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Dear Job Five (what a curious name!),

I’d be only too happy to think that your experience is representative, if rejection of shariah means rejection of terror. My first legal job, which covered almost the happiest two years of my life, was at a Muslim sole practitioner’s in West London. But then the Muslim in question was a Zanzibarian lady who drank and chain-smoked, had married (and divorced) an Italian Catholic, and who in middle life converted to Scientology; so perhaps my own experience wasn’t altogether typical either. I well remember my boss’s horror at the news of the atrocity in New York. But I also recall a friend of unimpeachable veracity describing to me how the bosses at her Muslim-run firm in the West End had cheered at the sight of the burning skyscrapers and the people falling to their deaths.

And, though of course it occurred a while ago now, I can’t entirely forget the destruction of fifty-odd innocent people on the London underground or the fact that several hundred “Britons” are said to have gone to Syria to participate in the beheading and burning alive of prisoners of war and elderly archaeologists. As for the “Inquisition” (about which I suspect you know even less than me), that happened some two or three centuries back and, unlike contemporary Islamic barbarism, is hardly, as Matthew Arnold would put it, “palpitating with actuality”.