Difficulties Islamic Quotes

So, verily, with every difficulty, there is relief; Verily, with every difficulty there is relief. Therefore, when thou art free (from thine immediate task), still labour hard, And to thy Lord turn [all] thy attention.

The philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life differ significantly among civilizations. The revitalization of religion throughout much of the world is reinforcing these cultural differences. Cultures can change, and the nature of their impact on politics and economics can vary from one period to another. Yet the major differences in political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world.

God pushes us to the edge of the cliff when He wants us to learn how to fly. The difficulties we face can act as catalysts for self-discovery and growth. The core Islamic teaching

It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht's character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for.

There should be no difficulty in understanding this love. Each one of you knows what love is. You know how restless one is to get close to whomsoever one loves; what pleasure one feels even in taking the name of the beloved and in taking that name again and again; the earnest zest with which one strives to win over one's beloved, and the extent to which one dreads the displeasure of the beloved. Just keep examining to what extent you have attained this love. Peep into your heart and see what is the place of Allah therein. The same shall be your place to Him.

The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond “good” and “evil,” which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to make this “God” a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make “him” fulfill our expectations. We can turn “God” into a Republican or a socialist, a racist or a revolutionary according to our personal views. The danger of this has led some to see a personal God as an unreligious idea, because it simply embeds us in our own prejudice and makes our human ideas absolute.

The mystics have always stressed the religious aspect of Islam, the rationalists the other one. All the same, both of them have always had difficulties with Islam, simply because it cannot be put into any of their classifications. Take wudu as an example. A mystic will define it as a religious ablution with symbolic meaning. A rationalist will look upon it as a matter of hygiene only. They are both right, but only partly. The defectiveness of the mystic explanation lies in the fact that it lets the hygienic side of wudu become a mere form. Following the same logic in other questions, this approach will reduce Islam to pure religion, by eliminating all physical, intellectual, and social components from it. The rationalists take quite the opposite way. By neglecting the religious side, they degrade Islam to a political movement only, creating a new type of nationalism from it, a so called Islamic nationalism, deprived of ethical-religious substance, empty and equal to all other nationalisms in this regard. To be a Muslim in this case, does not represent an appeal or a duty, a moral or a religious obligation, or any attitude to the universal truth. It means only belonging to a group different from the other one. Islam has never been only a nation. Rather, Islam is a call to a nation, " to enjoin the right and to forbid the wrong" Quran- that is, to perform a moral mission. If we disregard the political component of Islam and accept religious mysticism , we silently admit dependence and slavery. On the contrary, if we ignore the religious component , we cease to be any moral force.

Take terrorism, one example among the methods used in that struggle. We know that leftist tradition condemns terrorism and political assassination. When the colonized uses them, the leftist colonizer becomes unbearably embarrassed. He makes an effort to separate them from the colonized's voluntary action; to make an epiphenomenon out of his struggle. They are spontaneous outbursts of masses too long oppressed, or better yet, acts by unstable, untrustworthy elements which the leader of the movement has difficulty in controlling. Even in Europe, very few people admitted that the oppression of the colonized was so great, the disproportion of forces so overwhelming, that they had reached the point, whether morally correct or not, of using violent means voluntarily. The leftist colonizer tried in vain to explain actions which seemed incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the death of children and persons outside of the struggle, or even of colonized persons who, without being basically opposed, disapproved of some small aspect of the undertaking. At first he was so disconcerted that the best he could do was to deny such actions; for they would fit nowhere in his view of the problem. That it could be the cruelty of oppression which explained the blind fury of the reaction hardly seemed to be an argument to him; he can't approve acts of the colonized which he condemns in the colonizers because these are exactly why he condemns colonization. Then, after having suspected the information to be false, he says, as a last resort, that such deeds are errors, that is, they should not belong to the essence of the movement. He bravely asserts that the leaders certainly disapprove of them. A newspaper-man who always supported the cause of the colonized, weary of waiting for censure which was not forthcoming, finally called on certain leaders to take a public stand against the outrages, Of course, received no reply; he did not have the additional naïveté to insist.

