...Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck. If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place. Wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them. You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them.

I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.

The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam? I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam. Ruud said, Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful. I walked into the office thinking, I have to wake these people up....The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.

No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, When Allah loves a people, He tries them.

The question of divine knowledge is so deep that it is really known only to those who have it.

We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.

There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

It is He Who sent down to thee, in truth, the Book (Quran), confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and He sent down the criterion (Quran) (of judgment between right and wrong). - Holy Quran 3:3

Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire: that is MUHAMMAD. As regards all the standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask IS THERE ANY MAN GREATER THAN HE?

Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things--as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty--but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge

Don't hate the Muslims or Islam. Hate if you must, the fundamentalists who consistently compel the human society to turn away from even the peace loving Muslims. However, the term hate would be an understatement when we are referring to the fundamentalists. The fundamentalists are the biggest enemies of the human race. Without the presence of the fundamentalist inspiration, no violence in the name of religion shall ever fester on this planet. People from all religious, spiritual and non-religious background shall live in harmony, enriching each other's lives, if there are no fundamentalists to divide them apart.

It's time that Islam should be redefined by the world based upon, the goodness of all the peace-loving Muslims, instead of the theoretical teachings of some books, be it Quran or the Hadith.

To the representatives of theoretical Islam, i.e. Islamic fundamentalists, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Buddhists and all other humans who are not Muslims, are not just object of extreme detestation, they are, at the worst, lesser humans of false religions. This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.

Terrorism has nothing to do with religion, Islam or otherwise. Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.

A Christian sits in his or her well and thinks that the whole world is his or her well. The Jew sits in his or her little well and thinks that it is the whole world. A Muslim sits cooped up in his or her tiny well and believes it to be the whole universe. The same goes for a Hindu and all others. Also, atheists are no different from all those orthodox believers.

In today's society, the animals known as Homo sapiens have become conditioned to elicit the same kind of fearful response whenever the bell of Islam is rung.