I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

Unfortunately, in my home, we didn't speak Arabic; it was a mixed culture. My mother played a dominant role in our educational upbringing, and we grew up as part and parcel of Belize's culture.

If I were to pray in Arabic, I'd pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I'd pray to God.

Allah's the Arabic term for God. Stand up for God, fight for God, work for God and do the right thing, and go the right way, things will end up in your corner.

The international media concentrates on the famous, the big names. Al Jazeera goes to the margins, investigates stories that are still developing and in the future become very big. Why did the Arabic world love Al Jazeera? Everybody felt he was represented in the newsroom and on the screen. That kind of belonging is ours.

The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

In Arabic to say, for example, "Wisdom is precious," you could repeat the feminine pronoun: al-hikmah hiya tham?nah, literally "Wisdom, she is precious." It is stated by some S?f? Sheikhs (Masters) that S?f?sm originally was named Sophia, which connects S?f?sm with the Christian Gnostic tradition, in which Wisdom is personified as a woman, the divine Sophia. The physical mother of Jesus was an external image of manifestation of the Virgin Sophia, the word 'Sophia' stemming from Sophos (wisdom). The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was considered female.

I wrote those poems for myself as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying even if by chance they are later proved right.'

I want the Arabic Granada that which is art which is all that seems to me beauty and emotion.