Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.

YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.