Sins Islamic Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sins Islamic. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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)
Anonymous
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.
Abu Bakr al-Siddiq
Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.
Lesley Hazleton (After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam)
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.
Erwin Raphael McManus
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.
Dennis Prager (Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph)
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).
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
Ibn Mas'ud said that Allah's Messenger said: Abusing a Muslim is sinful and fighting with his tantamount to Kufr. Bukhari Muslim
Ahmad Von Denffer (A Day with the Prophet)
Saying of the Prophet Accusations Anyone reviling a brother for a sin will not himself die before committing it.
Idries Shah (Caravan of Dreams)
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
Men learn wisdom from their sins, not from their righteous deeds.
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall
No,matter how sinful we are there is a way to repent.
Faisal Attari
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.
Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
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?
Darrel Ray (Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality)
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
Sam Harris
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.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
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
Nizar Qabbani
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.
Slavoj Žižek (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections)
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.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity)
Dicho del Profeta El juez Un hombre que es nombrado juez ha sido asesinado sin cuchillo.
Idries Shah (Caravan of Dreams)
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
Ramadan isn't fulfilled by feasting on some tasty beef, the greatest of feast is haram if others go hungry.
Abhijit Naskar (Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was)
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.
Osama bin Laden (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden)
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.
Martin Luther (On War Against the Turk)
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.
Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
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.
Larry Collins (Ô Jérusalem)
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.
Buck Storm (Finding Jesus in Israel: Through the Holy Land on the Road Less Traveled)
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...
Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
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,
Karen Armstrong (Islam: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles))
Allah is the only One you need to please. —the path to peace When God gives us more than we think we can handle He is calling us to rely on Him in a deeper way. —the hidden mercy of pain When God heals you, don’t go back to the person that hurt you. When God frees you, don’t go back to the prisons that enslaved you. When God awakens you with His light, don’t go back to the darkness that kept you asleep. When God speaks to you, don’t go back to listening to your ego. When God welcomes you, don’t go back to the spaces your spirit never belonged in. When God forgives you, don’t go back to the same sins. When God says you are priceless, don’t go back to thinking you are not good enough.
A. Helwa (From Darkness Into Light (Inspirational Islamic Books Book 4))
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.
Paul Harrison (Elements of Pantheism; A Spirituality of Nature and the Universe)
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]
Osama bin Laden
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.
Slavoj Žižek
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.
Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam (Inspirational Islamic Books Book 2))
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.
David Gregory (Dinner with a Perfect Stranger: An Invitation Worth Considering)
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.
Pervez Musharraf (In the Line of Fire: A Memoir)
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)
Michael Sugich (Hearts Turn: Sinners, Seekers, Saints and the Road to Redemption)
....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.
Washington Irving (Life of Mohammed)
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
Karen Armstrong (A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
On my best days, Allah give me gratitude. On my worst days, Allah give me patience. When I am blessed, Allah make me generous. When I am wronged, Allah make me forgiving. When I am struggling, Allah make me persevere. When I am anxious, Allah give me peace. When I am heartbroken, Allah heal me. When I sin, Allah forgive me. When I am lost, Allah give me guidance. When I am in darkness, Allah give me light. When I see others sin, Allah protect me from the eyes of judgment. No matter what I face, Allah make it a means for turning my heart toward Your names.
A. Helwa (From Darkness Into Light (Inspirational Islamic Books Book 4))
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.
Amr Ali Ibrahim (مارينا.. كان يا مكان)
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 . .
Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
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.
Charles Le Gai Eaton (Islam and the Destiny of Man)
[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.
Ross Douthat (Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics)
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.
Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
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.
Diarmaid MacCulloch (A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years)
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.
Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter)
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.
Muhammad Asad (The Road to Mecca)
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».
Karen Armstrong (Una historia de Dios: 4000 años de búsqueda en el judaísmo, el cristianismo y el islam (Contextos) (Spanish Edition))
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.
