The people in Arab countries are now speaking out and asking many questions about human rights, minorities, religion, democracy, "the other," and so on.

There's no violence worse than the violence of Iraq. For the last fifty years Iraq has been living a nightmare of violence and terror. It's been a horrible experience and people in Iraq will need a lot of time and work to get over the disastrous effects. But first we have to think about how to stop the violence, so that the bloodshed stops. In spite of everything, on the personal level I don't easily lose hope.

Knowledge and imagination are the life buoy and the extra lung for breathing outside the walls of a tainted reality.

It's ridiculous and painful to use the Arabic of an Iraqi poet who lived centuries ago to describe what we in Iraq are suffering today.

"Secret migration" across borders is a form of human degradation and evidence of the depravity of the human conscience.

I live in a small country in Europe - Finland - and I don't speak English well and I had nothing to do with publishing houses in the West. I lived in complete isolation.

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world.