> "Look mate", I told him, "I work round here, so I meet a fair few > Muslims, none of them have ever mentioned that before". There's a fallacious assumption there that all Muslims are the same. Are all Christians the same? No. Some believe in papal infallibility, some don't; some believe that the world is 6000 years old, some don't; some believe that they can handle poisonous snakes and be unharmed, some don't. Some of the differences in belief within individual religions are cultural and some cultures definitely have a concept of God calling time on you. For one, to use a familiar example, many of the native north American Indian cultures do and it's a concept I've come across in some African and Arabic cultures. It's quite possible, as you don't mention this guy's ethnicity, that he comes from such a culture. It's a bit of a stretch to go immediately from "I don't agree with your irrational beliefs" to "we think you are having a psychotic episode", and I think you're dangerously close to the line here. > There is a line between persuading someone, coercing someone and forcing someone to do something. Pedantically, coerce means to "persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats". I think that reduces the equation to "persuade or coerce" as the person remains unwilling but is now compliant from fear. And around here, mentioning the police to a Muslim may be erring on the side of threats of force *in the mind of the Muslim*. It's not that long since locally some completely innocent Muslims had a dozen armed coppers break into their house and shoot one of them. I doubt that many Muslims in Newham regard the police as good or even neutral actors.