“Everywhere in the world today, people are searching for ways to reduce the threat of global warming both by limiting greenhouse gas emissions and by fighting the blight of deforestation. The key to both efforts is to move away from plant and fossil fuels, and to depend instead on renewable energy sources. Hydro electric power fulfills that goal. It is ‘clean’ energy - advancing sustainable development while minimizing its environmental impact… We feel deeply that environmental goals and development goals must be part of a Complementary Agenda - we can serve one set of goals only if we also serve the other.”

Mawlana Hazar Imam 
Foundation Ceremony of the Bujagali Hydropower Project, Kampala, Uganda
August 21, 2007

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“What the Canadian experience suggests to me is that identity itself can be pluralistic. Honouring one’s own identity need not mean rejecting others. One can embrace an ethnic or religious heritage, while also sharing a sense of national or regional pride. To cite a timely example, I believe one can live creatively and purposefully as both a devoted Muslim and a committed European.”

Mawlana Hazar Imam
The LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, Toronto, Canada 
October 15, 2010

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“When developments in Islamic societies break into the headlines, few journalists, and even fewer of their readers can bring the slightest sense of context to such news. These failures are compounded by our pernicious dependence on what I call crisis reporting – the inclination to define news primarily as that which is abnormal and disruptive. As one journalist puts it: ‘It is the exceptional cat, the one who climbs up in a tree and can’t get down, that dominates our headlines, and not the millions of cats who are sleeping happily at home’… Unfortunately, much of what the world thinks about Islam nowadays has been the result of crisis reporting.”

Mawlana Hazar Imam 
Commonwealth Press Union Conference, Cape Town, South Africa
October 17, 1996

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“I must believe that it is ignorance which explains the publishing of those caricatures which have brought such pain to Islamic peoples… Perhaps, the controversy can be described less as a clash of civilizations and more as a clash of ignorance… Perhaps, too, it is ignorance which has allowed so many participants in this discussion to confuse liberty with license – implying that the sheer absence of restraint on human impulse can constitute a sufficient moral framework. This is not to say that governments should censor offensive speech. Nor does the answer lie in violent words or violent actions. But I am suggesting that freedom of expression is an incomplete value unless it is used honorably, and that the obligations of citizenship in any society should include a commitment to informed and responsible expression.”

Mawlana Hazar Imam
Evora University Symposium, Portugal
February 12, 2006

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