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ما يصيب المسلم من نصب ولا وصب ولا همّ ولا حزن ولا أذى ولا غمّ - حتى الشوكة يشاكها - إلا كفّر الله بها مِن خطاياه
No fatigue, disease, sorrow, sadness, hurt or distress befalls a Muslim - not even the prick he receives from a thorn - except that Allah expiates some of his sins because of it. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 70, #545)
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Anonymous
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O Allah, You know me better than I know myself, and I know myself better than these people who praise me. Make me better than what they think of me, and forgive those sins of mine of which they have no knowledge, and do not hold me responsible for what they say.
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Abu Bakr al-Siddiq
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Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.
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Lesley Hazleton (After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam)
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I"m often accused of being irreligious, and I suppose it's for this very reason. Whether it's Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Judaism, or any other ism, when a religioin is created on the subtle premise that God withholds his love and you must submit to the system to earn that love, I consider it the worst of corruptions...
For centuries, the church has been telling us that if we want God to love us, we need to follow the rules. It's been far more important to focus on the sin problem than the love problem.
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Erwin Raphael McManus
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Whatever sins Christians engaged in the past, and they were extensive, the fact is that the most humane and decent countries in the world nearly all have Christian origins. That is not true of states that grew out of Islam.
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Dennis Prager (Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph)
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Saying of the Prophet
Accusations
Anyone reviling a brother for a sin will not himself die before committing it.
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Idries Shah (Caravan of Dreams)
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Ibn Mas'ud said that Allah's Messenger said: Abusing a Muslim is sinful and fighting with his tantamount to Kufr. Bukhari Muslim
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Ahmad Von Denffer (A Day with the Prophet)
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God’s mercy is greater than your sins or circumstances. His compassionate love embraces the cactus parts of you that you swear no one could hug. His grace celebrates the parts of you that nobody claps for. God loved you before you were even created, before you even knew of Him. As the Qur’an says, “It is He who sent down tranquility into the hearts of the believers, that they may add faith to their faith for to Allah belong the forces of the heavens and the Earth and Allah is full of Knowledge and Wisdom” (48:4).
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
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We are accused of terrorism
If we refuse to perish
Under Israeli tyranny
That is hampering our unity
Our history
Our Bible and our Quran
Our prophets' land
If that is our sin and crime
Then terrorism is fine
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نزار قباني
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When Allah makes us aware of a sin we committed, He is not punishing us, but rather inviting us toward His presence. In this way, the moment we are drawn to sincere repentance, we are in effect unveiling the forgiveness that Allah has already written for us to experience. Someone asked the great eighth-century mystic Rabia Al-Adawiyya, “I have sinned much; if I repent, will Allah forgive me?” She profoundly replied, “It is the opposite; if Allah forgives you, you are capable of repentance.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
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For present-day politicians there are only political points to be made from such statements, and the larger the sin the larger the outrage, the larger the apology and the larger the potential political gain for sorrow expressed. Through such statements political leaders can gain the benefits of magnanimity without the stain of involvement: the person making the apology had done nothing wrong and all the people who could have received the apology are dead.
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Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
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Men learn wisdom from their sins, not from their righteous deeds.
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Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall
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No,matter how sinful we are there is a way to repent.
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Faisal Attari
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REMEMBER: No matter what happens in your life, if it turns you towards Allah, it is a blessing. Whether Allah is testing you to strengthen you or holding you accountable for a sin you may have committed, the response is the same: turn to Allah and ask for His help and guidance.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
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Si otras culturas han sobrevivido 10,000 años sin las reglas religiosas del islam, mormonismo, hinduismo o cristianismo, ¿cuál es el propósito de las restricciones y la culpa religiosas?
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Darrel Ray (Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality)
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The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanation for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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Just as clouds cannot affect the presence and power of the sun’s light, but can alter our experience of the intensity of the light, sin can veil our perception of our inner goodness, but it cannot change it.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
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even if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society (and these are problems quite unlike those presented by similar tenets in other faiths, for reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere and touch on only briefly here). And any way in which I might be biased or blinded by “the religion of the state,” or any other form of cultural indoctrination, has absolutely no relevance to the plight of Shiites who have their mosques, weddings, and funerals bombed by Sunni extremists, or to victims of rape who are beaten, imprisoned, or even killed as “adulteresses” throughout the Muslim world. I hope it goes without saying that the Afghan girls who even now are risking their lives by merely learning to read would not be best compensated for their struggles by being handed copies of Chomsky’s books enumerating the sins of the West
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Sam Harris
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William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists.
It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.
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Slavoj Žižek (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections)
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Man, in the traditional sense of the term corresponding to insān in Arabic or homo in Greek and not solely the male, is seen in Islam not as a sinful being to whom the message of Heaven is sent to heal the wound of the original sin, but as a being who still carries his primordial nature (al-fitrah) within himself, although he has forgotten that nature now buried deep under layers of negligence.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr (The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity)
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In fact, the term “holy war” originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a battle for land and trade routes. “Holy war” was not a term used by Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively translated as “war”; jihad is not one of them. The word jihad literally means “a struggle,” “a striving,” or “a great effort.” In its primary religious connotation (sometimes referred to as “the greater jihad”), it means the struggle of the soul to overcome the sinful obstacles that keep a person from God. This is why the word jihad is nearly always followed in the Quran by the phrase “in the way of God.
