Quotes from Tamim Ansary

Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur'an is the Qur'an. The true Qur'an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur'an is in written form.

those wretched refugees still mired in the camps.

some seven hundred thousand Arabs found themselves homeless and stateless, living as refugees in the neighboring Arab countries.

I don't think in terms of legacy. I think: I was here, and while I was here, it was incumbent upon me to make my life meaningful. And once I'm gone, that's fine. There are other people crowding in the gate. We don't want to clutter up the table with the legacy of people who've gone. There are other people. Give them a chance.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," comes from ancient Persia.

In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.

World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened; it's a chain of only the most consequential events, selected and arranged to reveal the arc of the story—it's the arc that counts.

Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History

Reza Aslan, No god but God

Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted

Yasser Arafat

Information that fits with everything else we know has a leg up on feeling true. Just

We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.

Here are two enormous worlds side by side; what's remarkable is how little notice they have taken of each other. If the Western and Islamic worlds were two individual human beings, we might see symptoms of repression here. We might ask, "What happened between these two? Were they lovers once? Is there some history of abuse?

One side charges, 'You are decadent.' The other side retorts, 'We are free.' These are not opposing contentions; they're nonsequiturs.

Justice became a commodity that only the rich could afford.

The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed

Zoroaster preached that the universe was divided between darkness and light, between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between life and death. The universe split into these opposing camps at the moment of creation, they had been locked in struggle ever since, and the contest would endure to the end of time.

Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it's intervening in a country, but it's actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.

When the Common Era began—by the year one, that is—eight out of every ten humans lived between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the shores of the South China Sea.

But there is a distinction to be made between tools and machines. The line may be murky, but it's there. Think of it this way: tools help us humans do stuff; machines do stuff and we humans help them do it, by shoveling coal into their bellies, by replacing their worn-out parts when necessary, by feeding lumber into their saw teeth, whatever they need.

Omar directed the Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course of Islamic theology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than Rome. Any one of these achievements could have earned him a place in a who's who of history's most influential figures; the sum of them make him something like a combination of Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Lorenzo di Medici, and Napoleon.

If everyone were allowed to interpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might diverged wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as there were people, the community would fragment, and the world swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not then vanish as if it had never been?

what the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men's and a women's realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community.