The Truth does not belong to you, you belong to the Truth.

Your country needs religious leaders and religious politicians

I opposed the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I read the book and took a critical distance. I did not think The Satanic Verses is a blasphemous book. I did not consider the book as being a great read, but as an intellectual I read, I assess, and I respond. I make a difference between true freedom of expression to which we owe a response and provocation, which we ignore.

In sha Allah, God willing, must be the expression of humility of the active actors and it must never be the justification of the passive observers

If you do not have boundaries, you do not have a path.

We need modesty not only in the way we dress; we need intellectual modesty.

In fact all the Islamists, that is the reformists not the Salafis, now they all say that they want a civil state, a civil state with Islamic reference points. They are not talking about an Islamic state, or sharia in the way this was once understood in the fight against the colonisers, or just afterwards in the 70's, 80's and 90's.