I'm sorry to see how quickly anonymous people leap to personally hurtful comments on blogs. I don't do anonymity. My father had been dead for five years when I became Muslim. If I wanted to zing my father I would have gone ahead and become Catholic, though he was so anti-religious even conversion to Judaism would have been a cause for discontent in him.

Not that any of that should be anybody's business but mine, until I decide to publish something about it.

I didn't say Judaism rejected me. I just wasn't Jewish and therefore had to make a choice. I made a choice, which was and remains very, very complex. This dialogue is, I hope, only the beginning of the discussion.

Islam does command kindness to others, it just doesn't specify 613 ways to do it. As Muslims naturally we have dietary and marriage laws, as well as regulations for prayer and burial, and the requirements for fasting, pilgrimage and charity, but in Hanafi Islam belief in God and the prophecy of Muhammad are enough for a person to be saved. I have fasted every Ramadan since 1998.

People who commented on my name didn't read very carefully: I was identified as Stephen Suleyman Schwartz right at the top. New Muslims, i.e. "converts" are not required to take Islamic first names unless their born names are pagan. I am not sure what a pagan name would be since most names today are monotheistic in origin; maybe Hercules or Caesar or something similar. "Stephen" means "crown" and is not a pagan name. In addition, I am known as a writer under my born name and do not intend to change it. However, in Bosnia and among Muslims generally I am known as Suleyman.

The reaction to me and my work has been much more positive in Muslim countries, as well as among Israeli Arab Muslims, than in the West. My book THE TWO FACES OF ISLAM and a book I wrote about the recovery of Sephardic memory in the Balkans after the Holocaust, SARAJEVO ROSE, were both translated into Bosnian and have been included in school curricula there. Non-Muslims have almost no context for imagining how Muslims relate to me; I will only say it is very different than how non-Muslims might imagine it to be.

I suggest those who are really curious look at our website www.islamicpluralism.org. We have made particular progress, incredibly enough, among dissidents in Saudi Arabia.