Quotes about Islam

They are like those sacred cows in India which, I am told, eat up all the printed paper they can find in the streets... Yes, they gobble up all the printed pages from books that have been written centuries ago, but they do not digest them. They no longer think for themselves; they read and repeat, read and repeat - and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation. ...on the whole, Al-Azhar has lapsed into the sterility from which the whole Muslim world is suffering... If there is to be any change for the better, thinking must be encouraged instead of the present thought-imitation...

~ Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, Quoted by Muhammad Asad in The Road To Mecca

...the Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ...nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love...'

If the Muslims keep their heads cool and accept progress as a means and not an end in itself, they may pass on to Western man the lost secret of life's sweetness...

Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.

Islam united all heresies persecuted in Byzantine Empire and synthesised them well into a conseffion that later became a symbol of Arab self-affirmation.

Chapter 5

Jihad and Terrorism

Every Muslim must do jihad (struggle).  Must do.  In the literal meaning of the word, they strive in the path of God by observing the five essentials of Islam and trying to be good human beings.

            The Prophet Muhammed, upon returning from one war, said, “We have come from the smaller jihad to the greater jihad.”  Asked what he meant, he replied, “the jihad against oneself.”

            The word jihad strikes fear in the West, where it is understood soley in terms of war, but it is a more benign word for most Muslims.  To them, the first jihad is the struggle against the ego. Then there’s the jihad against the devil.  There’s also the jihad of the tongue to spread the word of Islam.  There’s the jihad of charity.  There’s the jihad of the pen to spread knowledge.  These are all individual jihads.

            Muslims are also sometimes urged to undertake similarly peaceful but collective jihads for the most mundane matters, such as the jihad for cleanliness, once declared by the Egyptian government; the jihad for literacy, initiated by the Tunisian government; the jihad against corruption in government, periodically proclaimed in Pakistan with little or no success; the jihad for water conservation, and so on.

            “Nowadays, jihad is often used without any religious connotation, more or less equivalent to the English word, crusade – ‘a crusade against drugs,’” writes Rudolph Peters, professor at the University of Amsterdam.  “If used in the religious context, the adjective ‘Islamic’ or ‘holy’ is added to the jihad.”

            But in the West where jihad is a highly charged term, especially since 9/11, we have two parallel discourses.  Those looking to discredit Islam insist that it is an inherently violent religion.  “Look, it says right here in the Qur’an,” they say.  Osama bin Laden and other terrorists quote these same Qur’anic passages to justify terrorism.  But most Muslims and many non-Muslims say Islam is a religion of peace, and they resent that both Islamophobes and militant Muslims are twisting it’s meaning to suit their disparate agendas.

            Falling somewhere in the middle is the Western media narrative on holy war.  The American media, in particular, have played hot and cold on the issue.  They were highly critical when Iranians rallied under the Islamic banner for the 1979 revolution that toppled the pro-American dictator, the Shah.  But during the US-backed 1980-89 holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the media glorified the 35,000 Mujahideen (those waging jihad) who had been recruited from forty-three Muslim countries and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency, and whom President Ronald Reagan called the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers.  Dan Rather, CBS-TV news anchor, proudly posed on the Afghan frontier wearing the local costume of long shirt and pantaloons, as if he had joined the jihad himself.

            The media adopted a more neutral tone during Saddam Hussein’s 1980-88 war on Iran, which he called a jihad and which the United States supported.  The media became hostile when Israel and America were targeted – by the Hezbollah during the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, by some Palestinians during the second intifadah, by Al Qaeda on 9/11 and by various groups since in occupied Iraq and elsewhere.

            Holy war is good when it suits the West but evil when it doesn’t.

I do know that Allah will debase the scholar who speaks for his own vainglory, and will honor the one who writes and teaches and learns for His sake alone.

If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be spent before the Words of my lord are spent.

My thinking had been opened wide in Mecca. I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

The Wisdom is old, the Koran is old, the Bible is old. Disagreements? Work 'em out.

He [Satan] said: "My Lord, because You misled me, I will make things on Earth seem good to them. I will mislead them all, every one of them, except Your servants among them who are sincere." (Qur'an, 15:39-40)

In the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of culture in a people. It was not until the Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more tolerant, and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that they declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture.

The search of knowledge is an obligation laid on every Muslim.

Reviling a Muslim is disobedience to God, and fighting with him is infidelity.

