People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that's what the West is all about.

It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.

I call myself a liberal - a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.

I don't have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it's not realistic to daydream about it.

I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form.

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.