We must delve deep into history the better to engage a true dialogue of civilisations. Fear of the present can impose upon the past its own biased vision.

Our pluralist society must provide its citizens with the tools to understand religions, their symbols and their practices.

You can't say 'I don't do politics,' because silence is a political statement.

I wrote a call to the contemporary Muslim conscience, saying to the ordinary people that we might not like the video or the cartoons, but that violence certainly isn't the right answer. I don't think laws are going to solve the problem.

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

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.

I have never, so far, in all the studies I have done, met a contradiction between what the human, experimental and natural sciences are telling us and the Islamic rules. In fact, the opposite is true: anything that is coming from the modern sciences is helping me better understand the text. It's not a contradiction. It's a relation.