I keep on repeating something told to me by an American psychologist: "When you are making a joke about someone and you are the only one to laugh, it is not a joke. It is a joke only for yourself." If people are making a joke they have the right to laugh at me but I will ignore them. Ignoring doesn't mean that you don't understand. You understand it so much that you don't want to react.
Tariq RamadanTo Islamize doesn't make sense to me. But to center, but to have intellectual empathy and modesty - all these dimensions are important on how we look at truth.
Tariq RamadanThe 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.
Tariq RamadanUnfortunately there are some trends that are changing this but you don't have for example as strict and narrow understanding of the relationship between men and women. And then there is the philosophy we have to extract in the relationship between text and culture.
Tariq Ramadan