A Muslim has five duties towards another Muslim; to return a salutation, visit the sick, follow funerals, accept an invitation and say 'God have mercy on you' when one sneezes.

If anyone removes (one of the) anxieties of this world from a believer, God will remove (one of the) anxieties from him on the Day of Resurrection; if one smoothes the way for one who is destitute, God will smooth the way for him in this world and the next; and if anyone conceals the faults of a Muslim, God will conceal his faults in this world and the next. God helps a man as long as he helps his brother. If anyone pursues a path in search of knowledge God will thereby make easy for him a path to paradise.

I am a Muslim and . . . my religion makes me be against all forms of racism. It keeps me from judging any man by the color of his skin. It teaches me to judge him by his deeds and his conscious behavior. And it teaches me to be for the rights of all human beings, but especially the Afro-American human being, because my religion is a natural religion, and the first law of nature is self-preservation.

It should not be strange that the values cherished by all the three major religions are the same, since they originate from a common source. For example, Islam, the predominant religion in the Middle East, accepts as an integral part of its religious teachings both the Old and the New Testaments. If this commonality of moral traditions among the world's major religions does not say something about the universality of religion, it does say something about the universality of mankind. . . .

President James E. Faust has noted that in contrast to earlier, God-fearing times' a new civil religion seems to be developing in America. He said: The civil religion I refer to is a secular religion. It has no moral absolutes. It is nondenominational. It is non-theistic. It is politically focused. It is antagonistic to religion. It rejects the historic religious traditions of America. It feels strange. If this trend continues, non-belief will be more honored than belief. While all beliefs must be protected, are atheism, agnosticism, cynicism, and moral relativism to be more safeguarded and valued than Christianity, Judaism, and the tenets of Islam, which hold that there is a Supreme Being and that mortals are accountable to him? If so, this would, in my opinion, place America in great moral jeopardy.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

When Sufism was at loggerheads with the legalitarian Islam embodied by the doctors of the Law, known as the fuqaha', according to Henry Corbin: . . . Ibn 'Arabi made no secret of his disgust at their stupidity, ignorance, and depravity, and such an attitude was not calculated to win their favor. The tension rose, giving rise to denunciations and arrests; our shaikh was in mortal peril. At this critical moment the irreducible antagonism between the spiritual Islam of Sufism and legalitarian Islam became patent. Saved by the intervention of a friendly shaikh, Ibn 'Arabi had but one concern, to flee far from Cairo and its hateful, bigoted canonists. Where was he to seek refuge? He returned to Meca (1207).

For the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, it is of no importance whether Plato or Aristotle ever lived. For the mystical practice of an Indian, Persian, Chinese, or Neo-Platonic mystic it is a matter of indifference whether Rama, Buddha, Laotse, or Porphyrius are myths or not. The mystic has no personal relation to them. It is not here a question of somebody telling me the truth which of myself I cannot find, but of my finding an access to the depths of the world in the depths of my soul. And everywhere the tendency is to eliminate personality. Even where religion does not have this mystical character, it has no relation to an historical person, who communicates himself to me. That is the characteristic essence of the Christian faith alone. Even where a prophet plays the role of a mediator of divine truth, as for example in Islam, the religious act is not directed toward him but toward his teaching or message. But the Christian does not believe in the teachings of Jesus - which would not be Christian faith, but general religion - he believes in Christ Himself as being the Word of God.

In Scandinavian mythology, for example, the fountain of Mimir, source of hidden wisdom, lay under the roots of the great world tree and in Islamic culture fountains are found referred to in the Koran, in the garden called Paradise. In the Bible the passage: "It is done, I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely," reflects the importance that fountains symbolized to the writers.

"Each time that something comes to your mind regarding Allah - know that He is different from that!" Commentary: If you think and believe that He is what all the schools of Islam profess and believe - He is that, and He is other than that! If you think that He is what diverse communities believe - Muslims, Christians, Jews, Mazdeans, polytheists and others - He is that and He is other than that! And if you think and believe what is professed by the Knowers par excellence - prophets, saints and angels - He is that! He is other than that! None of His creatures worships Him in all His aspects; none is unfaithful to Him in all His aspects. No one knows Him in all His aspects; no one is ignorant of Him in all His aspects. Those who are among the most knowing regarding Him have said: "Glory to Thee. We have no knowledge except what You have taught us." (Koran 2:32)