants to convert me back; I want to convert her to Western values. My mum is terrified that when I die, and we all go to God, I will be burned.

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.

Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is stupid and wrong. But acknowledging that there is a link between Islam and terror is appropriate and necessary.

Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis; they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.

Americans have always welcomed people of all backgrounds, religions, and races. It’s a spirit of tolerance, now energized and amplified by the cult of multiculturalism.

Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.

Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.

Avoiding offense means that we don’t accept each other as equals.

My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.

As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn’t prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn’t have to beg him for financial support.

I’d love to go and visit the Mosque in Mecca again, just for the sheer beauty of it, not for God – much the way a non-Catholic might go to Vatican City because of the beauty of the buildings and the artifacts.

I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘moderate Islam.’ I think it’s better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice.

After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.

Preying on the grievances of disaffected young men is the bedrock of Islamism.

No idea is above scrutiny. No idea whatsoever. To criticize, to scrutinize and to satirize my own religion Islam is not Islamophobia.

After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is the politicisation of Islam, the desire to impose a version of this ancient faith over society.

When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote.

We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today.

The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.