Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My cast away this week is the human rights activist Sarah Khan. A British

Muslim she's the director and co-founder of an organization called Inspire.

Its focus is pretty ambitious, countering extremism in the name of Islam,

and promoting Muslim women's rights, surely among the most complex contentious and incendiary

areas of British contemporary culture.

Although her work is driven by frontline public concerns, her approach seems in part at least

informed by her own private progression at 13 and against her immigrant

mother's wishes she began wearing the veil only taking it off in her 30s because she says by then she was

older, wiser and more well read. She is part of the government's extremism task force

set up in 2014 after the murder of Lee Riggi and also currently sits on the

government's Community Engagement Forum. Her prime concern is empowering Muslim women and girls

to challenge radicalization.

So how did a one-time pharmacist from Bradford

end up as a powerfully influential figure,

unafraid to raise her voice in the corridors of power. She says, my religion has been tarnished,

and it pains me greatly to say it, but at the same time I feel spurred on in my duty as a Muslim to reclaim my faith back from the grasp of

extremism and terrorists.

Sarah Khan, welcome to Desert Island discs.

I quoted you there as saying that you wanted to reclaim your faith from extremists

...