Allow me to respond to the second part of the letter Islam does not disallow inter-religious marriage which deals with the so-called fragmentation of one single Islamic empire into various modern states, of which the cause the writer attributes to the interference of non-Muslim imperialist powers.

The one single Islamic empire is, of course, the Ottoman Empire which imploded (like the former Soviet Union) and broke up in the aftermath of the First World War.

As a matter of fact, the Ottoman Empire did not rule the entire Muslim world but only the Arab portion of the Middle East, Southeast Europe and North Africa. Iran, for example, was not part of the Ottoman Empire because the Persians, while Islamised, are not Arabs.

The Islamised Persians cherished their own unique ethnic culture of which Zoroastrianism is more influential. Afghanistan and Indonesia were also not part of the Ottoman Empire.

Another historical fact is that the Ottoman Empire was not so much an Islamic Empire as an imperialist project (as imperialistic as the Western imperialists) of the Islamised Turks and imposed via military conquest onto the Arabs in the name of Islam.

The root cause of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire was the rise of Arab nationalism in the 19th century in revolt against the imperialist (mis)rule of the Islamised Turks.

Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party adopted secular Arab nationalism - not Ottomani theocracy - as their ideology. They are the ideological product of the Arab revolt against the Turkish Ottoman Empire. This is another fact that Arbibi Ashoy must be clear on.

The Western imperialist powers of France and Britain seized the opportunity to divide up the Ottoman Empire as the result of the empire being an ally of imperialist Germany in the First World War.

The US was not involved, directly or indirectly, in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire because it was still isolationist.

So, the Ottoman Empire was not a passive victim of Western imperialism but a defeated imperialist project of the Islamised Turks whose offspring in Turkey have now accepted the outcome and transformed their state and society into a secular one.