What is tragic today is that there is a number of Muslims who think that all the solutions are to be found simply by external actions. They don't have to do anything within themselves. This is a deeply Western idea - modern, Western idea, where you try to improve the world without improving yourself. And this is what the Muslims who talk about others putting their heads in the sand and that "We are doing jihad and we are political" and so forth, they are emulating a very important mistake of modernism.

The significance of the vast Islamic scientific tradition for Muslims and especially for young Muslims today is not only that it gives them a sense of pride in their own civilization because of the prestige that science fhas in the present day world. It is furthermore a testament to the way Islam was able to cultivate various sciences extensively without becoming alienated from the Islamic world view and without creating a science whose application would destroy the world of nature and the harmony that must exist between man and the natural environment.

The Quran explicitly opposes the killing of innocent people and the Prophet was always careful in doing that. If they had to fight a war, he was always on the side of peace as soon as it was possible to make peace because that's what the Quran says also.

I wish someone could get rid of individuality so easily; one never gets rid of one's individuality completely. One gets rid of one's egotism, which is a very different matter.

How did the Turks become Muslim? They became Muslim through the Sufis. The Arabs never conquered the Turks. There were people in early Islam who were speaking like Hallaj, who spoke about the Truth, about reaching the Truth, about being one with the Truth, and not only they were not killed, but they were great heroes of their own culture, and there is a university in Turkey named after one [Sufi Saint.]

In Islam, we believe that it is God himself who is the ultimate guide - Al Hadi - one of the names of God is Al Hadi, the Guide. But at the same time, God has provided within the Islamic revelation the possibility of spiritual guidance through human beings, because then everyone can have direct access to God.

300 years after the rise of Islam there were Zoroastrians in Iran. The Muslim armies never forced people to accept Islam. It was only within Arabia that God ordered the idolaters to have a choice of either embracing Islam or fight against Muslims, because He wanted to remove this terrible idolatry that exited there. But outside Arabia where Islam met Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus, they were given a choice by and large. That's why many Christians and Jewish communities survived in the Muslim world, but gradually many of them embraced Islam for different reasons.