On the October 3 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the HBO program’s eponymous host and atheist scholar Sam Harris argued fiercely about the nature of Islam with actor Ben Affleck. Harris called the faith “the mother lode of bad ideas.” Maher said Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f*cking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” Maher went further, saying it is a mistake to think that just “a few bad apples” in the religion share these extremist ideas. Affleck, for his part, accused Maher and Harris of painting Islam with a “broad brush” and called their comments “gross” and “racist.”

After Maher’s incendiary comments aired, a student group at the University of California Berkeley that had selected the comedian to give the school’s winter commencement speech moved to disinvite him. The students’ petition accused Maher of hate speech, but the university, which is celebrating the anniversary of Free Speech Movement protests on campus 50 years ago, stood by the invite. On December 20, Maher plans to speak at the commencement.

In advance of his speech, Maher spoke exclusively to VF.com about the mounting reactions to his comments on Islam, and how, despite criticisms that he has misrepresented the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, it’s Bill Maher who feels like he’s the one being misrepresented.

VF Daily: To some people this wasn’t big news—you’ve said some of these things before. But it wasn’t maybe in such strong or stark terms. Did something change or something spark this for you that made you speak out more strongly?

Bill Maher: No. I’ve been saying the same thing for years and years and years. What changed was Ben Affleck. What changed is a very shallow country, and so when an A-list movie star gets involved in the debate, everyone cares. If it had been Kim Kardashian it would have been even bigger.

But, you know, what changed for me—I think in a good way—is that since more people actually paid attention to the debate, way more people came over to my side. I have a very politically correct audience—the studio audience that comes to my show—very often too politically correct for my taste. I notice now they are pretty much on my side on this issue because they understand that I’m the liberal in this debate.

If you said everything you said but said it as, “I’m critiquing radicalIslam,” I don’t think it would’ve have sparked so much controversy. It seemed to be the implication that you’re applying your critique to the entire religion. In your mind is there moderate Islam?

Well, it depends on what you define as moderate. [Pauses] They would say there is moderate Islam and I’m sure there are moderates in Islam. But again, if you speak out against the oppression, there is every chance that the people who are not so moderate will take it out on you. . . . The irony of the Berkeley situation is I thought campuses were places where free speech was championed. And one of my problems with Islam is that they are not that big on free speech—which so offended the Muslims at Berkeley, they wanted to ban my speech.

But as far as your basic question, this is something that is perhaps not controversial if you delve into the statistics—and there are statistics. There’s lots of polling and there’s lots of research on this subject that connects, lets call them the rank-and-file, with the extremely illiberal ideas of Islam. Like, if you leave the religion, it is the appropriate response to have death visited upon you. That’s not an outlier in the religion. A Pew poll of Egypt done a few years ago said, I think, 90 percent of Egyptians felt that if you leave the religion, that’s the appropriate response. Now, I asked this question before . . . if 90 percent of Catholics in Brazil felt the appropriate response to leaving Catholicism was death, wouldn’t that be a slightly bigger story?