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Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
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For the Arabs, and the above all for the 1.2 million Arabs of Palestine, the partitioning of the land in which they had been a majority for seven centuries seemed a monstrous injustice thrust upon them by white Western imperialism in expiation of a crime they had not committed. With few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the caliphs, and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.
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Larry Collins (Ô Jérusalem)
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Dicho del Profeta
El juez
Un hombre que es nombrado juez ha sido asesinado sin cuchillo.
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Idries Shah (Caravan of Dreams)
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Ramadan isn't fulfilled by feasting on some tasty beef, the greatest of feast is haram if others go hungry.
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Abhijit Naskar (Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was)
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We do not need to understand every element of our sin to let go of it. The seed doesn’t need to understand the nature of the sun’s light to be moved and transformed by it.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
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What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. Our nation (the Islamic world) has been tasting this humiliation and degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked and no one hears and no one heeds. Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins. . . . To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear to God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it here in Palestine and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him.
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Osama bin Laden (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden)
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The Turk is the rod of the wrath of the Lord our God. . . If the Turk's god, the devil, is not beaten first, there is reason to fear that the Turk will not be so easy to beat. . . Christian weapons and power must do it. . .
(The fight against the Turks) must begin with repentance, and we must reform our lives, or we shall fight in vain.
(The Church should) drive men to repentance by showing our great and numberless sins and our ingratitude, by which we have earned God's wrath and disfavor, so that He justly gives us into the hands of the devil and the Turk.
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Martin Luther (On War Against the Turk)
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There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout -- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.
Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it ill be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on the matters of the spirit.
The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end -- wealth, fame, eternal salvation -- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God...
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Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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Israel is beautiful. Israel is vibrant. But Israel isn't clean -- far from it. Israel is sin, redemption, passion and blood. ... At its very foundation, Israel is the story of God's interaction with mankind.
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Buck Storm (Finding Jesus in Israel: Through the Holy Land on the Road Less Traveled)
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When we are humbled before Allah, we taste something of His greatness. When we focus on our shortcomings, our sins, and mistakes it is easy to lose hope, but when we focus our attention on Allah’s forgiveness, mercy, and love we are able to traverse whatever challenge or obstacle is in our way.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
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Brahman does not speak to mankind. It cannot meet men and women; it transcends all such human activities. Nor does it respond to us in a personal way: sin does not “offend” it, and it cannot be said to “love” us or be “angry.” Thanking or praising it for creating the world would be entirely inappropriate.
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Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
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Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and being (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, and so on. The result of such stances is what one should expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. [T]his constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. What this implies is that terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, are not really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term--what they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. The passionate intensity of a fundamentalist mob bears witness to the lack of true conviction; deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction--their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim would be if he felt threatened by, say, a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper? Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identify from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feed their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite: the fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.
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Slavoj Žižek
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Politics had never been central to the Christian religious experience. Jesus had, after all, said that his Kingdom was not of this world. For centuries, the Jews of Europe had refrained from political involvement as a matter of principle. But politics was no secondary issue for Muslims. We have seen that it had been the theatre of their religious quest. Salvation did not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just society in which the individual could more easily make that existential surrender of his or her whole being that would bring fulfilment. The polity was therefore a matter of supreme importance,
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Karen Armstrong (Islam: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles))
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Whatever sartorial choices a woman makes are hers and hers alone. It is neither a man’s nor the state’s place to define proper “womanhood” in Islam. Those who treat the Muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin: the objectification of women.
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Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
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Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: 'But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)'; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.
...All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in 'Al- Mughni,' Imam al-Kisa'i in 'Al-Bada'i,' al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: 'As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.'
On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, 'and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.'
...We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.
...Almighty Allah also says: 'O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For Allah hath power over all things.'
Almighty Allah also says: 'So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith.'
[World Islamic Front Statement, 23 February 1998]
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Osama bin Laden
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In Islam, it is a sin to claim that any other divinity existed beside Allah. Moreover, Allah is totally self-sufficient and needs nothing to complete him. This rigorous monotheism led some of the Sufis to the logical conclusion that nothing at all exists except Allah. And since Allah is within each one of us, it is possible to attain mystical union with Allah.
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Paul Harrison (Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe)
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One of the fundamental themes of the Qur'an is man's flight from reality. Given the basic premise that God is, and that His being both transcends and encompasses all existence, then unbelief is precisely such a flight. Men and women throughout the centuries have tried at every opportunity to evade total Reality and to take refuge in little corners of private darkness. Even at the simplest everyday level there is constant avoidance of the thought of death; there is evasion of our inward solitariness, which no amount of conviviality can entirely overcome, and there is a refusal to acknowledge our limitations and our sins. Not only is it the innate tendency of fallen man to 'forget' God, but there comes about a luxuriant growth of forgetfulness in every sphere.
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Charles Le Gai Eaton (Islam and the Destiny of Man)
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Sufism (tasawwuf) is not wearing clothes that you patched; it is not weeping when the singers sing their songs; and it is not dancing, shouting, experiencing ecstatic states, or passing out as if you’ve gone mad. Rather, Sufism is to become whole without any impurities; to follow the truth, the Qur’an, and this religion; and to be seen in a state of awe, broken and remorseful about all of your sins.
