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Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature.

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

I had this desire to understand Islam better and then focus on the beauty of Arabic and Islamic cultures. And one of the first things to emerge was Arabic calligraphy, which was instantly inspiring.

The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life.

I think I came to see Islam, or at least one part of Islam, as an important defense mechanism against the commercialization of the world.

Well, the most important thing about Islam is that we have to differentiate between two kinds of Islam. The first one is the institution of Islam... second, the culture of Islam.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they'd fallen compared with the West.

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.