Teach the heart not to give way to proud emotions and arrogant thinking; bring the mind to heart-soothing solutions that make it possible to control oneself gently and wisely.

As Western Muslims and American Muslims, we need to understand that the values and principles we promote are not only Muslim values. American Muslims live in a country where justice, dignity, freedom and equality are essential values.

I look to Islamic ethics to find something that can provide the basis for shared values with other traditions, and ultimately universal values. This ties into the point I made in a book, 'The Quest for Meaning', that the only way for values to be universal is if they are shared universal values. My main point is, in this quest for value the aim is not to express your distinctness from others, but about being able to contribute to the discussion of universal value.

The United States of America or the Western countries, they don't have a problem with Islamists as long as they are neoliberal capitalists and promoting the economic order. And the best example is the petro-monarchies. The petro-monarchies, they don't want democracy. They say there is no democracy in Islam. But they are within the economic system.

We should not treat people as they treat us, we should treat them better.

I focus on Islamic applied ethics in many fields, and here I am saying that coming back to the Qu'ran and the sunnah as our reference point does not mean that we depend for our ethics on 'Islam as opposed to the others'.

The perception in the Arab world now is that we are having secularists against Islamists, and that's it. So the secularists are progressive; the Islamists are reactionary, conservative. This perception is wrong.