Famous Islamic Scholars Quotes

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

From the time of the birth of the madhabs around the second century until now, an overwhelming majority of the Umma (Muslim nation) has been following them. In fact, for hundreds of years, there was not a single Scholar worth the name except that he belonged to one of the madhabs including Al-Shaykh Ibn Taymiyya and his most famous student Ibn Al-Qayyim who were both followers of the Hanbali school.

Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya, famous scholar and saint, was the dauther of 'Ali al-Zubaydi, a man belonging to the martial Zubaydi clan of the tribe of Bani Haritha, itself an offshoot of the major tribe of Kinda, one of the most ancient and best known tribes of Southern Yemen. [...] she became known as the Rabi'a of Hadramawt. [...] Shaykha Sultana became so engrossed in her spiritual pursuits that she never found it in herself to marry and beget children as was expected of her. Instead, she visited all the great men of the valley, sitting at the back of the mosques where the gatherings were held, and listening intently until she became well known and greatly respected by them. Mostafa al-Badawi, A blessed Valley, Volume One, Wadi Hadramawt & the Alawi Tradition, Chapter 10, S. 95-97

As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today.

Ash-Shâfi i paid no attention to a slave girl given to him by friends who wants to sleep with him. Abû Hanîfah, asked about the manner in which memorized knowledge can be acquired, exclaimed, “Lamp oil, lamp oil” (al-bizr al-bizr), and a poor student later to become a famous scholar, Abû Hâtim (as-Sijistânî?), being unable to buy lamp oil, used the watchman’s lantern to study at night in the streets. Scholars continue their studies even in the bath. They are so absorbed in their work that they do not notice what is going on around them, that they do not care to waste time on eating, that they do not bother when a hemorrhage occurs during their all-night study. In the last case, a warning note is sounded for the benefi t of the reader: Studying is done for the good of one’s soul (life). If the soul is destroyed, the knowledge acquired is of no use. “Overstepping the right mean in studying may lead to the loss of knowledge.

The charm offensive was complemented by the work of a number of Islamic intellectuals with strong links to the Egyptian Islamic movement in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tariq Ramadan was the most famous of these. The grandson of Hassan Al-Banna and a scholar at Oxford University, he argued for a heterogeneous Islam that combined the religion's traditions with new aspects rooted in the experiences of Muslims living in the West.

This famous collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales was compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age and is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, due to the 1706 first English language edition being titled The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. The tales were collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across West, Central and South Asia and North Africa, revealing influences from ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian and Egyptian literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most likely drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān, which in turn relied partly on Indian elements. The stories are connected by the frame story concerning the ruler Shahryār (Persian for “king”) and his wife Scheherazade (Persian for “of noble lineage”), while other tales are introduced within the frame story by its characters.