The faith by which we live is the only sure guarantee that our problems will be surmounted. The younger people among you must be especially aware of this. Only the faith of your fathers will enable you to live in peace.

He (Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah) achieved in His life, for our community, that which could only have been accomplished normally in a period of many generations. The tributes that the world has paid him, bear honest testimony to his real life and work.

I have been amazed and thrilled frankly, at the capacities of even the completely illiterate populations, to express themselves about the correct priority that should be addressed. And if you follow their agenda, nine times out of ten, you'll get it right!

The basic problem is the enormous lack of knowledge of the Islamic world in the general world-culture. It's a rather remarkable thing and a very sad thing to me, that over a billion people, their 1400 year history, of civilizations, are simply not part of general education in the general Western world. It's a remarkable knowledge gap.

You cannot deal with a world like the Islamic world by rejecting the notion of pluralism. Historically, it is part of that world. The faith of Islam recognizes and sustains the right of people to be their own masters of the judgments that they make.

Generally you will see as much diversity in the Islam as you do in the Christian world today. But the West does not really understand the pluralism of the Islamic world.

What does it (the West) know about the Islamic world? Is anything taught in secondary education? Does anybody know the names of the great philosophers, the scientists, the great theologians? Do they even know the names of the great civilizations?

It's important to make the difference between the faith of Islam and the people of Islam. They are not the same thing. . . I think it's important for you to accept the premise that there is enormous plurality in the Muslim world. African Islam, Asian Islam, Central Asian Islam, Arab Islam. Even within the Arab world, there is enormous difference.

Canada has succeeded in an area where the developing world has one of its greatest needs: How do you build pluralist civil society in the developing world? Look at Africa. Look at Asia. What is one of the characteristics? The inability of different groups of people to live together in peace in a constructive environment to build civil society.

I think Western society has an enormous need in its general education about this complex of 1 billion people, and that complex of 1 billion people is as pluralistic as Western society. And I'm not talking about the faith in Islam, I'm talking about peoples, the cultures, the geographies, the languages, the economies, the histories of an enormous part of human population, which is not part of general knowledge in Western culture.