As I had studied the poetry of Rumi, Jami, Nizami, Hafiz and Amir Khusrau, with some difficulty in the original Persian, and with some ease in various English translations, I realised that Nanak had absorbed the ethos of Islamic poetical mysticism, inherited the belief in ecstasy of union of Baba Farid, Nizam-ud-Din Aulia and Kabir. Of

The Muslim sees the Koran as the perfect and final revelation of Allah. Allah was the revealer, and Mohammed was the receptor. The very words were dictated to him. He, to them, is the last and the greatest prophet. The proof of his supremacy is the beauty of the Koran. It is the book that is considered to be the ultimate expression of perfection and the repository of truth. The difficulty here is manifold. How does one sustain that this written text is perfect? Let us consider just one troublesome aspect, the grammatical flaws that have been demonstrated. Ali Dashti, an Iranian author and a committed Muslim, commented that the errors in the Koran were so many that the grammatical rules had to be altered in order to fit the claim that the Koran was flawless. He gives numerous examples of these in his book, Twenty-Three Years: The Life of the Prophet Mohammed. (The only precaution he took before publishing this book was to direct that it be published posthumously.) A further problem facing the early compilers of the Koran was the number of variant readings of some of the important texts. Now, in recent times, scholars have begun to look at the Koran and have raised some very serious questions regarding its origin and compilation. This has sent many Islamic scholars scrambling for a response.5

At the present time, political power is everywhere constituted on insufficient foundations. On the one hand it emanates from the so-called divine right of kings, which is none other than military force; on the other from universal suffrage, which is merely the instinct of the masses, or mere average intelligence. A nation is not a number of uniform values or ciphers; it is a living being composed of organs. So long as national representation is not the image of this organization, right from its working to its teaching classes, there will be no organic or intelligent national representation. So long as the delegates of all scientific bodies, and the whole of the Christian churches do not sit together in one upper council, our societies will be governed by instinct, by passion, and by might, and there will be no social temple. ...We are beginning to understand that Jesus, at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness. But his promise cannot be fulfilled without the help of all the living forces of humanity. Two main things are necessary nowadays for the continuation of the mighty work: on the one hand, the progressive unfolding of experimental science and intuitive philosophy to facts of psychic order, intellectual principles, and spiritual proofs; on the other, the expansion of Christian dogma in the direction of tradition and esoteric science, and subsequently a reorganization of the Church according to a graduated initiation; this by a free and irresistible movement of all Christian churches, which are also equally daughters of the Christ. Science must become religious and religion scientific. This double evolution, already in preparation, would finally and forcibly bring about a reconciliation of Science and Religion on esoteric grounds. The work will not progress without considerable difficulty at first, but the future of European Society depends on it. The transformation of Christianity, in its esoteric sense would bring with it that of Judaism and Islam, as well as a regeneration of Brahmanism and Buddhism in the same fashion, it would accordingly furnish a religious basis for the reconciliation of Asia and Europe.

The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.

Poppies in Afghanistan: The Taliban and the Heroin Trade Harvesting opium in Afghanistan Ghaffar Baig/ Reuters/Corbis Most Americans knew little about Afghanistan or the Taliban prior to September 11, 2001, but those who follow the heroin trade have focused on Afghanistan for decades. Afghanistan has long been a major area of opium production, but the “golden triangle” of Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, and Thailand) historically dominated opium production. By 1999, though, Afghanistan had become the undisputed world leader in opium production despite being an Islamic state ruled by the Taliban, which publicly opposed opium use. In 1999, the Taliban representative to the United States, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, said, “We are against poppy cultivation, narcotics production and drugs, but we cannot fight our own people” (Bartolet & Levine, 2001, p. 85). Even before 9/11, the United States accused the Taliban of profiting from opium and heroin production, and using those profits to fund terrorist activities. Under pressure from the United Nations, the Taliban announced bans on poppy cultivation in 1997, 1998, and 2000, but there was little evidence of any decreased production. In 2001, though, a ban was put into place that apparently really did reduce poppy production. Cynics have pointed out that the Taliban was simply trying to increase prices by temporarily cutting the supply; whatever the reason, when the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan, the poppy made a comeback. In this war-ravaged and economically depressed nation, growing opium is one of the few ways that farmers can make a living. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has urged his people to declare jihad (holy war) on drug production, but opium farming still accounts for nearly half of the domestic economy, and Afghanistan supplies nearly 80% of the world’s heroin (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013). In recent years, opium production has declined in Afghanistan, but a close relationship between heroin traffickers and the insurgency continues to create difficulties for that country’s reconstruction process (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013).

