Hitchenism/Waleed Aly's Voice of Islam

I was watching this Q and A set in 2009 starring C. Hitchens because I was wistful in remembrance of the great orator and public debate extraordinaire. However, as I went on watching, I was more interested in what another panelist on the show was saying. Waleed Aly, a politics lecturer, representing the Islamic view, I presume. He answered some of the questions quite brilliantly, and below are what I gathered from most of what he said, which I found really interesting (and jubilantly agree with):

1) On religious/non-religious charities that do good work: The fact is that there are religious charities that do a lot of their religious works...with ends that are quite nefarious at times. Religions can be used as a pretext of evil and violence. It can be instrumentalised in that way...and in opposite way. We are caught in the assessment of the work...let people get on being good and being bad...

2) A truly secular society incorporates different perspectives...Christian, Hindu, socialist perspectives...to have an 'approved set of modes of discourse' would be antithetical to the spirit of secularism in the society. A religious perspective that is not allowed in the public discourse is quite anti-secular. Secularism welcomes everybody.

3) In post-colonial world, religion has become an identity movement, not something that's regarding spirituality and faith. Religiosity...Islam has been instrumentalised as a list of conclusions, as a political ideology...(it's not a) manifesto that you can just download from a computer and install into the society. It certainly doesn't work that way...in the classical tradition...has been a constant debate. You can't centralise an authority to make definitive statements on behalf of God in the Islamic tradition.

And then, they talked about Roman Polanski and issues regarding Iran and Israel and women's rights. It is an altogether great video to watch...and as I said previously, Waleed Aly raised some important considerations for us to shed more light on what being a Muslim really means.

Note: I have paraphrased some of what he said, but it's still in accordance of what he actually meant.