Quotes About Islam

Southeast Asia is an area in which there is a form of Islam which is both devout and progressive, and therefore to be supported. It's an area in which I see a congruence of American interests and local interests: to have tolerant societies and become more prosperous.

I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

I was once asked: 'Are you an Islamophobe?' And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.

Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial

If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia.

Ali said he felt a duty to explain Islam to Americans and to explain America to Muslims.

It was a great sage of Islam, ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who saw that as a society becomes affluent it becomes more individualistic. It loses what he called its asabiyah, its social cohesion. It then becomes prey to the 'desert dwellers', those who shun the luxuries of the city and are prepared for self-sacrifice in war.

How could you determine a man's intention if you didn't speak his language or share his beliefs? She'd happily embarked on a study of ancient Egyptian religion but had no curiosity about Islam, which seemed an amalgam of oddities and borrowings. She felt with conviction what she'd written home more than once--that Egypt would be an exquisite country if not for the Egyptians who lived there.

Today, anti-Semitism remains a distinctive feature of the nationalisms of eastern Europe, where Islam is almost non-existent and the turn of 1989 gave new life to the old demons (still present, even where there are no Jews), but it has almost disappeared from the discourse of the west European far right (which often proclaims its sympathies for Israel).

the idea of Pakistan was very strongly opposed by the Islamic religious scholars of India. The reason for that was, among others, an argument on the part of the ulema, the religious scholars of Islam in India, that nationalism was an anti-Islamic ideology, because nationalism proceeds to create boundaries where Islam is a faith without boundaries. It interferes with the universalism that is the Koranic commitment of Islam. It is a universal religion that will not be subject to drawn boundaries.

many devout Muslims, particularly in the east, understood that attacking helpless people, nonbelievers or not, was contrary to the tenets of Islam. Still, a vast number of Muslims saw the pronouncement of jihad as an endorsement for killing and looting.

Le soufisme attire, séduit, tandis que l'islam fait figure de repoussoir. Quel paradoxe ! Le soufisme, plénitude de l'islam, voie d'excellence évoquée par le Prophète.

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

Turkey's leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says that the very term "moderate Islam" is "very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it." Turkey's refusal to fight ISIS has led to the rise of that terror group as well.

There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that political Islam is a part of it.

You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.

Mosques where sharia law prevails - they exist in France. Refusing to see that means that we do equate Islam with Islamic fundamentalism. We have to denounce and eradicate it.

In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.

The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes.

ISIS is attempting to rebrand Islam as an ideology that justifies violence and brutality. It rejects the kind of global order our nation has sacrificed so much to achieve.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.

Indeed, no sultan or Muslim ruler in Islamic history ever kneeled to ask forgiveness before a grand mufti in the way that Henry IV was forced to do before the pope in 1077 in Canossa for challenging papal authority on some key secular matters. Henry VIII of England had to break with Rome entirely simply to secure the divorce he sought from his wife. Thus, intimate linkage between religious and state power marked most of Christian history in a way that has had no parallel in Islam.

In the first place we can discount the tendency—which has been popular in Christendom—to over-estimate the extent of the use of force in the propagation of Islam. The show of adherence to the religion exacted by the Prophet's successors was limited to the performance of a small number of not very onerous external observances….