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.

Canada for us is a country of great, great importance. Why? Because, Canada has been able to build a pluralistic society, in a modern economy, well, Voil

I think we have difficulty making people around the world realise what is the Islamic World. One should not confuse Sub-Saharan Africa with Central Asia. One should not confuse Central Asia with countries of Asia such as Malaysia and Indonesia. These are different peoples, with different histories, that have been converted to Islam at different times, that have evolved since then, that have different languages, that have different interpretations.

We cannot take situations, which are individual, unique, and specific in time, in history, in geography and say, "All this represents the totality of more than a billion Muslims.

Il y a, en Occident, une absence totale d'

I hope very much that we can together enhance our own indigenous cultural expressions. They're free. Export them. Export them in the English language in such a way that the world has direct access to our own expressions of culture.

The pluralism of our world has existed for centuries. But during the cold war it was frozen. And when the cold war thawed, plurality became visible and I think that what we are learning to live with now is expressions of pluralism which in the past simply were not manifested in the same way. I think now the problem is how do you manage these expressions of pluralism?

I think that as a look ahead, one of my continuing questions is the nature pluralism. If you look around the world, today, some societies, some governments, some organizations, some people still challenge the notion of human pluralism. I think in the years ahead it's important that this notion of pluralism should be seen as much as possible everywhere as a human asset, not as a human liability.