Qanta Ahmed

In a monumental irony, the ECHR’s agreement with an Austrian court that offensive comments about the Prophet Mohammed were 'beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate' has handed a big victory to both Islamists and Islamophobes – while infantilising believing Muslims everywhere. The case concerns an unnamed Austrian woman who held a number of seminars during which she portrayed the Prophet as a paedophile. After she was convicted by an Austrian court of 'disparaging religion' (and fined nearly €500), she appealed to the ECHR claiming the punishment breached her right to free expression. The court disagreed.

As a Muslim woman observing Islam, I am fully supportive of Boris Johnson’s rejection of the niqab. And I wonder how many of the former Foreign Secretary’s critics understand my religion, what this form of dress represents and the subjugation it implies. To defend the niqab and to defend Muslim women are, I can assure you, two very different things indeed. Growing up Muslim in Britain, not once was I compelled to cover my hair. This changed when I moved to Saudi Arabia to practice medicine. Arriving in the Kingdom, by Saudi Arabia’s Sharia law, I could not go out into public without concealing my entire body, save face and hands, in a flowing, black abayya. This was my first experience of enforced veiling. And my last.

UPDATE: Watch Dr Ahmed discuss this article on CNN here  The appalling attacks in Paris last night were, as Francois Hollande said, an act of war. They were Islamism’s declaration of war on free society – but, crucially, they represented something else. An act of war, by Islamists, upon Islam itself. As Douglas Murray says, it is lazy and wrong to argue that these attacks had nothing to do with Islam. The repugnant creed of the Islamic State is certainly related to Islam - but it is also inimical to Islam.

Like so many of the conjoined twins Dr Ben Carson has skilfully separated, Islam the monotheism, compatible with democracy, and its impostor, Islamism, the totalitarian ideology, incompatible with democracy, while intricately conjoined, couldn’t be more distinct in personality. Dr Carson’s assertion that American Muslims are unfit to hold the Presidency is explained only by his ignorance - not only of US constitutional history but of Islam and Islamism. His inability to conceive of an American Muslim as a pluralist liberal democrat shows the doctor’s inability - or unwillingness - to separate Islam from Islamism. Dr Carson’s assertions are hardly new.