According to the Munir Commission, no one who had ‘given serious thought to the introduction of a religious State in Pakistan’ had failed to realize ‘the tremendous difficulties with which any such scheme must be confronted’. It pointed out that before Partition ‘even Maulana Abul Ala Maududi of Jamaat-i-Islami was of the view that the form of Government in the new Muslim State, if it ever came into existence, could only be secular’.45 Although a consensus has been imposed with the help of the military over the last several decades that Pakistan must be an Islamic state, the issue remains, ‘which version of Islam should the state adopt in becoming Islamic?

political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic

Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest times, Christianity had developed in the particular social and economic world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and networks of church organization and mission followed the familiar routes of trade and travel. Also, this social world was founded upon cities, which were the undisputed centers of the institutionalized church. Mediterranean Christianity was founded upon a hierarchical system of metropolitans and bishops based in cities: even the name metropolitan suggests a fundamentally urban system. Over time, though, trade routes changed and some cities lost power or vanished altogether. Between the fifth century and the ninth, these changes had a special effect on the Mediterranean, as sea routes declined in importance and states tended to look more inland, to transcontinental routes within Asia and Africa. This process was accelerated by the impact of plague, particularly during the 540s, and perhaps of climate change. Cities like Carthage and Antioch shrank to nothing, while Damascus and Alexandria lost influence before the new rising stars of Baghdad and Cairo.11 These changes coincided with the coming of Islam rather than being caused by that event, but they had immense religious consequences. Churches that remained wedded to the old social order found themselves in growing difficulty, while more flexible or adaptable organizations succeeded. Nestorians and Jacobites coped well for centuries with an Eastern world centered in Baghdad and looking east into Asia. Initially, too, the old urban framework adapted successfully to the Arab conquest, and Christian bishops made their peace quite easily. Matters were very different, though, when the cities themselves were faced with destruction. By the seventh century, the decline of Carthage and its dependent cities undermined the whole basis of the North African church, and accelerated the collapse of the colonial social order. Once the cities were gone, no village Christians remained to take up the slack. The Coptic Church flourished because its network of monasteries and village churches allowed it to withstand changes in the urban system.

The qualities of Allah can be generally categorized as either a Jamal or Jalal quality. Jamal, or Allah’s qualities of beauty, most often correspond to the ease that comes from His blessings. Jalal, or Allah’s qualities of majesty, relate to the difficulty and pain we experience as Allah purifies and polishes the mirror of our hearts. Although many people struggle with the Jalal faces of God, they are necessary on the path of spiritual progress. Just

Prayer should not be used as a means to an end, because connection and conversation with God is the whole purpose of life. Salat can be one of the greatest opportunities to foster patience and gratitude, because we are called to pray to God regardless of how we feel or what we are going through. We are called to be consistent in prayer, even on the days when we feel disconnected from God, because He is not disconnected from us. When we are grounded in the soil of prayer, we are able to be grateful in times of blessing, and graceful in times of difficulty and despair.

For the Sufi Traveler, every journey is the haji, every tajalli is the Kaaba. Every path, if it be properly understood, is the Path; every way, however fraught with difficulty, can be experienced as a "straight" path to realization.

