“Once you subscribe to an ideological dogma as a solution to certain grievances, it then frames your mindset.”

No idea is above scrutiny. No idea whatsoever. To criticize, to scrutinize and to satirize my own religion Islam is not Islamophobia.

After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

Within our lifetime, we can remember a time when Islamism wasn’t the dominant form of discourse or the aim should be to minimise the absolutists within any religious community and contain them.

Ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.

Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is the politicisation of Islam, the desire to impose a version of this ancient faith over society.

Does freedom of speech give the right to offend?

When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote.

Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and that led to my – it touched me in a way that really led to me opening up my heart, I’ve called it the re-humanisation process.

I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

If we look at Abdel Nasser in Egypt as an Arab leader, he was secular.

We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today.

No form of theocracy, whether it’s manifested in a violent or non-violent form, is ever good for civilisation, and we have to challenge it in civil society as well as we would challenge Christian-based theocracy, or any other form of bigotry.

I believe that preventing radicalisation is far more efficient than de-radicalisation, meaning stopping someone joining is a lot easier than trying to pull someone out once they’ve joined.

The Bosnian Genocide was something that triggered my consciousness and led to an awakening politically for me.

I’m yet to discover any form of theocracy that isn’t homophobic, that isn’t bigoted to the out group.

I am everything I am today, because of my past.

God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes.

The fatigue produced on the muscles of the human frame does not altogether depend on the actual force employed in each effort, but partly on the frequency with which it is exerted.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

I’m a million miles away, and at the same time I’m right here in your picture frame.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.

I believe that the time has arrived for medical investigation of the problems of manned rocket flight, for it will not be the engineering problems but rather the limits of the human frame that will make the final decision as to whether manned space flight will eventually become a reality.

When Nature her great masterpiece designed,And framed her last, best work, the human mind,Her eye intent on all the wondrous plan,She formed of various stuff the various Man.

The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.