Ed Husain

But however hard it must be for some Muslims to accept, we have to recognize the flexibility within Islam, that there was a Muslim interpretation that drinking

You know, Ibn Sina famously, a great Muslim medical practitioner and philosopher, used to drink.

And some of the Muslims say that is Ibn Sina's position.

I'm not saying we should go and drink, but I'm just saying that flexibility exists.

The Ottomans were famous on spirits.

To this day, you go to Turkey, even at the highest levels of the so-called Islamist government, people are drinking spirits.

So there's a beer drinking culture in mainstream Turkey to this day.

So why do British Muslims have to snigger and dismiss either Ibn Sina or the Turks or a more flexible approach to Islam from Shaykh bin Bayyah or Shaykh Abdul Karim al-Isa and other big luminaries in the Muslim world and say, we are going to do what's been working in the villages of Pakistan.

And we're going to impose the villages of Pakistan on the rest of the country.

And with that, we're going to bring the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and further radicalize our younger generation.

And that's the worst combination you've got there.

You know, the remotest parts of Pakistan combined with the extremism of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Yes.

The grooming gang thing just beggars belief.

And I just don't understand it.

I really don't.

But I'll say two things.

When I was in some of those towns in the north, in Rotherham and parts of Manchester, and I met well-meaning white working class people that had seen their young daughters, nieces,

taken away and groomed and then used as sex objects, they would raise that with me.

And I put it in the book because my job isn't to filter.