Indeed, he was chased out of his mosque under the threat of death. Two years ago, after he had spent 25 years at the same mosque in Leyton, east London, the other worshippers rose up over his views on evolution and the wearing of the veil. Hasan is a Cambridge-educated scientist. If anybody could build a bridge over which the almost wholesale official creationism of the Muslim community might travel, it would be him. He tried, tentatively, and can no longer do so from the inside. Maher wrote that Hasan "is now challenging the extremists he once led". Possibly. But he is not doing so from the pulpit. I regret to say this, but it is the same with almost all of the reforming voices I know of in Britain. As a society we constantly let this problem become ingrained. In October the terrorist group al-Shabaab listed a number of British citizens, mainly Muslim leaders, who it said should be targeted by Muslims because of their "moderation". All but one of those listed have repeatedly acted as apologists for, or been connected to, extremists and spent far more of their efforts on "defending Islam" than they have on reforming it. Yet the BBC and every other media outlet talked of these people as "prominent Muslim moderates", thus embedding "pseudo-moderates" as the best hope we have. It is through ignorance like this that we shore up more problems for our future.

If Islam is not going to reform, what will the rest of us do? In September there was concern after a poll carried out by Comres for BBC Radio 1 revealed that around 27 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds questioned said that they did not trust Muslims. Putting this into proportion, of the thousand young people surveyed, 16 per cent said they did not trust Hindus or Sikhs, 15 per cent said they did not trust Jews, 13 per cent mistrusted Buddhists and 12 per cent did not trust Christians. Nevertheless it was, of course, the Muslim figure that was seized upon by the commentariat. Few, if any, dared to consider what lay behind it.

One reason might have been that the poll was carried out in June of this year, just after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of south London. But the reaction to the survey was what it always is: "How can we educate young British people not to fear Islam? How can we re-educate them?"

The beginning of an answer is simple: make sure Islam is something from which there is nothing to fear. Tell Muslim leaders not just to "condemn" acts of violence but to stop them. Tell them that the era of ifs and buts about the extremists must end. Tell them to put the concerns of the state foremost in the minds of young Muslims, to have a picture of the Queen and say a prayer for the royal family in mosques as it is said in synagogues every Saturday. Tell them to teach their young that if they feel an urge to get involved in a struggle, they can join up for one the best armies in the world — the British army. In particular, tell them to create swiftly and purposefully a type of British or Western Islam which not only is not in the hands of fanatics, but cannot be reclaimed by them. Lock the fanatical scholarship out as strongly as historically it has been able to be locked in. I say all this with a sense of hopelessness. There has been no sign, in a dozen years, that any Western country is willing to do anything like this.