Best 1302 quotes in «islam quotes» category

The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through. Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within.

The group with it's impurities is better than sectarianism with it's purity.

The hardest and greatest thing a human being can do is submit to his Creator.

The heart is like a bird: love as its head and its two wings are hope and fear.

The Hebrews have no name for Him, the Moslems have a hundred. Both suggest the same thing, that there are concepts as well as emotions that can be communicated only allegorically.

The idea behind verses about the sealing of hearts appears to be the psychological law that if a person once does a good or an evil deed, his chances of repeating that kind of action increase and of doing its opposite proportionately decrease. With constant repetition of an evil or of a good action, it becomes almost impossible for a person to do the opposite, or even to think of it, so much so that while men's hearts become "sealed" and their eyes "blinded" if they do evil, their doing good produces such a state of mind that the devil himself can have no sway over it. Nevertheless, actions which create a psychological habit, however strong their influence may be, must not be construed as absolute determinants, for there is no "point of no return" for human behavior: genuine repentance (tauba) can turn an apparently wholly evil man into a paragon of virtue; on the other hand, although this is much more rare, an apparent paragon of virtue (even a prophet!) can turn into a near devil enmeshed in carnal pleasures .

The important place held by Jesus among the world's six hundred million Moslems... and the agreement of both religions about the necessity for surrender to God as the means of salvation, thus makes it comparatively easy for a Moslem to address himself to Christians: the sympathy and the history are already there.

The incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual, and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe, and Africa. Riding on a rising tide of global trade along the land and sea routes of Asia, Islam came to dominate that continent's spiritual as well as its commercial life.

The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the "knowledge of the heart.

The Islamic State or The State of Islam are the titles under which ISIS and the like are committing their evil deeds and legalizing their crimes. Oddly, there are no such titles through the history of political Islam; we have heard of an Omayyad Empire, an Abbasside Empire, an Ottoman Empire, the Ayyubid State, and other states which made use of religion to expand their territories and control peoples’ minds and lives. These states held the names of the ruling dynasties but never Islam.

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: No question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.

The Koran is empathetic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs. It unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. It states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many of the new atheists with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. This kind of terror, in fact, has its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, which invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb: a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on September 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by Mario Buda, an Italian immigrant, in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200. Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon during the suicide attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Three were carried out by Christians.

The life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.

The little dove, in her nest, in my kitchen window, still awake, all scared, waiting for the storm to pass and we humans are sleeping peacefully, believing that our concrete houses will save us...

The medieval European, who shared the fundamental assumptions of his Muslim contemporary, would have agreed with him in ascribing religious movements to religious causes, and would have sought no further for an explanation. But when Europeans ceased to accord first place to religion in their thoughts, sentiments, interests, and loyalties, they also ceased to admit that other men, in other times and places, could have done so. To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than ‘merely’ religious issues. And so historians, once they had passed the stage of amused contempt, devised a series of explanations, setting forth for what they described as the ‘real’ or 'ultimate’ significance 'underlying’ religious movements and differences. The clashes and squabbles of the early churches, the great Schism, the Reformation, all were reinterpreted in terms of motives and interests reasonable by the standards of the day—and for religious movements of Islam too explanations were found that tallied with the outlook and interests of the finders.

The metaphors that Sumnun the Lover used to express the ineffable experience of this love, of which he was only a fragile vessel, are not taken from the vocabulary of worldly love. Rather, they are perfectly chaste, lucid, almost immaterial: "I have separated my heart from this world— My heart and Thou are not separate. And when slumber closes my eyes, I find Thee between the eye and the lid." (A 10:310)

The Message of Mohammad is not a set of metaphysical phenomena. It is a complete civilization.

The Nation of Islam is the best known Black Muslim group, though its actual numbers may be no more than 100,000. However, many blacks who are not, themselves, Muslims have great respect for the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan. Users of the Internet arm of Black Entertainment Television, BET.com, chose him as the black “person of the year” for 2005. Mr. Farrakhan was elected over Oprah Winfrey, then-Senator Barack Obama, Robert L. Johnson, who started BET, and the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “An overwhelming percentage of our users agreed that Minister Farrakhan made the most positive impact on the Black community over the past year,” explained a BET spokesman. What did Mr. Farrakhan do to deserve that honor? He received heavy news coverage twice that year. Once was when he promoted the theory that whites blew up the New Orleans levees to destroy black neighborhoods. The other was when he organized a “Millions More Movement” on the National Mall to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March. On that occasion, Michael Muhammad, National Youth Minister for the Nation of Islam declaimed: “We want to say to our young brothers of the Crips and the Bloods that we are one family. The real enemy doesn’t wear blue, but white, even when he’s butt naked.” Ayinde Baptiste of the Nation of Islam added: “We are at war here in America. . . . We need soldiers now. We need black male soldiers, we need black feminist soldiers, we need Crips and Bloods soldiers . . . soldiers in the prisons, soldiers in the streets.” The Congressional Black Caucus endorsed the event, and five black congressmen attended it.

