Not only did Malik assume the religious and Christian contours of conscience; he also argued, more controversially, that the right to change one's religion was a necessary aspect of this 'Platonic–Christian tradition'. Malik saw such a right as central to upholding freedom of conscience in the face of two key adversaries: a 'mass' (working-class and communist) politics whose focus on economic welfare threatened to reduce the human to a material, rather than a spiritual, being; and Islam, which, according to Malik's Orientalist depiction, lacked reason and distinction, and fused different orders (God and the universe, man and God, man and animal, and past and future) so that, in Islam, 'man – as to his origin, his powers, his state, and his destiny – is exceedingly ambiguous'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 131