Quotes About Muslim

As a Sufi Muslim you cultivated within yourself the thought of oneness, or monism, and made progress in experiencing each seemingly separate thing as an illusory veil over the eternal truth. You recognized the reality of God and the unimportance of matter, and one of the verses of the Koran that was the most dear to you was, "All things in creation suffer extinction and there remaineth the face of thy Lord in its majesty and bounty.

This is the story of how a new nation, saddled with war debt and desperate to establish credibility, was challenged by four Muslim powers. Our merchant ships were captured and the crews enslaved. Despite its youth, America would do what established western powers chose not to do: stand up to intimidation and lawlessness.

Where is the outrage of the Muslim community? Why aren't the imams of every mosque holding press conferences, and inviting the media to tell the American public, 'We are Americans first. Any enemy of America is our enemy. We will work to find, stop, arrest, turn in, and condemn anyone in our community who aspires to radicalize our religion and harm our country'?

Bengali leader, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (who served as Pakistan's prime minister in 1956) had noted as early as March 1948 that Pakistan's elite was predisposed to 'raising the cry of "Pakistan in danger" for the purpose of arousing Muslim sentiments and binding them together' to maintain its power.

Many Muslim parents are authoritarian, which leaves young men and women with limited spaces to express themselves. Self-expression and autonomy are regarded as symptoms of 'Westernisation.'

Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.

I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.

Hindu nationalist outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh perpetuate a false notion of the 'love jihad' - the false idea that young Muslim men are making Hindu girls fall in love with them to trick them into converting to Islam.

In Morocco, a Muslim country, I got to hear the call to prayer five times a day. At first it felt kind of scary, kind of dangerous, because of the propaganda towards anything Muslim in the U.S. subconsciously coming out in me. By the end of the trip, it was so beautiful, and then not hearing it when I got back to L.A. really threw me off.

You just don't see Muslims being matter-of-fact Muslim. They're always defined by their Muslim-ness. We're either terrorists, or we're fighting terrorists. I remember seeing 'True Lies' and going, 'Why are we always the bad guys?'

But the weakness comes from these Westernised co-opted Muslim leaders who just want to look good in the eyes of the West and Western media.

The first thing I want to make clear is that this violence, this terrorism, is not cultural. It isn't integral either to Arab or Muslim culture. I've done too many briefings for senators and congressmen who think that all 'towelheads' carry a pistol and a grenade. If you can't see beyond this stereotype, then we might as well stop now.

What sort of Europe do we want to have? Parallel societies? Muslim communities living together with the Christian community?

One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.

Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies.

In adapting to life in the melting pot of America, I discovered that the same soft power of science has a huge influence in building bridges between cultures and religions - and has the potential to do so with the Muslim world.

They are scared that the BBC or CNN may call them radicals, so they remain soft instead. The problem lies there, with the Muslim leaders, not the Muslim masses.

In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It

The Mediterranean was, before the northern European industrial revolution, one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Divisions between Muslim North Africa and Christian southern Europe were contained, if not always peacefully. The

Byzantium was both a source to emulate and a foil against which to define the distinctiveness of the Muslim regime.

It comes from the same root as jihad, 'to struggle,' but unlike violent struggle, ijtihad is about struggling to understand our world by using our minds. Which implies exercising the freedom to ask questions—sometimes uncomfortable ones. I spoke about why all of us, Muslim and not, need ijtihad.

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

And if the imam and the Muslim leadership in that community is so intent on building bridges, then they should voluntarily move the mosque away from ground zero and move it whether it's uptown or somewhere else, but move it away from that area, the same as the pope directed the Carmelite nuns to move a convent away from Auschwitz.

I think Tunisia has a specific place in the Arab world and in Africa because it is a tiny Muslim country, but it's very open minded. It's the first country to start the Arab Spring, for example.