The interesting part of my spiritual life is studying as much as you can. Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and Shamanism and Judaism, Christianity – you try to learn what the precepts are, what the religion is, and ultimately, it’s based in the same thought, it’s based in the same outcome, you know.
Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
The only model to follow is pure Islam.
I’ve been to Africa three times. All right? You can’t bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way you can’t bring it into fundamental Islam.
All too many Muslims fail to grasp Islam, which teaches one to be lenient towards others and to understand their value systems, knowing that these are tolerated by Islam as a religion.
As a Westerner, the child of civil rights and anti-war activists, I embraced Islam not in abandonment of my core values, drawn almost entirely from the progressive tradition, but as an affirmation of them.
Historically, Islam was hijacked about 20 or 30 years after the Prophet and interpreted in such a way that the ruler has absolute power and is accountable only to God. That, of course, was a very convenient interpretation for whoever was the ruler.
There are only three integral views of the world: the religious, the materialistic, and the Islamic. They reflect three elemental possibilities (conscience, nature, and man), each of them manifesting itself as Christianity, materialism, and Islam.
Moderation is part of faith, so those who accuse Muslim schools of fostering fanaticism should learn a bit more about Islam.
Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe.
Whether it’s people walking off ‘The View’ when Bill O’Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression.
My intention is to show the real face of Islam. I see it as a threat.
We have been given a role to play. We have been asked to provide, to give lectures on the role of Islamic development and the way we do it here, so the people who are Muslims there would understand what the role of Islam is.
The fact to the matter is, we never developed a comprehensive strategy to deal with radical Islam. And the 9/11 commission said one of the things we must do is develop a global alliance to combat it.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy.
I mean, in general, the danger is from Oriental faiths and Islam.
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.
At the height of his popularity in 1977, Cat Stevens converted to Islam and dedicated his life to educational and philanthropic causes.
Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is stupid and wrong. But acknowledging that there is a link between Islam and terror is appropriate and necessary.
Before I wrote ‘God’s War,’ I probably did eight years of research into the Middle East, Judaism, Islam, Catholicisim, and all sorts of fabulous other things.
Again and again, when Westerners are perceived as denigrating Muhammad, the Koran, or Islam, Islamists demonstrate, riot or kill.
Islam will be what Muslims make of it. And it is the sum total of the interpretation that Muslims give to it.
Probably the one Bible passage that is read by Jews and Roman Catholics, Protestants, Islam, more than any other chapter is Psalm 23. And in Psalm 23 there is a verse that says, ‘Surely, yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’
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.
The Prophet defeated the enemies of Islam even when he and his followers were small in number.
I beg Osama to stop warring. He is a Muslim, and Islam means peace. Nobody wins in a war… I wish I were tapped in the problem about Iraq. I knew Saddam enough that I could have talked him into surrendering. But it’s too late.
In the Nation of Islam, Akbar Muhammad is a big deal.
Muslims around the world deserve to see birthplace of Islam represent the ethics of Islam.
Islam’s laws are fixed and that is why Islam is stable.
What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I’m a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don’t think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.
I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.
Christianity and Islam are today the most numerous and fastest growing religions globally. Together they encompass more than half of humanity. Consequence: both are here to stay.
Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
The name Muhammad is the most common name in the world. In all the countries around the world – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon – there are more Muhammads than anything else. When I joined the Nation of Islam and became a Muslim, they gave me the most famous name because I was the champ.
The ‘Islam vs. the West’ dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
I want to ask those who are aiding terror, what do you get by taking innocent lives? Islam is a religion of peace; you are maligning its name.
Archaeologists have made discoveries that challenge fundamental traditions of Judaism as well as those of Christianity and Islam.
I used to fast during Ramadan because I admired the people fasting around me. What made me convert was that I had that certainty that Islam was for me. I felt this relationship with God, and that enlightened my life. I had that conviction in my heart that that was my religion.
They do not understand Islam, and I think that is one area where perhaps I hope one day I will play a role in actually making people understand what we perceive Islam to be.
Islam is about finding your own space.
Was Sen. Barack Obama a Muslim? Did he ever practice Islam? The presidential candidate officially rejects the claims, but the issue of Obama’s personal faith has re-emerged amid conflicting accounts of his enrollment as a Muslim during elementary school in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
I never would’ve thought in Homeland Security that you would see someone saying that we needed to have hearings on radicalization of Christianity because it’s a purported threat to America as much as radicalization of Islam.
Before there was radical Islam, immigration and terror didn’t mix.
I made the film to bring the story of Islam, the story of 700 million of people, to the West.
‘Islamist terrorism.’ The very phrase is contentious. No one wants to make this problem harder by unfairly branding and alienating a quarter of the world’s population, and even in this construction, no one should be thinking this means all of Islam or all Muslims.
What the printing press is to Christianity in the 16th century, that’s what the Internet is doing to Islam now. It has opened up the monopoly over the interpretation of Islam that used to solely belong to the religious class.
Obama has no power to change American policy because there are people who specialize in drawing these policies, which have been and still are hostile towards Islam.
I am concerned if 25 percent of Americans think that President Obama is a Muslim. I mean, it’s obviously a lack of knowledge. But also, it’s for the Muslims as well, you know, because a small numbers of Muslims have really painted a very negative image of Islam.
Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam.
The great majority of Americans do not know much about Islam but nonetheless fear it as violent, expansionist and alien to their society. The problem to overcome is not hatred, but ignorance.
Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I’m Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.
I’m afraid that a lot of things that people believe about Islam are totally different from the religion that most of us recognize. I was really fortunate that I got to know Islam before it became a headline.
