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.
Pushing the limits, to be thought provoking, pushing people to think and question the limits, it's not always bad for the rules if you're confident because it can even strengthen your understanding of religion in the process.
The strength of democratic societies relies on their capacity to know how to stand firm against extremism while respecting justice in the means used to fight terrorism.
Lack of consistency is a weakness shared by all nations.
If Barack Obama was to say Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood, is an ally, he's going to be destroyed here by, you know, the opposition saying, "How come you can say that the Islamists are your ally when these people are the same who are Hamas, and Hamas is against Israel?" It's the end of it. So he's saying, "We are just wait and see; we are trying to deal."
Because ethics is fundamentally about questioning the ends, the goals and aims of our actions, we must come back to the rules and ask why. So we must return to the philosophy of law, the raison d'etre and the point of what we're asked to do. It's not easy, it's very demanding and it needs intellectual courage.
One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity.
Being Muslim has become synonymous with pointed questions, with tension and mistrust, even with conflict. It has become a global phenomenon with profound consequences for inter-communal relations, political rhetoric and policies at the local, regional, national and international level.
We want to tell people how great Islam is yet we are not great Muslims.
History is replete with ideologies of freedom, justice, liberation of the downtrodden and the exploited, that have been turned against the very people they had mobilised, or that have reproduced the same logic of exclusion and terror toward those whom they claimed to set free.
If you look at how we are destroying and disrespecting Creation it is obvious that is something is not clear in our understanding. We overemphasize rules but we don't understand the objective.
Drafting of the constitutions is interesting and the discussions around them revealing in many ways. I take it as a discussion of very important symbols revealing many different problems. My take at the beginning was to warn that Tunisia might be the only successful country, the only one to justify us in talking about the spring, while all the other countries were less successful, if not failing. Now the point is that even in Tunisia it is not going to be easy, and this is where we have a problem.
Fear and its accompanying emotional reactions have become part of the public mindset. Such reactions, while often legitimate, are also being exploited with increasing frequency for political ends.
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 democratic societies are in danger. In allowing ourselves to be infiltrated by fear, to be blinded by the passion of identity, we are entertaining the most serious illusions about our freedom.
If we agree to say that those terrorists are indeed Muslim, I have no problem whatsoever to condemn their actions. I won't apologise though, or justify my point of view.
There is a claim coming from the West that says that all art must be outside any moral consideration. I can understand this as a provocation, but I also believe that we can still have very profound creativity with a moral sense.
The question about the Salafi is an important question as I say in Arab Awakening, and have often repeated since. I am really underlining the importance of this, because we really don't have very good memories. Remember - the Taliban in Afghanistan were not at all politicised in the beginning. They were just on about education. And then they were pushed by the Saudi and the Americans to be against the Russian colonisation, and as a result they came to be politicised.
51% of the French people - who are not very religious - were thinking that what "Charlie Hebdo" did was unwise. They aren't asking for a law to prevent Charlie Hebdo from publishing caricatures, but they are calling on its editors to be a bit more sensible.
There is dignity in your being even if there's indignity in what you're doing.
Terror will crash down on us if we fail to understand that a pluralistic society requires the personal and daily commitment of every citizen.
The collective psychology is something very close to being sacred - we can do it but we don't do it. We should understand that the Holocaust in the European conscience is reaching a point which is very close to what is sacred for people in the Southern countries, whether they are Muslims or not. Because of that we need to try to have intellectual empathy.
It's okay to feel the need for protection if there is a real external threat. But to feel protective from the inside, it's a kind of jail: you get so protective that you cannot get out of the box.
Every country in Europe needs immigrants for its economic survival.
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.
