People say to you, 'you've changed', or something like that, well, I hope, for the sake of God, that you have changed, because I don't want to be the same person all my life. I want to be growing, I want to be expanding. I want to be changing. Because animate things change, inanimate things don&'t change. Dead things don't change. And the heart should be alive, it should be changing, it should be moving, it should be growing, its knowledge should be expanding.

I'm amazed at the courage of the journalists on the frontlines in Iraq, but we need intellectual courage in our community.

There are 20,000 Muslim physicians in the United States, Americans putting their lives in the hands of Muslims every day.

And that is the secret of this world. If you remove love of dunya from your heart, the dunya is yours for the taking. You can have the dunya because it's in your hand and not in your heart

My experience on this planet is that if you treat people with respect, they tend to treat you with respect.

There are irrational fears. If you see a woman wearing a hijab and fear is your first thought, something's really wrong.

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?