I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

I think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

Obama has been the single worst president in modern American history in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.

When I was in the US, I felt that the discourse there surrounding Muslims as the other, problematising Muslims and Islam as the other was very similar to what we find in Australia, which is that the image of Islam is a constructed image in the West. We are starting from a point of view that Islam and Muslims - well Islam is a violent, misogynistic, hateful religion and that is where the debate always starts from - that presumption underlies the discourse.