Baroness Warsi has denounced atheist academic Richard Dawkins as a "secular fundamentalist", as she spoke about tackling Islamophobia.
During a wide-ranging interview with the Huffington Post UK, the minister for faith and communities, who is a Muslim, said the "most aggressive post I get is from people who are secular fundamentalists".
The Tory peer told HuffPost UK: "For me, what I define as a secular fundamentalist is somebody who says that there should be no public space for faith." When it was pointed out to her that this is what 'God Delusion' author Richard Dawkins and his fellow 'new atheists' call for, she replied: "That's why they’re so fundamentalist in their [secular] beliefs."
This isn't the first time Warsi and Dawkins have clashed. In an article for the Daily Telegraph in February 2012, Warsi claimed the UK was under threat from a growing wave of "militant secularisation". Dawkins responded by accusing her of wanting to "push religion" in the public sphere.