FROM the window of Mona Siddiqui’s office, high up in Edinburgh University’s New College building on The Mound, the first thing you see is the great 50ft statue of John Knox that dominates the quadrangle. The leader of the Protestant Reformation is standing with one hand up to heaven and the other gripping his Bible, with his great beard in full flow and a rather frightening, judgmental look on his face. It’s an impressive, imposing monument that immediately puts you in your place, but Siddiqui takes one look at him from the window and laughs. “Yes, it is impressive,” she says, “but I get to look down on him every day.”

That joke, followed by the first of many big, jolly laughs, is typical of the light-hearted, relaxed, but deeply thoughtful approach Scotland’s leading Muslim commentator and intellectual takes to religion – hers and other people’s. Every religion, she says, should be relaxed about humour – there’s nothing wrong with a joke, she says; in fact, it can make you really think about what you stand for, and the Charlie Hebdo atrocity did nothing to shake that belief. The ability to laugh and see ourselves as others see us, she believes, is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Siddiqui explores this view in more detail in her recent book My Way: A Muslim Woman’s Journey, which she will be discussing next weekend at the Boswell Book Festival in Ayrshire, but what the book is really about is Siddiqui’s conviction that faith isn’t, and shouldn’t, be about certainties, which can lead to trouble and violence, it should be about questions. “Every young person wants an answer straight away and that’s not the secret to life,” she says, with slight exasperation. “We should be equipping them to ask bigger and better questions of themselves rather than thinking that every question has an answer. It’s the questions themselves that make life interesting.”

As for the questions I have for her, Siddiqui is prepared to answer them with impressive directness and not for a second does she seem to pull back from expressing her views for fear of offending anyone. We talk about the turf war at Glasgow Central Mosque and Siddiqui says the problem at the mosque and others like it is that they are usually run by businessmen who do not represent the wider community. We also talk about imams who preach hatred and she says they must be monitored much more closely. And we talk about education and Siddiqui tells me she is open to the idea of targets in schools to protect against segregation. It’s a robust agenda from an impressive thinker on a subject that is often beleaguered by political correctness and a general unwillingness to speak out.

Siddiqui is like this because it’s how she was brought up. She was born in Pakistan, but grew up in Yorkshire after coming to the UK with her parents when she was four and one of the things she remembers most from her childhood is that there were no limits on discussion. She remembers being free to think and explore, to read and to question, which she believes led to her initial ambition to be a journalist. In the end, though, she studied Arabic and French and came to Glasgow University’s Divinity School in 1996 to lecture in Islamic Studies, in the process becoming the first woman, first non-white and first Muslim to work there. She is now Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh and, more recently, has also become the head of the Scotland Stronger in Europe group, which is campaigning to remain in the European Union.

However, she is perhaps best known for her regular contributions to Thought for the Day, the religious slot on Radio 4’s Today programme, which have, over the years, revealed her thoughtful, non-judgmental take on faith. As we sit in her little office, with Knox still glaring away outside, she talks a little about what her Sunni Muslim faith and prayer in particular means to her.

In her book, she writes about religion being a search for a transcendental moment, when everything makes sense, but she closest she gets, she says, is the solace of prayer at difficult times. “It’s almost a fusion of two things,” she says. “The feeling that ‘this will pass’ but also that there are bigger things in life and those bigger things are always connected to that which is beyond us.”

Using prayer in this way is something Siddiqui has had to learn how to do, and she says it was the death of her mother, Hasina Khatoon, that helped deepen her faith. Hasina Khatoon’s death happened shortly after Siddiqui had taken up her first lecturing position at Glasgow University and it was a sudden, deep shock for her, coming just a few years after a similar shock when her father, Abdul Ali, a consultant psychiatrist, suffered a stroke and was left unable to talk. Siddiqui’s mother, who was 63, had been helping to care for her husband, but suddenly she was gone after suffering a brain haemorrhage. Trying to describe the effect of the death of a parent on the child isn’t easy, but Siddiqui says it was as if her mother’s death removed a certain gaze on her life - a protective gaze.

“That was the first personal death I had ever experienced, someone I had really loved,” she says. “And you don’t really think about death until you lose someone you love and I started to think I too could die – it was almost like ‘He really does take life back’.”

The fact that Siddiqui, who is 52, was married and had three young sons (they are now 15, 19 and 21) helped get her through the grief, but it was still hard going. “I was bereft and didn’t know how to cope but it did affect my faith. It’s almost a pessimistic way to think and I felt trapped in it for a while, thinking constantly that I too could die, but at the same time there was this sense of hope that so many good things are in my life too and I have to focus on that. But her death stayed with me for the best part of four years.”

One incident Siddiqui talks about from her childhood is a conversation she had with her mother about why she raised her three daughters the way she did. Speaking about her arrival in the UK, in the 1960s, Hasina Khatoon said she knew almost as soon as she got here that she would need to raise her family in a very different way to how she had been raised. She watched television, she saw how people behaved with each other and it brought her to a new, freer way of thinking. Siddiqui remembers her mother saying that it was a challenge to be embraced, not fought or feared.

Sixty years on, that is now pretty much the philosophy at the heart of Siddiqui’s teaching and public speaking, which has led to her becoming the UK’s leading Muslim intellectual as well as a somewhat controversial figure too. “You know, I was voted one of the top ten Islamophobes on some recent poll, up there with Donald Trump, and it was like ‘why doesn’t she ever defend Islam?’ But the way I think about it is that it’s the minority cultures in any community that have to adapt to not just living in a place but understanding what the values of that place are. There needs to be more self-criticism among Muslims.”

