I refer to the letter And the twain shall never meet , and thank Syed Azni for his sympathy.

I am sorry if I was being harsh, but the reason why I said 'Maybe we deserved it, as Syed Azni would say' was because he said, 'In short, two individuals have got themselves into the predicament and it's up to them to sort it out'. I think it was a reasonable interpretation of his remark, but I do apologise if I have misinterpreted his intention.

But my point is this - Islam has existed more than 1,400 years and has been spread to so many diverse cultures and traditions. Islam is many different things to many different people, ranging from the more mystic and personal Sufism to the more dogmatic Wahabbism.

I understand that Syed Azni did not 'make the rules'. But the crux of my argument is that while you can regard it as 'the rules' for yourself, you have no right to regard it as rules for other Muslims.

You can choose to believe what obligations Islam entails but just don't impose it on any other Muslim. Maybe to Syed Azni, Islam means that there are dogmas which must be obeyed as they are mandatory 'rules'; maybe to Husin Tapa , life is a 'jihad'. Still other extremists might believe that Islam permits and allows its clerics to become fascists and totalitarian.

All is fine, but if everybody begins to impose their own particular view of Islam on everybody else, we have a chaos - and human suffering and pain.

Many other Muslims do not share your belief in what is the true nature of and obligation of Islam and they also believe that neither you, nor any temporal authority in this life on earth, has the moral or divine right or obligation to force any particular interpretation of Islam on other Muslims, especially the kind that says it is right and obligatory to impose.

That is where the debate should lie - whether the majority of a billion Muslims could morally compel the obedience of even the minority of one Muslim in matters of faith and conscience. What Islam allows or prohibits, whether a particular teaching is a rule or not, is only secondary.

As Zaid Ibrahim has correctly said, these Muslims should stop playing God because to begin with, they are not the Almighty and 'How do you know God won't forgive us?'

What I have tried to show by my personal story is that it is all too easy to condemn people from an impersonal moral or religious high ground without realising how people have actually suffered because of your peculiar views on Islam which are not shared by them. History is full of such examples of such religious pride and sad to say, both Christianity and Islam have been guilty of this.

As an invisible victim of this authoritarian behaviour of some Muslims, I urge the authoritarians to open their hearts and minds, and listen to those who have suffered real pain and injustice because of their religious dogmas.

Put yourself into our shoes. How would you feel if you were born a Christian and you wanted to convert to Islam or marry a Muslim but the law did not allow this on the penalty of death? (Remember how Muslims suffered during the Spanish Inquisition?)

And more generally, put yourself into the shoes of the current living victims of oppression and injustice such as Anwar Ibrahim and the ISA detainees who have suffered at the hands of tyrants who claim to act in the name of the majority. Only when you are at the receiving end of such oppression and injustice would you know how precious and inviolable human rights and freedoms are.

It is because they realised how inhumane and oppressive it was to exercise compulsion in matters of religion, including on one of their own, is why the Christian West has accepted the notion of an individual's inviolable right to religious freedom in particular, and human rights in general.

It is not because they have 'betrayed God' (as many Muslim clerics like to accuse those who champion human rights, including Muslims), but because they have come to understand that the love and compassion of God extends to all.

All I pray for is that these authoritarian Muslims should stop betraying God's true nature and learn to be compassionate, loving and merciful.