The quest for truth must be carried out by each person individually. It is like breathing, something which no one else can do for us.

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.

If you want to make a decision in life on what to do, but if you're trying systematically, through spiritual practice, through meditation, through the invocation of the name of God, to walk closer and closer in this life to Him, you need someone to guide you. And God has made it possible in Islam for this guidance to exist.

The love of God is not only the highest form of love, but also in reality the only love of which all other loves are but shadows

Sufism has always had the function of purifying Islamic ethics and that fasting and tazkiya is like lighting a lamp.

The life of Islamic philosophy did not terminate with Ibn Rushd nearly eight hundred years ago, as thought by Western scholarship for several centuries. Rather, its activities continued strongly during the later centuries, particularly in Persia and other eastern lands of Islam, and it was revived in Egypt during the last century.

There is an idea that you can take the spiritual teachings of a religion outside of a religion and practice them; these ideas are brought forward. That appears to be easy. You can say, "Oh, well. I don't have to bother about not eating pork, and not drinking wine, and all you have to do is read the beautiful poetry of Rumi and talk about wine, women and song. Or something like that." This kind of attitude. This is the antipode of the other attitude which says Islam is nothing but throwing bombs, it has nothing to do with internal or inward purification.