I ask her why there isn’t and why some Muslims have not adapted in this way, and appear unwilling to do so. Why are imams and other religious leaders not doing more to encourage open discussion about Islamic values? “I honestly don’t know – it’s something I’ve struggled with for so long and all the stuff with the Glasgow Central Mosque. Why are people so reluctant? They are quite incestuous societies in many ways, Muslims communities.

“There’s a lot of fear that whatever is said is going to be leaked out. There’s a lot of power and control freaks and the people who have made it in these communities are usually big businessmen so they are not necessarily coming from a background where they are concerned about the wider community. They are there for vested interests and I think for a lot of people the struggle is what does it mean to have British values.”

The death of the newsagent Asad Shah in Glasgow is a case in point, says Siddiqui. Mr Shah, an Ahmadi Muslim, was killed in March at his shop in an attack which the police described as religiously prejudiced and Siddiqui says the issues it raises are never properly discussed or addressed by Muslim leaders.

“People are saying Mr Shah was murdered because he was Ahmadi and there is a persecution against Ahmadis – none of this is EVER raised and if people are being discriminatory, Sunni or Shia Muslims against Ahmadi Muslims, then this is a real issue for Muslims and they should face up to it. But once the media catches on to a story, there’s almost a defensiveness, a ‘oh, no we’re not’ rather than face up to it.

“It’s very easy for certain Muslims to say that everyone is against us and we need to huddle together and show that this is what we believe and this is what we stand for, these are our convictions and all of that goes against the ethos of British society. You have to respect the values of the society in which you live.”

There is also the issue of the hate which Ahmadi Muslims have warned is being preached against them in Scottish mosques. Should we be monitoring those imams and getting tough on them? “Yes,” says Siddiqui. “I think we should, absolutely.” Monitoring their speeches? “Yes, I think so because there’s no point in talking about freedom of speech when freedom of speech leads to people being murdered. Most of us know that we don’t go around saying exactly what we want and peace doesn’t come about just because we don’t say anything – peace comes about because you make an active contribution to being peaceful.

“Any leader, not just imams, who is actively promoting hatred towards another community, or even if they’re putting it within some scriptural context and saying this is how it was and this is how we should still think, that’s wrong because it will have an impact on society.

“I don’t know if most of the imams are homegrown or from overseas and even if they’re homegrown, that’s no guarantee that they’re going to be open-minded and that’s a real issue. Why are we now third or fourth generation and have young people who still see things in such a black and white way?”

A possible solution to the problem Siddiqui suggests in her book is better and different schooling. Siddiqui herself was brought up being British and Muslim and took the same approach to her children. She remembers a Muslim acquaintance of hers asking her a little accusingly ‘Aren’t you putting your children into an Islamic school? but she says the thought never entered her head; indeed she was actively opposed to it on the grounds that education and religion are different territories: home was where her children could learn about their faith and school was where they could put some of the teachings of the faith into practice among people of all religions and none.

Siddiqui believes the mixing of faiths in this way is the best hope of finding a workable multiculturalism as well as a possible solution to radicalisation. “School is key,” she says. “Schools, any institution, should be able to create environments where people come together.” But I wonder if you have to actively encourage it, by, for example, legislating for a balance of religions in schools or setting a target that there should be no more than 50 per cent of one race in a school? “I think that’s probably a good idea,” she says.

It is notable that these ideas of co-operation and mixing are also at the heart of Siddiqui’s arguments for staying in the EU, a subject that is on her mind as chairwoman of the Scotland Stronger in Europe advisory group. Much of the argument so far has been about the economics of Leave versus Remain, but Siddiqui sees it rather differently.

“For me, I was pro Scotland staying in the UK and I’m pro the UK staying in Europe,” she says. “It’s usually discussed in economic terms but for me it’s more of a project of peace and Europe is not just something out there that we travel to; it’s a way of thinking about society. I can basically move around most of Western Europe and feel completely relaxed because I know how things work. For me, that project of peace, that way of thinking about the life, the software of democracy, is what attracts me to being part of a wider Europe.”

She does recognise that the referendum was essentially triggered by the migrant crisis in Europe, and that the arguments are partly about what would keep us safe, but she dismisses arguments by the Leave side that the UK would be more secure if we left. “No, in the age of the internet, there are no borders and the kind of security threats we’re talking about are mainly cyber threats. Radicalisation is spreading not necessarily because people are meeting face to face. And also, we have our borders – we have free movement but we still have borders.

“For me, the immigration issue and the security issue is not really the EU – the EU is bigger than that. This is an issue we’re facing because of conflicts in the Middle East and a kind of malaise in many Muslim communities around the world as to what is happening that is drawing people towards a more fundamentalist narrative. That may take a generation to go but it shouldn’t trigger people into thinking that if we leave the EU, that will go away. That’s not going to go away; that’s still going to be there. And we will have no friends to rely on.”

In many ways, the fact that Siddiqui takes this approach to Europe is no surprise because it is entirely consistent with the way she was brought up. Thanks to a conscious effort by her parents, she has always been clear about who she is - British and Muslim - and there is no angst about that, no dilemma about relating to others who are different, no “us and them”. This openness has dictated her approach to Europe and it also dictates her approach to faith - she is, she says, trying to communicate her way towards a more peaceful co-existence. And, in a world that still too often looks like it is dominated by men and by hate, she will go on trying to encourage others to do the same.

Mona Siddiqui is at the Boswell Book Festival on Sunday, May 8, at 4.45pm. For more information, visit www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk