'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.
I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.
The IRS targeting certain groups for harassment because of their politics would be unfair. If we found out the NSA was keeping special tabs on everyone who worshiped at a mosque or took a Bible trip through the Middle East, you'd have an uprising.
I think people often come to the synagogue, mosque, the church looking for God, and what we give them is religion.
I went to the mosque one day, and it came to me, like, 'This is where I belong.'
Let God's grace be the mosque, and devotion the prayer mat. Let the Quran be the good conduct.
Allah says in the Qur'an not to despise one another. So the criterion in Islam is not color or social status. It's who is most righteous. If I go to a mosque - and I'm a basketball player with money and prestige - if I go to a mosque and see an imam, I feel inferior. He's better than me. It's about knowledge.
Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of building a mosque near Ground Zero, this controversy now affords us an immense opportunity to examine who we are as a people. It provides us with the opportunity to get back to our foundational ideals, which have always stood as a beacon for the rest of the world.
My company is called East-West Theatre precisely because Sarajevo is this city on the border between East and West, the place where the Great Mosque and the Catholic Cathedral and the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral stand almost within touching distance of each other.
There's a sense of being under siege in many Muslim communities. People just assume there are agents or informants in their mosque now. It's a fact of life.
