When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

Sometimes I call myself a freelance, I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.