Reconstruction Of Religious Thought In Islam Quotes

It is the mysterious touch of the ideal that animates and sustains the real, and through it alone we can discover and affirm the ideal.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

الإنسان في صميم كيانه هو كما صوره القرآن قوة مبدعة وروح متصاعدة تسمو في سيرها قدما من حالة وجودية إلى حالة أخرى.

The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new world within his soul. Islam fully agrees with this insight and supplements it by the further insight that the illumination of the new world thus revealed is not something foreign to the world of matter but permeates it through and through. Thus the affirmation of spirit sought by Christianity would come not by the renunciation of external forces which are already permeated by the illumination of spirit, but by a proper adjustment of man's relation to these forces in view of the light received from the world within.

إن المشكلة التي واجهها الإسلام كانت في الواقع ما بين الدين و الحضارة من صراع متبادل , و ما بينهما في الوقت نفسه من تجاذب متبادل

لقد قدر على الإنسان أن يشارك في أعمق رغبات العالم الذي يحيط به، وأن يكيِّف مصير نفسه ومصير العالم كذلك؛ تارة بتهيئة نفسه لقوى الكون، وتارة أخرى ببذل مافي وسعه لتسخير هذه القوى لأغراضه ومراميه. وفي هذا المنهج من التغير التقدمي لا يكون الله في عون المرء إلا على شريطة أن يبدأ هو بتغيير مافي نفسه (إن الله لا يغير ما بقوم حتى يغيروا ما بأنفسهم)

nations are collectively judged, and suffer for their misdeeds here and now.

Individuality, therefore, harbours its own enemy at home.’2

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Thus, in the evaluation of religion, philosophy must recognize the central position of religion and has no other alternative but to admit it as something focal in the process of reflective synthesis. Nor is there any reason to suppose that thought and intuition are essentially opposed to each other. They spring up from the same root and complement each other. The one grasps Reality piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other on the temporal aspect of Reality. The one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole for exclusive observation. Both are in need of each other for mutual rejuvenation. Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals itself to them in accordance with their function in life.