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.

It is only through the opposition of ideas that we can learn to be self-critical, to work towards intellectual humility.

You can't have anything happening today within the petro-monarchies, is going to be too risky for the United States and the oil interests there.

If you look at how great artists of the past, like Beethoven, for example dealt with art and morality, you see that there was torture and pain in their work, but there was also dignity in the way that was dealt with. So I don't buy this contemporary notion that the only way to be artistic is to be arrogant, offensive or immoral.

Your heart is the center of humility, your mind could be the source of arrogance.

I want the American Muslims to tell the leaders what they are telling me all the time. I want this internal debate to happen and the Muslims cannot just criticize the leadership without being involved. At the end of the day, you have the leadership you deserve.

In sha Allah, God willing, must be the expression of humility of the active actors and it must never be the justification of the passive observers