What's happened in the United States is something that has already happened in Europe and that is that Islam is become 'otherised', it has become a kind of receptacle into which fears and anxieties about the political or economic situation, about the changing racial landscape of this country are being thrown.

Well I wouldn't want to tell Obama specifically what to do, but obviously he's already promised publicly and privately, both before and after he was elected president, that he was going to open up communications with Iran.

The New Testament is not a historical document.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

I have to say that it's a weird feeling to have to respond to a Christian leader of an anti-Muslims organisation - it would be like having to respond to a Muslim leader of an anti-Jewish organisation about Judaism so the whole thing is kind of weird. Let me just say it's kind of convenient to simply pick and choose whatever violent bits and pieces one finds in the Koran and ignore the equally important versus that talk about compassion and peace.

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