America is about choices, including those to live certain lifestyles.

Why do we need to justify God's existence? He exists. We need to justify our own existence.

I definitely have sympathy for people who are struggling. I've met with young Muslims who have told me about their struggles.

In the Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always - Che Guevara, people like that - they were always from the middle class and the educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion.

Religion is here to unite us. It's not here to divide us. If it's dividing us, it's not God's religion, it's something else.

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."