As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.

In many of the things that people do, they themselves are the centre of attention, but they inscribe some other name on their banner.

Compromise has a negative connotation.

If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.

In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear.

We must break problems down into small, digestible bits. We must define the concepts that we use and explain what components they consist of. We must tackle small problems.