If you read the Qur'an with your head, you find repetition. If you read it with your heart, you find depth.

I am not a politician. I have often been approached in this regard, but I have always declined these sorts of offers. I view myself as an independent, critical intellectual, as someone who tries to stimulate thought on the left and the right, to encourage intellectual evolution.

Pray in the night so that you can change the world in the day

I'd say that the modern social sciences are just showing us why the conditions for implementing Hudud are so demanding, and thus Hudud should only be for the absolutely last resort.

Things need to be properly named. Political confusion starts with terminology confusion. Islamism implies some sort of political and social plan for Muslim people. In that classification, we find different categories. Legalist ones, traditional ones and revolutionary ones. Some of them are revolutionary but are non-violent, others are extremely violent. There are also the ones we call the literalists, like the Egyptian party Hizb al-Nour that used to be against democracy and now is getting into the political game.

Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.

I think we are making a mistake, a very big mistake if we look at what we call the Arab Awakening only by looking at the whole dynamics in political and not in economic terms.