In the same way that we have a body and a soul and a spirit, our soul can't walk in the street without our body - we would be dead then. Religion is the same way; it has to have a body, it has to have a form, it has to have structure. Without that, the soul cannot be prepared to follow the tariqah.

It is for Muslim scholars to study the whole history of Islamic science completely and not only the chapters and periods which influenced Western science. It is also for Muslim scholars to present the tradition of Islamic science from the point of view of Islam itself and not from the point of view of the scientism, rationalism and positivism which have dominated the history of science in the West since the establishment of the discipline in the early part of the 20th century in Europe and America.

When one talks about being like a dead corpse in the hands of a spiritual teacher it means being able to surrender one's will, specially one's nafs al ammarah, that is a part of our soul which is again a Quranic term, which commands us to evil - we must surrender that. That's what it means. It doesn't make you become part of a cog of a machine.

Look at Senegal, about 90% of the Muslims in Senegal are Tijani or Qadiri Sufis. Among them, they have very great teachers who have written poems about al-Hallaj, and they have not been killed. In fact, it's Sufism that brought Islam through all of Senegal, right under our noses the last couple of centuries. And you can go down the same line through Indonesia and Malaysia.

The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthropos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.

To be modern is to destroy nature.

Jalaluddin Rumi is completely rooted in Islamic teachings of Quran. He was a great scholar, he belonged to a madrassa, and he knew Islamic theology and jurisprudence very well. He knew Persian, Arabic and Turkish, which was coming into Anatolia at that time, very well. He was a remarkable, remarkable scholar, besides being a great saint.