Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment...
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G. Willow Wilson
Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.
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Osman Bakar
To the extent that in one's act of faith one participates in the truth through reason and heart, faith already implies a particular level of knowledge and of certainty.
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Osman Bakar
Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.
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Osman Bakar
Faith in Qur'anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.
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Osman Bakar
More Quotes By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then...
Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.
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,...
..Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck." "If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place." "Wherever you find the polytheists, kill...
