Where is your heart? Is your heart with God? Is it with your own ego or your lust? Is it with your greed, your pride, envy, or your resentment? This is a time where you can go into yourself and ask: Where is my heart? Ramadan is a time to give the heart back to the One who possesses the hearts.

For young people, if someone tells you: you are the future - say No! I'm the present. You have things to do right now.

Everyone’s a believer when things are going fine. The real faith is when one becomes patient with tribulations.

There's no specific punishment in the books of fiqh (Islamic laws) that relate to homosexuality per se. They apply to any illicit sexual relations, including prohibited heterosexual acts like adultery. And the punishments are strong, but they are legal fictions because they are impossible to prove. You need four witnesses to say they witnessed (sexual) penetration. In what circumstances are you going to find someone to testify to that?

There's a statement in the Quran: There should be "absolutely no compulsion in religion."

In our inherent contradictions as humans, and in order to validate our own pain, we deny the pain of others. But it is in acknowledging the pain of others that we achieve fully our humanity.

What comes to a person in his or her life, however difficult it may be, perhaps will help a person move closer to God. The response to tribulation is abr, which is patience, perseverance, steadfastness, and resolve. Allāh loves the patient; part of the reason the tribulation comes is to draw the quality of patience out of them - He loves this quality.