Best 29 quotes of Muhammad Asad on MyQuotes

All cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small.

But who, except God, can say whether a man is right or foolish if he follows the call of his conscience?

By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West, the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads, by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.

Every age requires a new approach to the Qur’an for the simple reason that the Quran is made for all ages. It is our duty to look for deeper meanings in the Quran in order to increase our knowledge and experience. The Quran wants your intellect to be always active and trying to approach the message of God. God himself dedicated this book to people who think.

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a gross immorality in itself, for morality lives and dies with the human endeavour to establish its victory upon earth.

I conceived from the outset a strong objection to Zionism. I considered it immoral that immigrants should come from abroad with the avowed intention of attaining to majority in the country and thus to dispossess the people whose country it had been since time immemorial.

I do not feel that the West has really become less condescending toward foreign cultures than the Greeks and Romans were: it has only become more tolerant. Mind you, not toward Islam—only toward certain other Eastern cultures, which offer some sort of spiritual attraction to the spirit-hungry West and are, at the same time, too distant from the Western world-view to constitute any real challenge to its values.

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.

If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings.

Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.

...I suddenly felt in myself all the weight of Europe: the weight of deliberate purpose in all our actions. I thought to myself, 'How difficult it is for us to attain to reality... We always try to grab it: but it does not like to be grabbed. Only where it overwhelms man does it surrender itself to him.

It is not enough to say, 'We are Muslims and have an ideology or our own': we must also be in a position to show that our ideology is vital enough to withstand the pressure of the changing times, and to decided in what way the fact of our being Muslims will affect the course of our lives: in other words, we must find out whether Islam can offer us precise directives for the formation of our society, and whether its inspiration is strong enough in us to translate these directives into practice.

It's very impossible to live by yesterday's standards and expect extraordinary results today. Live life with passion!

It was not Muslims that had made Islam great; it was Islam that had made the Muslims great.

Of all religious systems, Islam alone declares that individual perfection is possible in our earthly existence.

So long as Muslims continue looking towards Western civilization as the only force that could regenerate their own stagnant society, they destroy their self-confidence and, indirectly, support the Western assertion that Islam is a "spent force".

...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...'

We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision

We (Muslims) have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realise that it was the negligence of the Muslims - and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam - that caused our present decay.

...we must learn -once again- to regard Islam as the norm by which the world is to be judged.

Ayaklarımız kaskatı kesilinceye kadar evde oturup yaşlılığın gelip çatmasını beklemek, senin benim gibi insanlara göre değil de ondan." diyor Zeyd, gülümseyerek, "Hem evlerine tıkılan insanlar da ölmüyor mu sanki? Nereye giderse gitsin, insan kaderini boynunda taşımıyor mu?

History proves beyond any possibility of doubt that no religion has ever given a stimulus to scientific progress comparable to that of Islam. The encouragement which learning and scientific research received from Islamic theology resulted in the splendid cultural achievements in the days of the Umayyads and Abbasids and the Arab rule in Sicily and Spain. I do not mention this in order that we might boast of those glorious memories at a time when the Islamic world has forsaken its own traditions and reverted to spiritual blindness and intellectual poverty. We have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realize that it was the negligence of the Muslims and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam that caused our present decay. Islam has never been a barrier to progress and science. It appreciates the intellectual activities of man to such a degree as to place him above the angels. No other religion ever went so far in asserting the dominance of reason and, consequently, of learning, above all other manifestations of human life.

If one has not been able to experience God by himself, one should allow himself to be guided by the experiences of others who have experienced Him

İnsanın oturup, soyut ve teorik planda kendi ölümünü mutlaka bir yokoluş olarak düşünmesi zor olmayabilir; ama aynı şeyi gözünde canlandırması bütünüyle imkansızdır: çünkü bunu yapmak kendi yok oluşunu tasarlamak -bir başka deyişle yokluğunu tasarlamak, yokluğu gözde canlandırmak demektir ki insan zihni bunu yapabilecek güçte değildir. Bize ölümden sonraki hayata inanmayı öğretenler felsefeciler ve peygamberler değildir; onların bütün yaptığı, insanlık kadar eski fıtri bir kavrayışa biçim ve manevi içerik kazandırmaktır.

It was not the philosophers and the prophets who taught us to believe in life after death; all they did was give form and spiritual content to an instinctive perception as old as man himself.

The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.

There is one thing only which a Muslim can profitably learn from the west, the exact sciences in their pure and applied form. Only natural sciences and mathematics should be taught in Muslim schools, while tuition of European philosophy, literature and history should lose the position of primacy which today it holds on the curriculum.

The vast majority of administrators, at all times and in all societies, are prone to commit grievous errors if left entirely to their own devices. Hence, they should not be left to their own devices, and should be allowed to govern only in consultation with the accredited representatives of the whole community, which is one of the classical lessons of history that no nation may neglect except at its own peril.

...to imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.