Hello, listeners and welcome to a very special bonus episode of the Europeans.

We are going to be playing you a longer version of the interview you may have heard in our most recent episode.

We really enjoyed speaking to Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, who is one of the leading contemporary voices on Islam,

according to the BBC.

And he's just written this book about Islam in Europe.

And yeah, we thought it was really interesting.

So we thought it was worth playing a bit more of the interview,

even though total transparency I did leave before the end of the interview.

Don't tell everyone that.

I shouldn't tell everyone.

We could totally have got away with no one ever knowing.

Well, Katie, let's just be honest about it.

People will be like, why is Dominic really quiet?

It's because Katie just won't stop talking, as usual.

It's because I left because I had to go to the theatre to work.

Some of us have to bring the bacon home. I bring home the bacon. I'm literally

late for work right now because we're recording this. So we better get on with it. Yeah, that's true.

Okay. Sorry. As mentioned, you'll probably have heard part of this conversation already, but there

was just so much that we talked about that we didn't have time to put in last week's episode,

so we thought we'd give you the whole thing. In particular, we talk quite a lot more about the history of Islam's role in Europe and go into a bit more

depth as well about the kind of challenges that it faces in terms of working out what

its role is in the continent today. And Akbar in general is just a super knowledgeable and

...