I keep on repeating something told to me by an American psychologist: "When you are making a joke about someone and you are the only one to laugh, it is not a joke. It is a joke only for yourself." If people are making a joke they have the right to laugh at me but I will ignore them. Ignoring doesn't mean that you don't understand. You understand it so much that you don't want to react.

To have a moral sense is not to be dogmatic in dealing with rules. It can be an open way with dealing with questions of objectives and purpose, which is completely different.

Instead of looking outside of ourselves and counting potential enemies, fasting summons us to turn our glance inward, and to take the measure of our greatest challenge: the self, the ego, in our own eyes and as others see us.

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.

The dogmatic and, therefore, invulnerable core in Islam is understandably simple: acknowledgement of faith, prayer, charity and fasting. Almost everything else is open to interpretation and modification in space and time.

To Islamize doesn't make sense to me. But to center, but to have intellectual empathy and modesty - all these dimensions are important on how we look at truth.

Greek philosophy departs from the assumption that we can understand the world autonomously using our rational faculties. Islam is not saying this.