There is the philosophy embedded in the culture we are living. It is quite clear for example that Arabs have a different culture than Malaysians.

Islam came to teach us that there is no faith without intelligence and here we are: destroying our intelligence in the name of faith.

The problem with what we call the 'Arab spring' is that these are very nationalistic experiences. Tunisians are concerned with Tunisia, Egyptians concerned with Egypt and so on.

If we agree to say that those terrorists are indeed Muslim, I have no problem whatsoever to condemn their actions. I won't apologise though, or justify my point of view.

What we have within the Sunni tradition is this clash between the literalists and all the other trends and the Salafi movement, that are very much acting on the ground and using the popular sentiment to act against the West.

Unsettled Middle East, in these times where the people are trying to find their way towards democracy, could be interesting for many reasons - for weapons to be sold, for new geostrategic interests to be protected, and something that we are not talking about, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The people who are lost in the whole discussion here are the Palestinians. We have demonstrations in Palestine in West Bank. Nobody is covering this. It's as if they don't exist anymore. And this is, in fact, central. And Israel is silent.

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'.