Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims - not excuse it, but expect it. And that's happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there's an enemy within.

[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.

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

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.

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

The religiously observant is lumped in with the nominal Muslim, the nominal Muslim is lumped in with the non-Muslim and the radical. If we want to make sense of this mess and stop pushing Muslims into the arms of the extremist, we need to make meaningful distinctions between the religion of Islam that a billion Muslims follow and see as a guidance as a peaceful righteous moral life and the puritanical Islam of a minority which so captures the media's attention.

I think that in many ways, some of those who did vote for Trump are sorry that they did so. But the hope, at least, is that we have a chance to make up for those kinds of mistakes.