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Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi
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Oh Allah, distance me from my sins just as You have distanced the east from the west. Oh Allah, purify me of my sins as a white robe is purified of filth. Oh Allah, cleanse me of my sins with snow, water, and ice.”10 Oh Allah, I lovingly await Your invitation to come visit You, both in this life and the next. I place my hope in Your mercy and place my trust in Your perfect timing. In Your generous names I pray, Ameen.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam (Studying Qur'an & Hadith Book 2))
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Islam did not seem to be so much a religion in the popular sense of the word as, rather, a way of life; not so much a system of theology as a programme of personal and social behaviour based on the consciousness of God. Nowhere in the Koran could I find any reference to a need for 'salvation'. No original, inherited sin stood between the individual and his destiny - for, nothing shall be attributed to man but what he himself has striven for.
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Muhammad Asad (The Road To Mecca)
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So Allah has to deny perfect justice in order to be merciful. There’s no penalty for wrongdoing if you have done enough good things to offset it. But true justice doesn’t work that way, not even on earth. If someone is convicted of fraud, the judge doesn’t say, ‘Well, he was a kind Little League coach. That offsets it.’ In Islam, Allah is not perfectly just, because if he were, people would have to pay the penalty for every sin, and no one would get into paradise. That’s what perfect justice is.” I pushed the vegetables around on my neglected plate. “But I thought God is forgiving. You’re implying that because of justice, God can’t forgive.” “God is forgiving. God wants to forgive people more than anything in the world, to restore them to himself. What I’m saying is that God’s desire to forgive doesn’t negate his perfect justice. Someone has to pay the penalty for sins. God’s justice demands it.
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David Gregory (Dinner with a Perfect Stranger: An Invitation Worth Considering)
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I was enraged by these heinous acts of barbarism - enraged that people who called themselves Muslims could launch an unprovoked attack on Christians or foreigners, enraged that through their vile acts these terrorists were perverting our faith, which tells us that Christians are among the "people of the Book", that we should show discernment when fighting for the cause of God and not fight those who have not harmed us, that murder and suicide are grievous sins.
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Pervez Musharraf (In the Line of Fire: A Memoir)
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In Fez Yasmin had another dream. „I saw myself in a shower. Water poured over me, washing and purifying me and I was told ‚All your sins have been washed away by that water. You‘ve been cleansed. Your sins have been washed away and you‘re blessed.‘ „I feel that Allah has been knocking on my door for some time now, perhaps all my life. ‚But you just haven‘t recognized Me‘, He says, ‚You haven‘t recognized Me. You keep waiting but I have been there all along.‘“ (p.195)
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Michael Sugich (Hearts Turn: Sinners, Seekers, Saints and the Road to Redemption)
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....It was to complete his marriage with Maimuna, the daughter of Al Hareth, the Helalite. He had become betrothed to her on his arrival at Mecca, but had post-poned the nuptials until after he had concluded the rites of pilgrimage. This was doubtless another marriage of policy, for Maimuna was fifty-one years of age, and a widow, but the connection gained him two powerful proselytes. One was Khaled Ibn al Waled, a nephew of the widow, an intrepid warrior who had come near destroy-
ing Mahomet at the battle of Ohod. He now became one of the most victorious champions of Islamism, and by his prowess obtained the appellation of " The Sword of God." The other proselyte was Khaled's friend, Amru Ibn al Aass ; the same who assailed Mahomet with poetry and satire at the commencement of his prophetic career ; who had been an ambassador from the Koreishites to the king of Abyssinia, to obtain the surrender of the fugitive Moslems, and who was henceforth destined with his sword to carry victoriously into foreign lands the faith he had once so strenuously opposed.
Note.— Maimuna was the last spouse of the prophet, and, old as she was at her marriage, survived all his other wives. She died many years after him, in a pavilion at Serif, under the same tree in the shade of which her nuptial tent had been pitched, and was there interred. The pious historian, Al Jannabi, who styles himself "a poor servant of Allah, hoping for the pardon of his sins through the mercy of God," visited her tomb on returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, in the year of the Hegira 963, a.d. 1555. "I saw there," said he, "a dome of black marble erected in memory of Maimuna, on the very spot on which the apostle of God had reposed with her. God knows the truth ! and also the reason of the black color of the stone. There is a place of ablution, and an oratory ; but the building has fallen to decay.
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Washington Irving (Life of Mohammed)
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The Prophet (ﷺ) stated that: <> (recorded by at-Tabarâni and graded reliable by al-Albâni)
In this hadith, the Prophet (ﷺ) presents an analogy. Our hearts are likened to the moon; just as the moon is sometimes covered by clouds that conceal its light, the heart is sometimes covered by clouds of sin that cover its light. At other times, the clouds go away, and the light shines again in the heart. The light increases when we strive to engage in acts that will increase our eemân.
