All people, including Muslims, should be allowed to define themselves, not have a two-dimensional group identity forced upon them. We are all complex beings with layers of identity, and those who deny such reality are often engaging in their own form of correctness to further a distinctly political agenda.

Muslims know of Muhammad as a man who happily forgave the men and women who murdered his followers, even the woman who chewed the liver of his uncle slain on the battlefield. So why are ludicrous threats taken so seriously.

Iranian Muslim youth aren’t the only ones disillusioned with theocratic politics. Many young Muslims in the West like myself, once attracted to political Islam, have now become disillusioned by it. At the same time, we feel disenchanted with Western attempts to manipulate it, then demonise it when it suits.

Neither the West nor Islam can be seen as a cultural monolith. Those of us sitting on the fence should never have to choose between one or the other.

The mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay continues to be a powerful recruiting argument used by anti-Western and anti-democratic forces in the Muslim world.

The man who ruled over the world’s largest Islamic nation for over 30 years certainly was not perfect. But today Indonesians enjoy freedoms which their co-religionists elsewhere yearn for.