“We heard that you just gave an unauthorized talk on religion,” one of the men said. “And we got complaints about it.” They took me to another room, photographed me and asked questions about my speech. I assumed that was the end of the matter and went shopping for gifts for my wife and children. “The ‘no compulsion’ verse was a problem to the earliest exegetes,” as Patricia Crone, a scholar of Islamic history, has noted. They are only enfeebling their societies, raising hypocrites and causing many people to lose their faith in or respect for Islam.

Source: New York Times September 28, 2017 08:15 UTC