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1. Islam is a peaceful religion.
2. I think that Sufism fits all over the world. The concept is not anything that fits standard Western ideas — it’s always related to culture, to music, to religion. It is a dominant religion in Senegal.
3. In the West, you have always associated the Islamic faith 100 percent with Arab culture. This in itself is a fundamentalist attitude and it is mistaken.
4. I grew up with reggae music.
5. I respect music, I do. I love it.
6. I have to protect my family and have a life with them that is completely private.
7. I’m a modern Muslim. I pray, and if I have a question, I ask someone who is more educated in the religion than me.
8. World music is about taking things from different places and bringing them together — which is great.
9. I think people should know more of Africa in terms of its joie de vivre, its feeling for life. In spite of the images that one knows about Africa — the economic poverty, the corruption — there’s a joy to living and a happiness in community, living together, in community life, which may be missing here in America.
10. When the slaves left Africa, they left us this music. They left us blues.
11. I can assure you that I have never used my media companies for propaganda, and I will never do so.
12. The question of modernization is central to disturbances in the Middle East and in Africa. Everyone is after modernization, no matter where they come from. But you have to be careful about it, and more importantly, you have to have sense about it.
13. Senegal needs to free itself, to rediscover its democracy.
14. Travel teaches as much as books.
15. Africa is the future.
16. I want to use my music to deliver a political message and sometimes to denounce, but I don’t want to be a politician.
17. I don’t want to see that two-tier Senegal, that two-tier Africa, when you have those at the top and those at the bottom, people who are hungry, people who do not have enough to eat.
18. I have studied at the school of the world.
19. Listen, a lot of religions have fundamentalists.
20. Islam has been badly used by a certain ideology.