Respecting other people's cultures is well and good, but I draw the line at where some branches of Islam, what they do to women. It's indefensible.
Modern society places an emphasis on individual responsibility, whereas Islam places an emphasis on collective responsibility and the family.
It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.
Our socialism does not include extreme materialistic concepts, since Indonesia is primarily a God-fearing, God-loving nation. Our socialism is a mixture. We draw political equality from the American Declaration of Independence. We draw spiritual equality from Islam and Christianity. We draw scientific equality from Marx.
I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.
Yes, ISIL is a terror-based insurgent army that seeks to establish a Caliphate, but the group's actual end goal is far from political: ISIL believes that, through jihad, it will bring about the Day of Judgment. This is not true Islam.
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
My aim is to show that those governments that violate the rights of people by invoking the name of Islam have been misusing Islam.
In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.
Those who say that the West and Islam are eternally irreconcilable have more in common with the Islam extremists than they might like to think, for it's the very same argument of course advanced by Al-Qaida. And they do have it wrong. We need to work with mainstream Islam.
The West is in for a long, irregular confrontation - not with terrorism, which is simply a tactic, but with radical Islam.
We believe women have rights in Islam that they've yet to obtain.
The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.
Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong.
ISIS and radical Islam have declared war on us not because of anything we have done - not because we are a friend to Israel and not because we have not yet toppled the bloody Syrian dictator Assad. ISIS and radical Islamists hate us for who we are. The irony is, we ourselves do not know who we are.
I always found it ironic when a Saudi official bashes Islamists, given that Saudi Arabia is the mother of all political Islam - and even describes itself as an Islamic state in its 'Higher Law.'
I have witnessed and heard countless reports of young black men routinely targeted and recruited by various subversive groups. One of the leading recruiters inside U.S. jails and prisons is none other than Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
The lesser jihad is our active fulfillment of Islam's commands and duties.
