But Bawer weakens the force, both of his analysis and his argument, by broadening his critique beyond Islamist extremism, and its appeasers, to the whole of Islam itself. Bawer argues on page 62 of his book that "while there is such a thing as moderate and liberal Christianity, there is no such thing as a moderate or liberal Islam."

He goes on to maintain that, "there are millions of good-hearted individuals who identify themselves as Muslims and who have no enmity in their hearts for their non-Muslim neighbours and co-workers. Some of these Muslims are religiously observant, but their moderation is not an attribute of the brand of Islam to which they officially subscribe...liberal Islam does not yet exist in practice."

Bawer's judgement that liberal Islam is a chimera does not reflect my own experience. Sufism, the dominant strain of Sunni Islam among British Muslims, is explicitly moderate in theology and practice. There are many millions of Sufi Muslims who derive great spiritual enrichment from their gentle and contemplative faith and who are horrified at the crimes committed in the name of Islam by extremists. By instinct, most Sufis, and other moderates including traditionalist Shias, do not get involved in politics because they are quietists and wish to see a, properly liberal, separation between throne and altar. They are totally opposed to the ideology we know of as Islamism, which seeks to make any territory in which Muslims live an explicitly Islamic state bound by the austere and unforgiving rule of Sharia.

And because there are so many Muslims — pious, believing, sincere and faithful Muslims — who detest fundamentalism and disagree with the ideology of Islamism, who reject the worldview of the Muslim Brotherhood and Tariq Ramadan, who regard Sayyid Qutb and Jamaat-i-Islami with disdain, they are the natural allies of all those of us who want to defend liberal values from extremists. People like Ed Husain, of the Quilliam Foundation, or Tarek Heggy, Taj Hargey or Khurshid Ahmed, of the British Muslim Forum, or the Sufi Muslim Council, or the American Shia writer, Reza Aslan are all liberal Muslims whose lifestyles and worldviews are threatened by extremism just as much as mine or Bawer's.

Bawer quotes George Orwell at one point, saying that freedom, if it means anything, means telling people what they don't want to hear. And there are some writers and thinkers who prefer a world in which the battle lines can be drawn with flinty clarity between rationalist defenders of the Enlightenment on one side and those in thrall to the austere faith of desert warriors on the other: Reason versus Islam. But defending freedom means we must never surrender to such terrible simplicities, or we will hand freedom's real enemies a victory they do not deserve.