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Aisha Utz (Psychology from the Islamic Perspective)
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It is not death that we fear; what we fear is not living the life we know we were created to live. We are afraid of running out of time before we are able to manifest our soul’s purpose. Death is the ultimate confrontation. When we think of death, we regret all the time we have lost in procrastination. When death arrives, all of our secrets, sins, and shortcomings will be manifested. We will be confronted with all the dreams we did not pursue, the repentance we did not make, and the charity we did not give.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam (Studying Qur'an & Hadith Book 2))
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In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests. God could be present in the humblest home as well as in the Temple. Consequently, they lived like the official priestly caste, observing the special laws of purity that applied only to the Temple in their own homes. They insisted on eating their meals in a state of ritual purity because they believed that the table of every single Jew was like God’s altar in the Temple. They cultivated a sense of God’s presence in the smallest detail of daily life. Jews could now approach him directly without the mediation of a priestly caste and an elaborate ritual. They could atone for their sins by acts of loving-kindness to their neighbor; charity was the most important mitzvah in the Torah; when two or three Jews studied the Torah together, God was in their midst. During
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Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
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لأن مرض الإدمان مش مقتصر بس على المخدرات وإنما الإنسان يعتبر مدمن لأي سلوك غلط عارف كويس أنه بيضره ونفسه يبطله بس مش قادر وكل ما يحاول يبطله يظهر عليه أعراض انسحاب نفسية زي اللي بتيجي لمدمن المخدرات لما يحاول يبطلها؛ يقول إبن القيم رحمه الله:
“إن المعاصي تزرع أمثالها ويولد بعضها بعضاً حتى يعز على العبد مفارقتها والخروج منها، حتى تصير هيئات راسخة وصفات لازمة وملكات ثابتة، ولو عطل المجرم المعصية وأقبل على الطاعة لضاقت عليه نفسه، وضاق صدره حتى يعاودها، حتى إن كثيراً من الفسَّاق ليواقع المعصية من غير لذة يجدها ولا داعية إليها إلا لما يجده من الألم بمفارقتها.
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Amr Ali Ibrahim (مارينا.. كان يا مكان)
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This was very troubling. It made me think of Mina’s father, a supposed Muslim, selling his own daughter to another man to become a wife and slave. But Islam teaches that a man must not touch a woman without her consent. Mina didn’t consent to be a wife. None of this made any sense to me, the more I thought about it. I talked to Shakila, and she told me that rape and murder are sins in Islam. I understood that well, but still everything I’d seen with my own eyes, the way Mina was treated, filled me with doubts. The way Islam was practiced in the countryside was very different than my father’s religion.
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Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller (The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan)
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The Prophet (ﷺ) stated that: «Every heart has a cloud covering it, with the similitude of a cloud covering a shining moon. It suddenly becomes dark when the cloud covers, but its brightness returns once the cloud has passed.» (recorded by at-Tabarâni and graded reliable by al-Albâni)
In this hadith, the Prophet (ﷺ) presents an analogy. Our hearts are likened to the moon; just as the moon is sometimes covered by clouds that conceal its light, the heart is sometimes covered by clouds of sin that cover its light. At other times, the clouds go away, and the light shines again in the heart. The light increases when we strive to engage in acts that will increase our eemân.
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Aisha Utz (Psychology from the Islamic Perspective)
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Thou art God, I am God, all that groks is God.’ The Prophet never asserted that he was the last of all prophets nor did he claim to have said all there was to say. Submission to God’s will is not to be a robot, incapable of choice and thus of sin. Submission can include—does include—utter responsibility for the fashion in which I, and each of us, shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden . . . or to rend and destroy.” He smiled. “‘With God all things are possible,’ if I may borrow—except the one Impossible. God cannot escape Himself, He cannot abdicate His own total responsibility—He forever must remain submissive to His own will. Islam remains—He cannot pass the buck. It is His—mine . . . yours . .
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Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
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Que el islam sea feminista es una mentira como una catedral que también defienden expertas en la materia que no han nacido ni vivido en el mundo musulmán. Estudiosas supuestamente objetivas defienden en medios de difusión muy poderosos que la religión de nuestros padres es una especie de paraíso para las mujeres. Y yo sin enterarme. Llevo toda la vida creyendo que si en los textos sagrados se afirma que tengo que obedecer a mi marido, que valgo la mitad que mis homólogos masculinos o que mi sexualidad debe ser vigilada es porque el islam es machista, y ahora resulta que académicas de renombre me sueltan un sermón para convencerme de todo lo contrario. Debo de ser muy ignorante para no haber reconocido las virtudes del mensaje divino.
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Najat El Hachmi (Siempre han hablado por nosotras)
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[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . .
Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . .
Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . .
The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . .
These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . .
“Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . .
In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young.
But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . .
An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . .
For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging.
This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . .
Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.
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Ross Douthat (Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics)
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What would have made [seeing Göbekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran."
[...]
A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. Current excavations by Harran University and the Sanliurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city's pre-Islamic period.
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Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
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Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.8 In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.
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Diarmaid MacCulloch (A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years)
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Wahhab set out to extinguish all Islamic practices that he considered not to have come from either source: thus Wahhabi mosques lack minarets—the towers that the caller to prayer, the muezzin, climbs in order to chant the azan, the call to prayer. Wahhab also rejected the veneration of Muslim saints and prayers at their shrines, a practice that had become widespread by the eighteenth century. Wahhab pointed to hadiths in which Muhammad himself condemned this practice, calling it shirk, the combination of idolatry and polytheism that is the worst sin of all in Islam: associating partners with Allah in worship. The Wahhabis were often just as brutal as the Islamic State is today. In an 1803 attack that could have come from today’s headlines about ISIS, the Wahhabis entered Ta’if, a city near Mecca, massacred all the men, and enslaved all the women and children.
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Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (Complete Infidel's Guides))
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In sixteenth-century Geneva, Protestant theologian John Calvin spun a complex theological web around two simple threads: the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of human beings. Like Calvinists, Muslims go to great lengths not to confuse Creator and created. Glorifying in the servility of human beings before Allah, they refer to themselves in many cases as "slaves" of the Almighty. But unlike Calvin, Muslims do not believe in original sin. Every human being is born with an inclination toward both God and the good. So sin is not the problem Islam addresses. Neither is there any need for salvation from sin. In Islam, the problem is self-sufficiency, the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient. "The idol of yourself," writes the Sufi mystic Rumi, "is the mother of (all) idols." Replace this idol with submission to Allah, and what you have is the goal of Islam: a "soul at peace" (89:27) in this life and the next: Paradise.