The most complete gift of God is a life based on knowledge.

The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?" I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam." Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful." I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.

The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and ethnic dictatorship in the Balkans took precedence. This, by the way, was partly a battle to save Muslims from Catholic and Christian Orthodox killers. That impressed me. The neo-cons also took the view, quite early on, that coexistence with Saddam Hussein was impossible as well as undesirable. They were dead right about that. They had furthermore been thinking about the menace of jihadism when most people were half-asleep. And then I have to say that I was rather struck by the way that the Weekly Standard and its associated voices took the decision to get rid of Trent Lott earlier this year, thus removing an embarrassment as well as a disgrace from the political scene. And their arguments were on points of principle, not 'perception.' I liked their ruthlessness here, and their seriousness, at a time when much of the liberal Left is not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong, and babbles without any sense of responsibility. (I mean, have you read their sub-Brechtian stuff on Halliburton....?) And revolution from above, in some states and cases, is—as I wrote in my book A Long Short War—often preferable to the status quo, or to no revolution at all.

Then Gai told me about the famous cup of the heart, which I should now begin to empty. The Sufis compare our spiritual heart, the seat of God within us, with a cup into which the love of God flows. This cup, however, needs to be emptied before it can be filled with Divine love. This emptying is a long process that requires courage, strength of character, determination, and, above all, sincerity. It is a process of reining in and eventually extinguishing the ego, of letting go of material needs, bad and unhealthy habits and emotional attachments in order to make room for God. Sufis often likened it to the process of dying and being born again. ‘Die before you die’ is a famous Sufi saying. This was the essence of every spiritual path, Gai told me.

The one ultimate rule of the Quranic fundamentalists is “there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith. At moment’s notice, every man or woman, who does not exactly believe in that, must be killed.... This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.

The one whose concern is with that which enters the belly will discover that his value is found in that which goes out of it.

The onus is on us as a community to really put forward a different face for our religion, for our community, and for our Lord, and for our Prophet, peace be upon him, because it's really unacceptable that a religion with all of this beauty should be painted with such ugly strokes. So we're really here trying to paint a beautiful picture of our faith in action.

The past is like a tattoo. Your life changes, but the tattoo is still there to remind you who you were and you forget who you are.

[...] the past century has shown that dumb minds can do extraordinary damage.

The Prophet once said to his Companions, "Do you want to see a man of Paradise?" A man then passed by and the Prophet said, "That man is one of the people of Paradise." So a Companion of the Prophet decided to learn what it was about this man that earned him such a commendation from the Messenger of God . He spent time with this man and observed him closely. He noticed that he did not perform the Night Prayer vigil (Tahajjud) or anything extraordinary. He appeared to be an average man of Madinah. The Companion finally told the man what the Prophet had said about him and asked if he did anything special. And the man replied, "The only thing that I can think of, other than what everybody else does, is that I make sure that I never sleep with any rancor in my heart towards another." That was his secret.

The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.

The problem is that, when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.

The Prophet (SAW) said: 'Knowledge is only gained through learning and clemency is only gained through perseverance.

The Qur’ān does not appear to endorse the kind of doctrine of a radical mind-body dualism found in Greek philosophy, Christianity, or Hinduism; indeed, there is hardly a passage in the Qur'ān that says that man is composed of two separate, let alone disparate, substances, the body and the soul.

The Quran holds the answer to all. Have you opened it?

The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.

...The Qur'an cannot be translated. ...The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur'an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur'an-and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur'an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so...

The Qur’ān has been revealed in the classical Arabic spoken in Makkah. It was spoken in the age of ignorance by the tribe of Quraysh. No doubt the Almighty has endowed it with inimitable eloquence and articulacy in the Qur’ān, yet as far as its substance is concerned, it is no different from the one spoken by the Messenger of God and which in those times was the tongue of the people of Makkah: Thus We have revealed to you this [Qur’ān] in your own tongue that through it you may proclaim glad tidings to the upright and fully warn the stubborn. Quran (19:97)

The Qur’an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole.

The reality of the Islamic metaphysical world was not taken seriously despite the fact that Iqbal, who was the ideological founder of Pakistan, had shown much interest in Islamic philosophy, although I do not think that he is really a traditional Islamic philosopher. He himself was influenced by Western philosophy, but at least was intelligent enough to realize the significance of Islamic philosophy. The problem with him was that he did not know Arabic well enough. His Persian was very good, but he could not read all the major texts of Islamic philoso- phy, which are written mostly in Arabic. Nevertheless, he wrote on the development of metaphysics in Persia, and he had some philosophical substance, much more than the other famous reformers who are men- tioned all the time, such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan or Muh:ammad ‘Abduh.