Fear of Dragons Lawrence Kohlberg, who wrote some excellent material on levels of moral development, charted what each level of moral development was like, describing six distinct levels. He was clear about the difficulty of seeing reality, especially moral or spiritual reality. He concluded that we are incapable of understanding a stage more than one beyond our own. A third-level person can’t make sense of what someone on the fifth level is saying. It is meaningless. That’s what we’re up against when we preach the Gospel. Jesus, in Kohlberg’s schema, is a sixth-level person. Many people have not done their first-, second-, and third-level work of conscience. They’re really not bad-willed; they just can’t understand a higher, more complex moral understanding. I’ve had to accept this from some who attack preaching and teaching. They’re not necessarily ill-willed; they just have no idea where the Gospel is coming from. They have some growing to do yet. It really helps to understand this so we are less apt to be judgmental of them. Jesus meant what he said: “Forgive them, they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The vast majority of people, according to Kohlberg, remain in the first levels of moral development. The Gospel of Jesus will always be a minority position, as will mystical Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism. If we’re not willing to be led through our fears and anxieties, we will never see or grow. We must always move from one level to a level we don’t completely understand yet. Every step up the ladder of moral development is taken in semi-darkness, by the light of faith. The greatest barrier to the next level of conscience or consciousness is our comfort and control at the one we are at now. Our first response to anyone calling us to truth, greatness, goodness, or morality at a higher level will be increased anxiety. We don’t say, “Isn’t this wonderful.” Instead, we recoil in terror and say, “I don’t know if I want to go there.” At the edges of medieval maps was frequently penciled the warning: “Here be dragons.” We confront these dragons when we approach the edge of our comfort level.

the Voyage occurs in the second volume, an account of Islam as a religion.64 Volney’s views were canonically hostile to Islam as a religion and as a system of political institutions; nevertheless Napoleon found this work and Volney’s Considérations sur la guerre actuel de Turcs (1788) of particular importance. For Volney after all was a canny Frenchman, and—like Chateaubriand and Lamartine a quarter-century after him—he eyed the Near Orient as a likely place for the realization of French colonial ambition. What Napoleon profited from in Volney was the enumeration, in ascending order of difficulty, of the obstacles to be faced in the Orient by any French expeditionary force. Napoleon refers explicitly to Volney in his reflections on the Egyptian expedition, the Campagnes d’Égypte et de Syrie, 1798–1799, which he dictated to General Bertrand on Saint Helena.

This may be at once the curse and the blessing of the modern age, that the ready availability of printed books—and now, electronic versions easily downloadable from virtually anywhere on earth—has enabled teachings to be preserved and passed down, passed around, and disseminated to anyone with even a glimmer of interest. It's a curse, because this ready availability cheapens the teaching by making it that much easier to obtain without all the psychological preparation of periods of intense study, fasting, purification, and other conditioning techniques. The effect of this is noticeable on social media and websites in which serious studies of various forms of esoteric tradition are airily dismissed by casual readers who have difficulty understanding their specialized terminology due to a lack of years of preparatory instruction or even a basic classical education, but still feel competent enough to pass judgment. Yet books are what we have in lieu of the secret society, the midnight initiations, the training by an experienced guru. Books also have preserved essential information from being lost due to persecution by enemies or opponents, or to execution or death by natural causes of lineage holders in sacred traditions (the Chinese invasion of Tibet comes to mind, and the decimation of various sects in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Islamic State, and others beginning with the oppression of the Kurds under Saddam Hussein). A deeper question than we can address adequately in this place is what happens to a tradition if its human teachers are all dead, unable to pass on the oral instruction or the psycho-spiritual techniques of initiation?