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Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter)
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Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly - at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarding bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Córdoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet’s teaching that ‘Cleanliness is part of faith’. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, ‘God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty’.
In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying Yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and no to quietism, Yes to life and No to ascetism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little layer of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword’, was the explanation of Islam’s amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history.
It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilisation waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.
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Muhammad Asad (The Road to Mecca)
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Elle Wiesel, premio Nobel, había vivido sólo para Dios durante su infancia en Hungría; su vida había estado configurada por el Talmud y esperaba ser iniciado un día en los misterios de la cábala. Cuando era niño lo llevaron a Auschwitz y, después, a Buchenwald. Durante su primera noche en el campo de concentración, al ver el humo negro que subía en espiral hacia el cielo desde el horno crematorio donde iban a meter los cuerpos de su madre y de su hermana, experimentó que las llamas habían consumido su fe para siempre. Se encontraba en un mundo que correspondía objetivamente al mundo sin Dios imaginado por Nietzsche. «Nunca olvidaré aquel silencio nocturno que me privó, para siempre, del deseo de vivir —escribió años más tarde—. Nunca olvidaré esos momentos en que asesinaron a mi Dios y a mi alma y que convirtieron mis sueños en polvo.»[33] Un día la Gestapo iba a colgar a un niño. Incluso las S. S. estaban preocupadas por la idea de colgar a un niño ante miles de espectadores. El niño —que, como recuerda Wiesel, tenía la cara de un «ángel de ojos tristes»—, estaba silencioso, lívidamente pálido y casi tranquilo al subir a la horca. Detrás de Wiesel, uno de los prisioneros preguntó: «¿Dónde está Dios? ¿Dónde está?». El niño tardó media hora en morir mientras a los prisioneros se los obligaba a mirarlo de frente. El mismo hombre preguntó de nuevo: «¿Dónde está Dios ahora?». Y Wiesel oyó, dentro de sí, una voz que respondía: «¿Dónde está? Está aquí, pendiendo de esta horca».
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Karen Armstrong (Una historia de Dios: 4000 años de búsqueda en el judaísmo, el cristianismo y el islam (Contextos) (Spanish Edition))
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As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism.
(...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away.
Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I."
Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.
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Sachiko Murata (The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought)
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Allah is gentle with His subjects. He does everything to bring people closer to Him, to help them obey Him and to keep them away from sin
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عباس آل حميد (The Islamic Intellectual Framewok)
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The fact is that the more we move towards Allah and get closer to Him, the stronger, purer, more determined, and more understanding we become. This, in turn, makes us more capable of getting rid of our sins and our negative traits, though we might not realize it
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عباس آل حميد (The Islamic Intellectual Framewok)
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The five set Prayers are an expiation, for there is something amongst them by which major sins are repelled.
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Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (Inner Dimensions of Islamic Worship)
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When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor’s palace “in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot,” before adding with true Christian charity, “which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.
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Roger Crowley (1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West)
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The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, and it was on those nations, not theirs, the Arabs maintained, that the burden of those sins should fall. Beyond that, seven hundred years of continuous occupation seemed to the Arabs a far more valid claim to the land than the Jews' historic ties, however deep.
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Larry Collins (O Jerusalem)
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Original Sin in Islam “The Prophet said, ‘when any human being is born, Satan touches him at both sides of the body with his two fingers…’” Hadith Bukhari, v. 4 # 506 ~ “Original sin” in the Quran refers only to the first mistake committed by Adam. ~ Adam’s mistake affected only him. It does not affect his descendants. ~ Humans are born sinless and neutral, and then Satan touches them. ~ Sin is an outward action not a heart issue. It can be paid for by good works and through Allah’s mercy.
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Samya Johnson (The Simple Truth: The Quran and The Bible Side-by-Side)
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The professoriate, the media, and world leaders do not realize that the West is not the first among sinners—Islam has a long history of colonialism, imperialism, conversion by the sword, gender and religious apartheid, unending Muslim-on-Muslim religious wars, and slavery. Westerners have been carefully taught to believe that such sins or crimes are mainly or solely true of the West—and therefore Westerners must atone for having impoverished and exploited others.
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Phyllis Chesler (The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis & What We Must Do About It)
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I look at the augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all it is merely this world that is chaotic b ringing changes to us all threat nobody could have anticipated. The augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who i am what i represent whom i belong to or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday i might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough but tomorrow i could be a firework's depository, even in the eternal city says the silent augusteum . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.
pizzaeria da michele
Passato remoto
In her world the roman forum is not remote nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as i am.
The bhagavata Gita that ancient Indian yogic test says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now i have started living my own life, perfected clumsy as it may look it is resembling me now thoroughly.
It was in a bathtub back in new York reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits, and I was so unrecognizable to myself that i probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But i felt a glimmer of happiness when i started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grip onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face first out of the dirt this is not selfishness but obligation you were given life it is your duty and also your entitlement as a human being to find somehtign beautiful within life no mattter how slight
But i do know that i have collected me of late through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures into somebody much more intact .
I have e put on weight I exist more now than i did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when i arrived here. And i will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person the magnification of one life is indeed an act of worth in this world, Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody s but my own .
