This simple truth is the essence of my message to Muslims throughout the world: know who you are, who you want to be, and start talking and working with whom you are not. Find common values and build with fellow citizens a society based on diversity and equality.
Interpretation
Embrace your identity and aspirations while engaging with others to foster a diverse and equal society.
In this quote, Tariq Ramadan emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and the pursuit of personal goals within a framework of collaboration and community engagement. He advocates for Muslims to understand their own identities and to interact with those who are different from them, fostering solidarity and building a society that values diversity and equality.
In practice
During a community outreach program.
If people who cherish freedom, who know the importance of mutual respect and are aware of the imperative necessity to establish a constructive and critical debate, if these people are not ready to speak out, to be more committed and visible, then we can expect sad, painful tomorrows. The choice is ours.
My experience of living with people of diverse religions and cultures taught me that one will never be at peace with the other if one is at war with oneself.
I believe my religion is the truth, but I am not the truth and the truth doesn't belong to me I'm trying to belong to the truth.
Compelling a woman to wear a headscarf is against Islam, and compelling her to remove it is against human rights.
The great majority of Americans do not know much about Islam but nonetheless fear it as violent, expansionist and alien to their society. The problem to overcome is not hatred, but ignorance.
Instantaneous and mass communication is the mother of mass naivety. Should we then lose hope? Is there any hope? But to lose hope is as dangerous as to nurture false hope. Where then can we find hope that is responsible?
Four things to think about. 1. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 2. Let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred. 3. Keep three chairs in your house. One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. 4. To preserve your relationship to nature, make your life more moral, more pure, more innocent.
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.
True freedom is not advanced in the permissive society, which confuses freedom with license to do anything whatever and which in the name of freedom proclaims a kind of general amorality. It is a caricature of freedom to claim that people are free to organize their lives with no reference to moral values, and to say that society does not have to ensure the protection and advancement of ethical values. Such an attitude is destructive of freedom and peace.
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.
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