Before the twin towers were toppled, seventeen years ago today, I didn’t take much notice of religion. Nor, it seems, did Richard Dawkins. He tackled the subject head-on in The God Delusion, but only after he had re-evaluated the destructive power of faith in the immediate aftermath of the attack. “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense”, he wrote. “Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.”
It’s taken me rather longer to marshal my thoughts. While 9/11 remains an indelible memory, my reason for writing my book was altogether more prosaic. It was the idea, almost innocuous on first hearing, that members of other religions, and non-believers like myself, were required to treat Islam with respect, and that any criticism of the religion was deemed to be “racist” or “Islamophobic” or “anti-Muslim bigotry”…
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