The real Muslim is the one who prefers speaking the truth even when it is ruinous to him over lying even when it benefits him, and who finds inner peace in doing so.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If, for the sake of argument, 1 million are violent, that's a mere .000625 percent of them. I wonder who among you wants to be judged on such a tiny minority. Further, at 1.6 billion, if all Muslims - or even most Muslims - were violent, the world would already be in flames. Most people simply want to live their lives in peace, with some degree of material comfort. I find it bizarre - and disturbing - that so many Americans imagine that being a Muslim somehow trumps human nature and makes ordinary simple people want to rise up and kill everyone. That takes a special kind of stupid.

There are corrupted Muslims who have become Christians, and corrupted Christians who have become Muslims. They called it freedom of religion.

The portion of Islam has been given to us through the Sunnah: Worship Rituals i. The Prayer ii. Zakāh and Sadaqah of ‘Īd al-Fitr iii. Fasting and I‘tikāf iv. Hajj and ‘Umrah v. Animal Sacrifice and the Takbīrs during the days of Tashrīq Social Sphere i. Marriage and Divorce and their relevant details ii. Abstention from coitus during the menstrual and the puerperal period Dietary Sphere i. Prohibition of pork, blood, meat of dead animals and animals slaughtered in the name of someone other than Allah ii. Slaughtering in the prescribed manner of tadhkiyah by pronouncing Allah’s name Customs and Etiquette i. Remembering Allah’s name before eating or drinking and using the right hand for eating and drinking ii. Greeting one another with al-Sālamu ‘Alaykum (peace be to you) and responding with Wa ‘Alaykum al-Salām (and peace be to you) iii. Saying al-Hamdulillāh (praise be to Allah) after sneezing and responding to it by saying Yarhamukallāh (may Allah have mercy on you) iv. Keeping moustaches trimmed v. Shaving pubic hair vi. Removing the hairs under the armpits vii. Paring fingernails (cleaning it) viii. Circumcising the male offspring ix. Cleaning the nose, the mouth and the teeth x. Cleaning the body after excretion and urination xi. Bathing after the menstrual and the puerperal periods xii. Ghusl-i Janābah xiii. Bathing the dead before burial xiv. Enshrouding a dead body and preparing it for burial xv. Burying the dead xvi. ‘Īd al-Fitr xvii. ‘Īd al-Adhā

The purpose of man's creation is that he do good in the world, not substitute himself for God and think that he can make and unmake the moral law at his own convenience and for his own selfish and narrow ends. This is the difference between physical laws and the moral law—the one is to be used and put to service; the other must be obeyed and served. For God says

The Qur’ān began by criticizing two closely related aspects of that society: the polytheism or multiplicity of gods which was symptomatic of the segmentation of society, and the gross socioeconomic disparities that equally rested on and perpetuated a pernicious divisiveness of mankind. The two are obverse and converse of the same coin: only God can ensure the essential unity of the human race as His creation, His subjects, and those responsible finally to Him alone. The economic disparities were most persistently criticized, because they were the most difficult to remedy and were at the hear of social discord—although tribal rivalries, with their multiple entanglements of alliance, enmity, and vengeance, were no less serious, and the welding of these tribes into a political unity was an imperative need. Certain abuses of girls, orphans, and women, and the institution of slavery demanded desperate reform.

The Qur’ān definitely seems optimistic about the future, while rather grim about the past It is absolutely imperative for successor civilizations and their bearer communities to study well and learn from the fate of earlier ones that have perished; or they will assuredly meet with the same fate, for "God's law does not change" for any people. This is perhaps one of the most insistent ideas in the Qur’ān, which constantly exhorts people to "travel on the earth and see the end of those before them

The Qur’ān has not merely been revealed in Arabic: it has been revealed in eloquent Arabic. The language is clear and cogent, and there is no vagueness in it; every word is unambiguous and every style adopted is well known to its addressees. The Qur’ān says: The faithful Spirit has brought it down into your heart [O Prophet] that you may become a warner [for people] in eloquent Arabic. (26:193-195) In the form of an Arabic Qur’ān, free from any ambiguity that they may save themselves [from punishment]. (39:28) This is an obvious reality about the Qur’ān. If this premise is accepted, then it must be conceded that no word used or style adopted by the Qur’ān is rare or unknown (shādh). Its words and styles are well known and conventionally understood by its addressees. No aspect of the language has any peculiarity or rarity in it.

The question of divine knowledge is so deep that it is really known only to those who have it.

the Qur’ān appears to be interested in three types knowledge for man. One is the knowledge of nature which has been made subservient to man, i.e., the physical sciences. The second crucial type is the knowledge of history (and geography): the Qur’ān persistently asks man to "travel on the earth" and see for himself what happened to bygone civilizations and why they rose and fell. The third is the knowledge of man himself.

The real dawah to Islam is the character of a Muslim.