Hatha yoga one limb of the philosophy the ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation,
Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation through scholarly study.
The yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition which i[m going to very simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.
Taoists call it imbalance Buddhism calls it ignorance Islam blames our misery on rebellion against god and the jedio Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin, Graduands say that unhappiness is that inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization needs and my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it desire is the design flaw the yogis however say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity we're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals alone with our fears and flaws an d resentment sand mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature, We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character we don't realize that somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self is our true identity universal and divine .
you bear God within your poor wretch and know it not.
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Elizabeth Gilbert
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the Iranian Shia Muslim audience was led to a stunning outburst of emotion, a deep sense of personal guilt, weeping, and even mutilation in their attempts to expiate the sin they had inherited from the forefathers.
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William R. Polk (Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, from Persia to the Islamic Republic, from Cyrus to Khamenei)
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تأملت الكاوتش في ضيق. موقف سخيف جداً لما تبقى نازل الشغل فتلاقي كاوتش العربية نايم. يا ترى إيه حكمة ربنا من حاجة زي كدة؟
بعض العلماء بيقولوا أن معصية ربنا بيظهر تأثيرها في الحاجات اللي حوالينا؛ يقول الحسن البصري - رحمه الله: والله إني لأعلم ذنبي في خلق زوجتي وفي خلق دابتي (ركوبتي).
ويقول الفضيل بن عياض - رحمه الله:
إني لأعصي الله فأجد ذلك في خلق دابتي وامرأتي.
هل ممكن يكون كاوتش العربية اللي لقيته نايم إمبارح وأنا نازل الشغل هو عقاب من ربنا ليا نتيجة للذنب اللي عملته الليلة اللي قبلها؟ وارد.. وبما أني مش متجوز، ولا خاطب، ولا مصاحب، جه عقاب ربنا ليا في كاوتش العربية الmichelin..
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Amr Ali Ibrahim (مارينا.. كان يا مكان)
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Someone asked the great eighth-century mystic Rabia Al-Adawiyya, “I have sinned much; if I repent, will Allah forgive me?” She profoundly replied, “It is the opposite; if Allah forgives you, you are capable of repentance.
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A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam (Studying Qur'an & Hadith Book 2))
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Islam means peace. And if that translates to loving your friend like you love yourself, then love is my truest religion.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo
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In love there is no sin, but in sin there is lechery and salacity. If you wish to condemn, condemn sin, but to condemn love is a vulgarity and blasphemy.
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Khaled Abou El Fadl (The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books)
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God’s gift is but a potentiality, that we may fulfill or utterly fail. In sin and piety, there are no inevitabilities - only the promise of God’s damnation and grace. To honor God’s gift is the heart of piety, and to debase it is nothing but a disgrace, and an utter treachery.
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Khaled Abou El Fadl (The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books)
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On another occasion, Mohammed (s) said, "A person will die with many sins and he will wake up without sins on the day of judgment. He will ask Allah (S) with a great surprise about his sins, and Allah (S) will answer him, 'You left good children behind who prayed for you and that's how We have washed your sins.'" (Tirmazi)
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Javed Khan (Parenting in Islam: A book on child psychology from Islmaic Point of View)
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Are we not the ambassadors of this truth that we humans are fundamentally equal and no human being is superior to another on the basis of caste creed or religion or language . Upholding these values that to speak truth is important, to lie is a sin, not to kill an innocent life, striving for peace, upholding the human dignity, and cherishing the differences with honor, and finally believing that our God is one. Our creator is one. He has to be one. We are one family.
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Nazar Ul Islam Wani
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They can take heart from the belief that, on “the Last Day” (the rasho-keretfi or frashegird), a world savior or messiah, the Soshyant, will return to earth to raise the dead and judge them, passing them through holy fire to burn away their sins.
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William R. Polk (Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, from Persia to the Islamic Republic, from Cyrus to Khamenei)
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Hate the sins, not the sinners
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Dr. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri
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And the Sun runs its course for a period determined for it, that is the decree of (Him), the Exalted in Might, the All-Knowing."
- The Holy Qur'an (Surah Ya-Sin, Ch. 36, Verse 38)
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Abdul Rashid Khan (Astrophysics & the Holy Quran)
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The third answer is the zeitgeist on campus. Political correctness prevents many in American academia from acknowledging that the Third World, too, is rife with acts of evil. The annihilation of hundreds of thousands in Syria, the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, the incarceration of homosexuals in Egypt, the persecution of Christians in Gaza, and even the barbaric abominations perpetrated by the Islamic State—seem to get a pass. The legacy of Edward Said is that the intellectual, political, and moral discourse is confined to the misdeeds of the white man. Thus many in academia find it hard to see, and confront, the Middle East as it really is. They are immersed in an endless discussion of victims and victimizers, colonialists and indigenous people, the powerful and the powerless. The Iraq War exacerbated this phenomenon. The trauma it created means that any (Western) show of strength is seen as sinful, and every (Western) use of force is seen as criminal. According to this worldview, the West is always the perpetrator, the guilty party, while the inherent weakness of the non-West cleanses and absolves it of all wrongdoing.
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Ari Shavit (My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel)
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If your soul does'nt feel guilty for the act of sin, then do whatever you please
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Atef Ashab Uddin Sahil
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Things to keep private :
- your sins
- the sins of others
- family disputes
- marital matters
- acts of worship to Allah
- financial matters
- dreams with meaning
- trusted conversations (amanah)
- aspirations and accomplishments
- struggles and hardships
Remember, there is a certain barakah with keeping things private. The more you share things with the world, the less value they have. There is too much envy and hate among people so don’t innocently assume that no one will wish bad against you. May Allah protect us all.
