I would rather clean than beg.

I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

Infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially people who called themselves Arabists, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world - wrote reams of commentary [after 9/11]. Their articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew.

I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.

In April 2006, a Dutch court ordered that I leave my safe-home that I was renting from the State. The judge concluded that my neighbors had a right to argue that they felt unsafe because of my presence in the building.

Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

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