For religious education effectively to complement what children learn in secular schools, it has to be intellectually stimulating and pedagogically sound.

The Muslim world offers deep roots in a system of values, emphasising service, charity and a sense of common responsibility, and denying what it sees to be the false dichotomy between religious and secular lives.

The West has many strengths, but prominent among them are science and democracy (with their public mechanisms for self-correction) and also private institutions, liberal economics, and a recognition of fundamental human rights.

The Muslim world no longer can be thought of as a subset of the developing world. Islam is well represented in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and western Europe -- and that presence is growing.

The Islamic world is remarkably poorly understood by the West -- almost terra incognita. Even now, one sees pervasive images in the West that caricature Muslims as either oil sheikhs or unruly fundamentalists. The Islamic world is in fact a rich and changing tapestry, which the West would do well to understand.

there can be no question about the power of architecture to lift a people's heart.

you cannot articulate the [ismaili] Tariqah without articulating the concept of Imamat.

The conflict between the power blocs is gone, hopefully forever. The massive imposition of dogma on human minds may also be gone forever. Henceforth, artificial constraints on human intelligence will be replaced in many lands by new horizons of hope and thought.

To create a pluralistic, civil society, private institutions must be established that meet needs of their constituent groups. The state cannot do it all.

Development is ultimately about people about enabling them to participate fully in the process and to make informed choices and decisions on their futures.