Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.

To those who say "Sufism is apolitical" or "no politics," I respond: "No politics is politics." Look at the very old African Sufi tradition, the Asian Sufi tradition, or the North African Sufi tradition. Then you get it and understand what Sufism is all about wisdom, courage and resistance.

Advertising, music, atmospheres, subliminal messages and films can have an impact on our emotional life, and we cannot control it because we are not even conscious of it.

National politics and elections are dominated by emotions, by lack of self-confidence, by fear of the other, by insecurity, by infection of the body politic by the virus of victimhood.

I wrote a call to the contemporary Muslim conscience, saying to the ordinary people that we might not like the video or the cartoons, but that violence certainly isn't the right answer. I don't think laws are going to solve the problem.

What I see now is that even with the Islamists, who have been portraying themselves as the alternative to corruption and dictatorship and in defence of more transparency, there is one respect in which they have now changed completely. Since the beginning of the 1920's, Islamism was very close in positioning in some respects to 'liberation theology'. But that is no longer the case.

Criticizing to destroy is easy, thinking in order to build is much more difficult to achieve