Similar fear was expressed by Lala Lajpatrai in a letter 49[f.150][f.5]  to Mr. C. R. Das — " There is one point more which has been troubling me very much of late and one which I want you to think carefully and that is the question of Hindu-Mohamedan unity. I have devoted most of my time during the last six months to the study of Muslim history and Muslim Law and I am inclined to think, it is neither possible nor practicable. Assuming and admitting the sincerity of the Mohamedan leaders in the Non-cooperation movement, I think their religion provides an effective bar to anything of the kind. You remember the conversation, I reported to you in Calcutta, which I had with Hakim Ajmalkhan and Dr. Kitchlew. There is no finer Mohamedan in Hindustan than Hakimsaheb but can any other Muslim leader override the Quran ? I can only hope that my reading of Islamic Law is incorrect, and nothing would relieve me more than to be convinced that it is so. But if it is right  then it comes to this that although we can unite against the British we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on British lines, we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on democratic lines. What is then the remedy ? I am not afraid of seven crores in Hindustan but I think the seven crores of Hindustan plus the armed hosts of Afghanistan, Central Asia, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Turkey will be irresistible. I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders, but what about the injunctions of the Quran and Hadis ? The leaders cannot override them. Are we then doomed ? I hope not. I hope learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty.

However, while Western principles were the major source of inspiration for Hatt- I Serif of Gulhane, the document itself made a notable effort to place the reforms in the context of the Ottomans Islamic heritage. In fact, it started by placing the Islamic law (Sharia or Şeriat) as a central source of inspiration, and alleging that the Empire’s decline was due to its lack of observance of the Şeriat: “All the world knows that since the first days of the Ottoman State, the lofty principles of the Qu’ran and the rules of the Şeriat were always perfectly observed. Our mighty Sultanate reached the highest degree of strength and power, and all its subjects [the highest degree] of ease and prosperity. But in the last one hundred and fifty years, because of a succession of difficulties and diverse causes, the sacred Şeriat was not obeyed nor were the beneficent regulations followed; consequently, the former strength and prosperity have changed into weakness and poverty. It is evident that countries not governed by the laws of the Şeriat cannot survive.”[6]

The breakup of Pakistan was the result of the autocratic policies of its state managers rather than the inherent difficulties involved in welding together linguistically and culturally diverse constituent units. Islam proved to be dubious cement not because it was unimportant to people in the different regions. Pakistan’s regional cultures have absorbed Islam without losing affinity to local languages and customs. With some justification, non- Punjabi provinces came to perceive the use of Islam as a wily attempt by the Punjabi- led military–bureaucratic combine to deprive them of a fair share of political and economic power. Non- Punjabi antipathy toward a Punjabi- dominated center often found expression in assertions of regional distinctiveness.

As can be seen from their tweets and more, many young Muslims are reacting to this suppression, watching the Islamic State's antics around the world and how it's making them look, studying the scripture their parents taught them was infallible, and dealing with high levels of unemployment and economic difficulty due to their governments' corrupt, ineffectual policies. They are watching their leaders use religion and blasphemy laws to solidify their authority and restrict the freedoms of their people. This worked in the past, but not anymore. On websites like WikiLeaks, they learn things about their governments and the world that they have never seen in their newspapers. They discover the roles that their own leaders have played in bringing about the frustrations and difficult conditions they were told were the fault of the United States and Israel.

Nothing beautiful to the mind than to witness passing of difficulty. Human mind receives episodic happiness, it waits for this phase. In between those episodes is a sequential sadness just to harmonize us musically with happiness. All love for nature and life for this melodrama, life is a true story. Witness it. Feel it. Make it. Read it. As the end approaches, let it go in the end like a handsome guest. Celebrate the moments spent and drop it at the door with your soul.

Americans in general have difficulty in understanding these acts as “hate crimes,” because the notion of a religion telling you to kill others is so foreign to them.

My thought is, that if the Moslems of our colonial Empire do not gently, little by little, become converted, a nationalist movement analogous to that in Turkey will arise; an intellectual élite will be formed in the big cities, taught à la française without having either French hearts or minds, an élite which will have lost its own Islamic faith, but which will keep the label in order to influence the masses. . . . Nationalist sentiments will be exalted by this élite, which when it finds an opportunity (such as would be provided by difficulties threatening France from without or from within) will use Islam as a lever to rouse the ignorant multitudes, and will try to create an independent African Moslem Empire.