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Reviver of islam
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When we realize the depravity of our sins and the depths of our rebellion against God, it exceeds the mind’s capacity to grasp this grace. What could we do to deserve such forgiveness? Nothing at all! He engulfs us with his infinite love and absolute mercy, though we cannot earn it.
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Nabeel Qureshi (No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity)
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Every part of a woman’s body provokes sexual temptation to the Muslim male, who has been trained to regard them all as equally erotic as her private parts. His temptation and resulting sinful actions are therefore her problem and not his responsibility.
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Nonie Darwish (Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law)
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Part of [the benefit of God’s making one fall into sin] is also that the servant attains the ranks of humility, meekness and lowliness as well as neediness before Him, for the ego has a tendency to rival lordship; if it had the power it would claim what the Pharaoh claimed, but He has predestined and dominated and all other than Him is incapable and dominated.
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Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (Ranks of the Divine Seekers A Parallel English-Arabic Text. Volume 1 (Islamic Translation) (English and Arabic Edition))
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A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future. It makes a country nervous about itself whatever the wisdom of its actions. Embedding the idea of original sin in a nation is the best possible way to breed self-doubt.
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Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
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Lord, we thank You for Your great love and tender mercies. How awesome You are. We worship You in spirit and truth. In Your amazing grace, You love all of us equally and intimately, regardless of the color of our skin, our gender, the language we speak, or the country in which we live. You, Lord, desire that each of us, as Your unique creation, will come to know You in a saving relationship. You have paid the ultimate price in sacrificing Your only Son, Jesus, to restore fellowship with us that was broken through our sins, and You continue to reach us with unrestrained boundaries today. You use Your amazing Word to transform lives. May each man and woman who picks up this book be overwhelmed by You. We ask You to break their hearts for the 1.5 billion Muslims who desperately need Jesus. We ask You to call followers of Jesus everywhere to action. Thank You for opening the hearts and minds of Muslims through dreams and visions that set them on a path to Jesus. We pray that Your Spirit and presence will continue to draw people in the Islamic world to You. And give strength to those who respond to your call. In the name of Jesus, amen.
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Tom Doyle (Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World?)
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Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone.
When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money.
The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared:
Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim.
An American text designed to teach children Farsi:
Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen
Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad.
The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics.
With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.
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Anand Gopal
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Those who treat the muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin : the objectification of women
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Reza Aslan
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«Cuando Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña y sus aliados invadieron Iraq en 2003 dieron comienzo a una revolución. No era esa su intención, pues su objetivo era acabar con Sadam Hussein y su régimen, y no se apercibieron de la radicalidad de lo que estaban haciendo. La invasión y ocupación del país suponía un cambio revolucionario porque ponía fin a la dominación suní, vigente sin solución de continuidad durante cientos de años bajo los otomanos, los británicos y tras la independencia. Los americanos disolvieron el Ejército y los cuerpos de seguridad, que habían sido los principales instrumentos de control suní sobre el 80 por ciento de la población, que era chií o kurda. (...) Las potencias invasoras nunca asumieron el hecho de que la identificación del nuevo gobierno post-Sadam con los americanos y con un antiguo poder imperial como Gran Bretaña lo deslegitimaba desde el primer momento a ojos de los iraquíes».
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Patrick Cockburn (The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East)
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It was not until Christians were a thousand years removed from Jesus that they believed holy war could purge sin, whereas Muhammad himself taught Muslims that fighting in jihad can forgive sin, and indeed is the best thing in the world.
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Nabeel Qureshi (No God but One: Allah or Jesus?: A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity)
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Arts of energy management and of combat are, of course, not confined to the Chinese only. Peoples of different cultures have practised and spread these arts since ancient times. Those who follow the Chinese tradition call these arts chi kung and kungfu (or qigong and gongfu in Romanized Chinese), and those following other traditions call them by other names.
Muslims in various parts of the world have developed arts of energy management and of combat to very high levels. Many practices in Sufism, which is spiritual cultivation in Islamic tradition, are similar to chi kung practices. As in chi kung, Sufi practitioners pay much importance to the training of energy and spirit, called “qi” and “shen” in Chinese, but “nafas” and “roh” in Muslim terms.
When one can free himself from cultural and religious connotations, he will find that the philosophy of Sufism and of chi kung are similar. A Sufi practitioner believes that his own breath, or nafas, is a gift of God, and his ultimate goal in life is to be united with God. Hence, he practises appropriate breathing exercises so that the breath of God flows harmoniously through him, cleansing him of his weakness and sin, which are manifested as illness and pain.
And he practises meditation so that ultimately his personal spirit will return to the universal Spirit of God. In chi kung terms, this returning to God is expressed as “cultivating spirit to return to the Great Void”, which is “lian shen huan shi” in Chinese. Interestingly the breathing and meditation methods in Sufism and in chi kung are quite similar.
Some people, including some Muslims, may think that meditation is unIslamic, and therefore taboo. This is a serious mis-conception. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed himself clearly states that a day of meditation is better than sixty years of worship. As in any religion, there is often a huge conceptual gap between the highest teaching and the common followers. In Buddhism, for example, although the Buddha clearly states that meditation is the essential path to the highest spiritual attainment, most common Buddhists do not have any idea of meditation.
