The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.
The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.
Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.
If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.
The Muslims are, as a group, attacking people because under the Quran, there is the house of Islam, and outside of it, there's the house of war.
Had Elijah Muhammad tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted 500 people, but he introduced a form of Islam that would communicate with the people he had to deal with. He was the king to those who had no king, and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy of a messiah.
Secular intellectuals may wax eloquent about 'true Islam' being humane and peaceful, on TV programmes, but it is clear that they have not read any authoritative translations of the Koran, the Sira, and the Hadith.
In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam, where the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven.
We have to find a way to try and reconcile our beliefs - and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally seen homosexuality as a sin - with the reality of life in modern, pluralistic, secular societies in which gay people cannot be wished away or banished from sight.
The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.
Islam's basic principles of belief, worship, morality, and behavior are not affected by changing times. Islam does not propose a certain unchangeable form of government or attempt to shape it. Islam has never offered nor established a theocracy in its name.
One of the basic principles when you dealing with mathematics and Islam: Seek knowledge.
When 9/11 hit, the second thing I said to myself was, 'This really is what religious people do.' Those people flying the plane were very good, very pious, truly faithful believers. There's no other way to paint them. Of course, they are extremists by definition, but they certainly aren't going against Islam in any real way.
Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.
After the 9/11 incidents, Islam has become a big question mark among westerners, especially Americans. The mass media constantly raise the issue of relationship between Islam and terrorism.
Muslims around the world deserve to see birthplace of Islam represent the ethics of Islam.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks.
This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
The God of Islam is not the same God of the Judaeo-Christian faith. The God that we worship in Christianity is a God that has a Son. To Islam, that is blasphemy, to say that God has a son. Therefore, they do not worship the God that we worship.
