When I watch a TV show I wouldn’t notice if someone was Muslim or wearing a hijab. It’s nice to be on a show where your skin colour or religion is incidental.
Sometimes it seems that what really worries the Israeli governments, even more than the Muslim Brotherhood, is the real Egypt.
We need to understand why there is a void of participation in public life from the Muslim community and why it is a growing issue, and we need to understand the impact of this on wider civil society.
Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the ‘Wall Street Journal.’
I became, suddenly, not just a Muslim in faith. I became a Muslim in politics. Somebody whose politics were pre-defined by one interpretation of Islam.
In spite of this fact, the Western powers have never given sufficient importance to the Muslim world. They have always been inclined to treat it as a big backward and lethargic child.
I don’t think being a Muslim or being a non-Muslim has been an advantage or disadvantage.
It took the Gulf War to demonstrate that America did want more than one friend in the Mideast, and also was willing to take and make major risks to prevent a small Muslim country, Kuwait, from being overrun and in effect stolen by Iraq.
I did a lot of things as a Muslim that I am sorry for now.
Iran believes that before Imam Mahdi reappears, it must prepare a fertile ground for him and that it must control the Muslim world.
Being raised by a Catholic father, a Protestant mother, and marrying the Muslim father of my three children, I encourage people to respect and at least try to understand different religions.
American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem.
I think the way I am, the way I’m chilled out, has a lot to do with being Muslim and having faith.
I, therefore, demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best interest of India and Islam.
I think that Hassan Nasrallah is the best leader in the Muslim world.
It may be politically incorrect to say, but it is nevertheless true that a terrorist today is exponentially more likely to be a Muslim than a Christian.
The thing I found when I was actually reading through the Quran is that Christianity – that is a very easy switch to make to lead a Muslim to Christ.
We have been sold a Muslim boogeyman. We are buying into it, and we are terrified, and that terror is causing people to lash out at comedians like myself or women wearing hijabs, or anyone who seems to defend equality for Muslims worldwide.
This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.
I don’t just want to support only Muslim women. I want to inspire women across the board, and I’m hoping they won’t allow things to get in the way.
There have been huge Muslim demonstrations against cartoons depicting Muhammad and any other perceived insult against Islam. But I am unaware of a single demonstration of Muslims against Muslim terror directed at non-Muslims.
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.
It makes me furious to hear haters of all skin colors – especially Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists – deride other people because of their different beliefs and lifestyles.
The Muslim Brotherhood, or ‘the Brotherhood’ for short, is an Islamic group founded in Egypt in 1928. It has been pursuing a secret campaign to take over the government since its creation.
I tend not to believe radical Muslim movements.
I was on the steering committee of the New York City Coalition on Muslim School Holidays.
It was 1989, and the word ‘Muslim’ wasn’t even really used in Britain at the time; you were either black or Asian.
To be a veiled Muslim woman on screen is a very scary minefield for me.
People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim.
I don’t care if you’re Christian, you’re Muslim, you’re gay, you’re straight – I am here to fight for your equality. Because I believe that we are all born equal, but we are not treated equally, and that is why we must fight.
Americans have almost been conditioned to believe that the majority of people who seek to do us harm are those of Muslim descent.
Freedom of expression is essential for feminists and dissidents in the Muslim world.
The British, and most European countries, have struggled to accommodate Muslim immigrants, but they have nevertheless welcomed them in large numbers.
I did a play called ‘Disgraced’ in 2012 at Lincoln Center, which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. I played the lead character, a Muslim American, who had renounced Islam and became very anti-Islam.
I’m a firm believer in God himself, but that’s as far as I can go. I’m not any denomination. I’m not Catholic or Presbyterian or Baptist or Methodist or Jewish or Muslim. I’m none of those things. And I’m sure that’s just fine with God.
The human family is a great one, and the Muslim branch is certainly worth knowing.
A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic, a Jewish fanatic, a secular fanatic, an atheist fanatic, a communist fanatic – all of them are the same. The thinking that, ‘If you don’t think like me, that if you are not with me, then you are against me;’ this is something to condemn.
Wearing hijab made you know that I was Muslim.
Circumcision is obligatory for Jewish-born males – it must be performed on the eighth day after birth and is only postponed in the case of threat to the life or health of the child. Muslim parents also circumcise their male children.
People from all over the world were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. They came from many different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu believers were killed together as they worked in the towers.
I thought everybody would embrace and understand my reasons for becoming Muslim.
I am Shia Muslim.
I’m a Muslim Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. I grew up in Kuwait until the first Gulf War, when my family relocated to the United Arab Emirates. As an adult, I studied and lived in the U.K. before moving to Boston.
The Muslim world is deeply hurt by the campaign of violence initiated against our Palestinian brothers.
Even in the Western world, one cannot argue that the ideal has been achieved given the existence of issues like the integration, participation and representation of Muslim citizens, and occasional but lingering anti-Semitism.
I converted Dec. 31, 1999. It was a Friday. That was my second time going to the mosque. The woman who is my wife now… was basically raised Muslim – and she was at that point where she was deciding or trying to come to terms with her own relationship with Islam and how to embrace that for herself.
I would rather live as a Muslim in the West than in most of the Muslim countries, because I think the way Muslims are allowed to live in the West is closer to the Muslim way.
In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.
I mean, Britain is a country of successful Muslim businesspeople, teachers and educators, journalists. So, we have to say very strongly that the two million plus Muslims in Britain, the vast bulk of them make a huge contribution to our society, and they actually make it the vibrant society it is.
US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.
Being raised Muslim, we had to get up at the crack of dawn to pray. There was no sleeping in, no getting up Saturday morning to watch cartoons because there was no TV in the house. But you got up and you worked, cleaned the house.
Shortly after he became the first Muslim to attend cabinet, I urged Sadiq Khan to be prepared. The Islamophobes, the new McCarthyites, would at some stage come after him. He laughed it off. Yet it was only a matter of time.
We used to have a genre called Muslim social drama which nobody in the world has. Writers from North India and Bengal came and wrote great stories. Then that stopped.
People’s identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way – quite suddenly – to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.
ISIL is not ‘radical Islam.’ Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood – these are radical Islamic groups. They resort to armed struggle and terrorism to move toward their goals. But they are also deeply political organizations that have internal rules, standards, and codes of conduct.
The first responsibility of the Muslim is as teacher. That is his job, to teach. His first school, his first classroom is within the household. His first student is himself. He masters himself and then he begins to convey the knowledge that he has acquired to the family. The people who are closest to him.
