Islam Quotes

“The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?

I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“A Rule: Life without Islam is a naked tree,
Birds without trees can never feel free.”
― Leena Ahmad Almashat, Harmony Letters

“The first thing I would like to share with you
here is that when you help people, you don’t wait
around until they say thank you because you didn’t
help them so you can hear appreciation.”
― Nouman Ali Khan, Revive Your Heart: Putting Life in Perspective

“Interestingly, the more Americans report knowing about Muslim countries, the more likely they are to hold positive views of those countries. (p. 155)”
― John L. Esposito, Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think

“Not all Muslims become involved in acts of violence. Yet all might be held culpable. THis is because that section of Muslim--in fact, the majority--who are not personally involved, neither disown those members of their community who are engaged in violence, nor even condemn them. In such a case, according to the Islamic Shariah itself, if the involved Muslims are directly responsible, the uninvolved Muslims are also indirectly responsible. (p. 91)”
― Wahiduddin Khan, The True Jihad: The Concept of Peace, Tolerance and Non Violence in Islam

“Submission, when it is submission to the truth — and when the truth is known to be both beautiful and merciful — has nothing in common with fatalism or stoicism as these terms are understood in the Western tradition, because its motivation is different. According to Fakhr ad-Din ar-RazT, one of the great commentators upon the Quran: The worship of the eyes is
weeping, the worship of the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender and satisfaction in Allah.”
― Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi, Gai Eaton

“وإذا بالأوامر العليا تنزل من فوق السماء السابعة لأجل ذلك المهموم المكروب.. تنهي في ساعة سنوات العذاب، ليأتي عهد الشفاء.. لماذا تذهب إلى غيره؟ لماذا تلتجئ إلى سواه؟ لماذا تثق بكل هؤلاء الموتى الذين يتحركون حولك وتنسى الحي الذي لا يموت؟”
― علي بن جابر الفيفي, لأنك الله: رحلة إلى السماء السابعة

“Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.”
― Osman Bakar, Tawhid and Science

“An oft-quoted statistic from the [United Nations] reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.”
― The Economist

“[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus

“Hijab adalah pembebasan dari ketergantungan kosmetik dan topeng. Hijab adalah pembebasan untuk jujur pada hatimu. Hijab adalah pembebas jiwamu dari rantai-rantai duniawi.”
― Mahdavi, Ratu yang Bersujud

“On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war.”
― Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“إن أمة تفخر بالموالي والعبيد كما تفخر بالأشراف لأمة عظيمة وإن ديناً يتساوى فيه البشر ليستحق الخلافة في الأرض ..كل الأرض”
― محمد الصوياني, السيرة النبوية كما جاءت في الأحاديث الصحيحة #1

“Of course, a single verse of the Holy Qur'an or a hadith moves the faithful to good actions, but volumes of books would not move an unwilling person who is like an ass carrying a load of books.”
― Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalvi

“All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy.”
― Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam & Modernity in the Middle East

“The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.”
― G. Willow Wilson

“قانون الشريعة: بعدما قيل لهم أن الشريعة تجسد المثل الاسلامية العلياافترض غالبية المسلمين أن الشريعة مقدسة...يكتب ضياء الدين ساردار "ان القسم الأعظم من الشريعة ما هو الا الرأي الفقهي لفقهاء كلاسيكيين هذا هو السبب في أنه كلما فرضت الشريعة خارج سياق الزمن الذي وضعت فيه تكتسب المجتمعات الاسلامية احساسا قروسطيا.هذا هو ما نشهده في السعودية، ايران، السودان، افغانستان”
― Irshad Manji, The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith

“The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.
”
― Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

“Dapatkah seseorang itu membayangkan bahawa pedang Islam yang patah dapat menakutkan Maharaja Khan yang gagah perkasa itu hingga tunduk kepada agama yang dibawa oleh Rasulullah?”
― Muhammad Zaki Badawi, Latar Belakang Kebudayaan Islam

“I have engaged in enough women’s rights activism to know that the belief “sons are better than daughters'' is a huge problem in some parts of the world. For those who have little knowledge of Islam, there is the impression that women’s oppression stems from islamic teachings. This is simply not the case. In fact, muslim imams preach about the value of daughters often siting that a daughter opens the gates of paradise for their father. Indeed, the person the most beloved to the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, was his youngest daughter, Fatima. Islamic teachings are clear that a father has to fulfill his duty to raise and care for his daughters, and that the obligations go beyond providing financial support. He must provide a safe, peaceful, and loving home environment that is conducive to his daughter’s overall spiritual and moral development.”
― Mariam Khan, It's Not About the Burqa

“Islam is not a native calling settled for spreading its principles in one specific medium, and it is not a sectarian or communal calling, either, particular of one group of people. It is rather a universal appeal. And for that, it is not in our welfare the continuation of war: that which hinders preachers from conveying the message of Islam to people around the globe, and which sends people away worrying about what has befallen them in the aftermath of war, instead of pondering the teachings of this religion.

Therefore, Islam favors peace, abides by law, and ensures security and order. For when such circumstances exist, people are free to present themselves accurately, and free to believe and choose, and think and decide upon what is best for them.”
― محمد السيد الوكيل, تأملات فى سيرة الرسول صلى الله عليه و سلم

“The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World

“For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition

“Let me also again emphasize that it is only within Islam that Sufism can be practiced. The two have never been separated from each other in their reality and in fact are inwardly one, and certainly they have never been separated for me throughout my life.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr

“Het huwelijk tussen links Nederland en lichtgetint-orthodox-Nederland is er een dat barst van de ongerijmdheden en dat niet te doorgronden valt. Een gemeenschap die voor het leeuwendeel een geïmporteerd Staphorst is, een soort oriëntaalse SGP, met gesluierde vrouwen, vrouwen die achter de mannen bidden in de moskee, tegen abortus, tegen homo's en transgenders, tegen genderneutraliteit, tegen vrijheid van meningsuiting in de vorm van satire, tegen godslastering, vóór besnijdenis, vóór nationalisme en een eigen-volk-en-geloof-eerst-mentaliteit, met duidelijke rollen voor de geslachten, waarbij de vrouwen de piepers schillen en de mannen brood op de plank brengen, moderniteit-sceptisch en anti-feministisch, wat had die gemeenschap in godesnaam te zoeken bij het inclusieve links met de geheven regenboogvlaggen? Wie stemt er nu Erdoğan in het ene land en PvdA in het andere?”
― Lale Gül, Ik ga leven

“Prayer, then is a means of undressing the ego of its superficiality and coming to the Divine presence with all of our neediness and humility.”
― A. Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith