Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.

The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?

Authoritarians tend to consolidate support by using fear, but more importantly by driving a wedge among the people that they want to control.

Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God’s essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?

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.

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.