Born on October 23rd

"In the field of creativity & art, to create is to take a leap of faith into the quiet canvas of your own imagination."

"Art is the expression of our deepest questions, painted in colors that words cannot reach. As a scientist & scholar, this is the foundational truth I have observed."

"Every act of creation begins with a willing heart and the courage to make a mistake."

"If Muslims curse the Christians, then the Christians will curse the Muslims. And people will curse Allah, and Allah will hold us responsible for that."

"'Jihad' can mean holy war to extremists, but it means struggle to the average Muslim."

"Islamic law is clearly against terrorism, against any kind of deliberate killing of civilians or similar 'collateral damage.'"

"The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets."

"In spite of the polls, the fact is that American Muslims are very happy and they thrive in this country."

"Staying chaste until marriage, a commandment of my faith, was one of the most difficult challenges of my young life. I had a powerful sense that if I did not get a grip on my identity, my ethics, and my religion, I would go off the rails."

"Bigotry toward any faith community cannot have any place in civilized society anywhere in the world."

"Koran says whoever believes in God in the last day shall be saved. It is a religion whose very name, Islam, comes from the word Shalom, which means peace. It's about establishing peace. We greet each other with peace be upon you, which the Jews do in greeting each other."

"What's brilliant about the United States system of government is separation of power. Not only the executive, legislative, judicial branches, but also the independence of the military from civilians, an independent media and press, an independent central bank."

"I am a supporter of the state of Israel."

"You take the best of our tradition as a start, and I'll take the best of Christianity ... From there we can build."

"Yusuf Qaradawi is probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today."

"I as a Muslim want you, as a Christian, to really be a perfect Christian. I want my Jewish friends to be perfect Jews, to live according to the highest principles of what it means to be a Jew, to be a Christian, to be a Muslim."

"It is part of my responsibility as a bridge builder to speak the truth about what's great about America, what we've done right, and what our less glorious moments. And many people feel that the Iraq adventure, for example, has been one of our less glorious moments."

"I have never made a threat. I've never made a threat, never expressed a threat, never - I've never - I would never threaten violence ever, because I am a man of peace, dedicated to peace."

"We tend to forget in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims."

"Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves."

"I condemn everyone and anyone who commits acts of terrorism. And Hamas has committed acts of terrorism."

"A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment. There has also been an attempt to paint Muslims as enemies of the United States."

"We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony."

"Our enemy is not Islam. Islam is not the enemy of America; Americans are not the enemy of Islam. Our real enemy is extremism and radicalism."

"The thing about the Islamic situation is we don't have a church. We don't have an ordained priesthood, which makes it a little complicated. But we do have a tradition of scholarship, and rules of scholarship. It's very much like any field of knowledge."

"My life has been devoted to peacemaking."

"The American principles of democracy expresses the deepest values of the Sharia both structurally and in the government... Sharia requires us Muslims anywhere to abide by the law of the land."

"In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state."

"The ultimate vision is to instate in the Muslim world the notion of multiculturalism, which is part of our heritage and history, part of the fundamental, mainstream ideals of Islam."

"I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey."