Preach or proselytize for Christianity in much of the Islamic world, and you are a candidate for martyrdom. Practice freedom of speech in Xi Jinping's China, and you can wind up in a cell.
For eight years, you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world, army first or fist first.
Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.
Western civilization is, no doubt, predominantly on the side of secular relativism. That is not true in the Islamic world, where faith dominates.
I'm discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had on European music and culture.
In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra.
Usually, people in the Islamic world set aside one-third or one-fourth of their wealth for endowment, and that will be effective only after their death. But in my case, I decided to implement this decision in my lifetime itself.
But September 11 marked a big change in the sense that the public was suddenly interested, and as a professor at a public university I felt a responsibility to respond to all of the inquiries about the Islamic world.
The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.
I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's darkest hours.
I remember watching David Beckham scoring that free-kick at Old Trafford to take England to a World Cup. Things like that stick with you. I was at Southsea, waiting to board a hovercraft for the Isle of Wight. We ended up missing it because we were more interested in watching the big screen.
I vowed I would do everything I could to stop the Isle of Man counting towards the world championship. And it was stopped, so they love me in the Isle of Man.
We live in the physical world, the age of the Internet, and it's very easy to disappear from view and isolate ourselves from the rest of world and become invisible.
I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.
I've gotten to go to far-off places in the world, have very unique, isolated, intense experiences for four or five months at a time, and then, kind of like a dream, those things disappear. You may see those people again, but it's never, ever going to be as intense as it was for that time period.
Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.
Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.
Theodore Roosevelt's policy to build a two-ocean navy confirmed that the old-style isolationism of the founders had not survived the modern, increasingly globalized world.
I heard an Israeli speaking on Palestinian human rights issues, an interesting guy, and he said 'There's no military solution to terrorism. If there were, Israel would be the safest place in the world. But there's no military solution.'
The Israeli military plays more than a critical role in defending the citizens of the Jewish state. It also plays an important social, scientific and psychological role in preparing its young citizens for the challenging task of being Israelis in a difficult world.
