“Her latest book, The New Religious Intolerance, is a vigorous defence of the religious freedom of minorities in the face of post-9/11 Islamophobia. And by minorities she mostly means Muslims. ‘We see unreasoning fear driving a certain amount of public policy, perhaps more in Europe than in the US,’ she explains. And Europe has historical form on all this. ‘The laws that made it illegal to speak Latin in a church but left it legal to speak Latin in universities were covert forms of persecution – and not very covert at all. And you get that all over Europe. You get that in the Swiss minaret case, where a building that expresses the wish of a religious minority is suddenly illegal; you get it in Germany in those cases where nuns can teach in full habit but a teacher can’t wear a headscarf’.”
Giles Fraser talks to Martha Nussbaum.