In October 2016, at the height of the Islamist terror wave that had already claimed my friend Theo van Gogh, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, the Bataclan concertgoers in Paris and the patrons of a Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Southern Poverty Law Center sat down in its offices in Montgomery, Alabama, and published a document called ‘A Journalist’s Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.’
My name was on it.
So were activists Maajid Nawaz, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz and a dozen others whose only alleged sin was insisting that Islam, like every other tradition of ideas, should be subject to criticism, reform and public debate.
I want to be precise about that moment in 2016. I was not, at that point, an anonymous person. In fact, I was already in hiding.
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