The martial arts of the Muslims were effective and sophisticated. At many points in world history, the Muslims, such as the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks, were formidable warriors. Modern Muslim martial arts are very advanced and are complete by themselves, i.e. they do not need to borrow from outside arts for their force training or combat application — for example, they do not need to borrow from chi kung for internal force training, Western aerobics for stretching, judo and kickboxing for throws and kicks.
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It is reasonable if sceptics ask, “If they are really so advanced, why don't they take part in international full contact fighting competitions and win titles?” The answer is that they hold different values. They are not interested in fighting or titles. At their level, their main concern is spiritual cultivation. Not only they will not be bothered whether you believe in such abilities, generally they are reluctant to let others know of their abilities.
Muslims form a substantial portion of the population in China, and they have contributed an important part in the development of chi kung and kungfu. But because the Chinese generally do not relate one's achievements to one's religion, the contributions of these Chinese Muslim masters did not carry the label “Muslim” with them.
In fact, in China the Muslim places of worship are not called mosques, as in many other countries, but are called temples. Most people cannot tell the difference be
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Wong Kiew Kit
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Hun samlede hænderne om sin koran og begyndte at messe Ayat al-Kursi højt for at overdøve både nattens stemmer og de levendes letsindige omgang med helvedes dæmoner.
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Sara Omar (Dødevaskeren)
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The
primeval “pen,” for instance, is light, and the writing on the well-
guarded tablet is a light of God,
as the Qur-
ân itself was frequently
referred to as a light, on good scriptural authority. The light of knowledge, or knowledge and learning being a lamp in the darkness of
ignorance and sin came to be used as commonplace metaphors.
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Franz Rosenthal (Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Brill Classics in Islam))
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An ignorant man is forgiven
seventy sins, before one sin is forgiven to the person who possesses
knowledge. Evil actions should not deter anyone from accepting good
advice from the individual who commits them. This has been said by Bilâl
b. Abî Burdah and is expressed in a famous verse, here ascribed to al-Khalîl: The light of knowledge must not be extinguished by dark sins. Knowledge
is sought on account of action, and not vice versa. Leaving the truth
alone because of one’s ignorance is better than doing so through
inaction.
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Franz Rosenthal (Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Brill Classics in Islam))
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Don`t let your sins silence your heart from calling out to your lord
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Islamic teachings
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In the Bible, Ham finds Noah drunk and naked in Noah's tent. He tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who proceed to cover their father without gazing at him. When Noah finds out what happened, he curses Ham's son Canaan, saying he shall be “a servant of servants.” Yet, in the earlier biblical account, Noah and his family are not described in racial terms. Before the 16th or 17th century, the racial interpretation of Ham is absent or contradictory. But as the story echoed through the centuries and around the world, variously interpreted by Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars, Ham came to be widely portrayed as black; blackness, servitude, and the idea of racial hierarchy became inextricably linked. The racist interpretation of scripture was never adopted by the African Coptic Churches, and in Europe, some of the earlier representations of Jesus Christ, Mary, etc. depicted them as being dark-skinned. By the early nineteenth century, many supposed scholars in America supported the belief that African-Americans were descendants of Ham, who were cursed and consequently blackened by their sins, was a primary justification for their enslavement.
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Joseph Gibson (God of the Addicted: A Psychohistorical Analysis of the Origins, Objectives, and Consequences of the Suspicious Association Between Power, Profit, and the Black Preacher in America)
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John wrote in Revelation 17 that Babylon was the “mother” of abominations. In other words, an innovator and pioneer of promoting sin. Once America ‘birthed’ the killing of babies, others quickly concluded they should follow our lead and do the same.
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John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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Consequently, when Muslims today say they revere Jesus and even that they recognize Christianity as a legitimate faith, they are being disingenuous. For the Christianity that the Koran recognizes is not Christianity as millions practice it around the world today. This is a key source of much of the enduring suspicion and mistrust between Muslims and Christians. The Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qadhi expatiated on the Koranic view of mainstream Christianity in a recent sermon, in which he also elaborated a contemptuous view of Christian charity: Today we will talk about one of the distorted religions, about a faith that deviates from the path of righteousness . . . about Christianity, this false faith, and about the people whom Allah described in his book as deviating from the path of righteousness. We will examine their faith, and we will review their history, full of hate, abomination, and wars against Islam and the Muslims. In this distorted and deformed religion, to which many of the inhabitants of the earth belong, we can see how the Christians deviate greatly from the path of righteousness by talking about the concept of the Trinity. As far as they are concerned, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three who are one. . . . They see Jesus, peace be upon him, as the son of Allah. . . . It is the Christians who believe Jesus was crucified. According to them, he was hanged on the cross with nails pounded through his hands, and he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” According to them, this was so that he would atone for the sins of mankind. . . . Regardless of all these deviations from the path of righteousness, it is possible to see many Muslims . . . who know about Christianity only what the Christians claim about love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans. . . . After all this, we still find people who promote the idea of bringing our religion and theirs closer, as if the differences were miniscule and could be eliminated by arranging all those [interfaith] conferences, whose goal is political.18 The idea that Christianity is a “distorted, deformed religion” created by people who were bent on rejecting the prophet Muhammad fuels a great deal of Muslim hatred for Christianity, Christians, and the West to this day.
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Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
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all theisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—the difference between the self and God is radical. Pride is the fundamental sin of human beings.
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James W. Sire (Echoes of a Voice: We Are Not Alone)