Sachiko Murata (The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought)
To put leaders in their proper place is to think honorably of them and their families, to support their policies and to advise them, and not to bring them down because of their mistakes or errors, which may affect public interest and national stability. However, we are never to obey of aid them in unjust or sinful acts.
Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud (Islamization of Contemporary Knowledge and the Role of the University in the Context of De-Westernization and Decolonization)
A sick person is Allah’s guest for as long as he is ill. Every day he is sick, God gives him countless rewards, as long as he says ‘ al hamdulillah’, praise be to God, and does not fight it and complain. When God returns to him his health, he expiates his sins and gives him the status of the newly-born (completely pure and free of any sin). Illness is a mercy and a blessing.
Kristiane Backer (From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life)
These are deadly serious thoughts, just as aborting babies is a deadly serious national sin.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
America also has sinned grievously since 1973 in allowing, by law, the killing of as many as fifty five million American babies in, and emerging from, their mothers’ wombs. Does anyone seriously think that this carnage would have been allowed to happen if the Church had arisen with one voice and said ‘we will not abide the legalized murder of our children in the womb’?
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
The literal translation of the word “sin” is missing the mark. Are we blind to how far we are from ‘hitting the mark’? Since current polls and demographic studies show that Christians living in America are divorcing, abusing, over-indulging, bankrupting or adultering at rates that don’t differ from non-Christians, we have to admit our blindness.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
all theisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—the difference between the self and God is radical. Pride is the fundamental sin of human beings.
James W. Sire (Echoes of a Voice: We Are Not Alone)
A recent George Barna poll revealed that only 1% of Christians interviewed in his poll subscribed to all thirteen listed basic doctrinal principles of our Christian faith. Only one percent. Colson notes that in most churches today, “Biblical illiteracy is rampant.” As I detailed in America at the Crossroads (Tyndale House, 1979), cultures historically have only improved when God’s people get serious and experience spiritual revival. America has not witnessed a nationwide revival since early in the 20th century, over one hundred years ago. Americans really shouldn’t be too surprised that our culture continues to spiral downward. If we are “blind” to our true spiritual condition as an end times Church, our prayer should be that we see our true spiritual condition, as God sees it.          The literal translation of the word “sin” is missing the mark. Are we blind to how far we are from ‘hitting the mark’? Since current polls and demographic studies show that Christians living in America are divorcing, abusing, over-indulging, bankrupting or adultering at rates that don’t differ from non-Christians, we have to admit our blindness.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
America also has sinned grievously since 1973 in allowing, by law, the killing of as many as fifty five million American babies in, and emerging from, their mothers’ wombs. Does anyone seriously think that this carnage would have been allowed to happen if the Church had arisen with one voice and said ‘we will not abide the legalized murder of our children in the womb’? David Bereit, Founder of Forty Days for Life, points out that any abortion clinic in America should have a sign in its window that reads “THIS ABORTION CLINIC IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE INACTION OF CHRISTIANS IN THIS COMMUNITY.” When the Lord looks upon the Church in America today what does He see? Is today’s America what the Apostle John saw when the Church of Laodicea was revealed to him.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
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.
Anand Gopal
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
Reza Aslan
My fifth point is that, nevertheless, the experience, memory or imagination of enforced abnegation does play a key role. Years of real or imagined oppression — or a solidarity, even an identification, with those who have been oppressed elsewhere — lead to a rebellion. The question missing from most analyses, however, is that the oppression that is resisted is not only a political oppression of a people — for example, the Palestinians (which almost every Islamic state and militant organisation has conspicuously failed to help beyond very limited points) — but a perceived oppression or denigration of a sense of self and a sense of core belief; and it is perceived as applied personally, but also as systemically applied to the collective manifestation of this core belief. To that extent, it is belief that seems as if it is called upon to fight back, because it is belief and philosophy that have been subject to abnegation. It is not, however, just the philosophy that fights back, but, as mentioned above, the philosophy of the means chosen. Does abnegation justify a sacrificium in which huge numbers of innocent people are swept into death? Does the sacrificium necessarily sacrifice others? In so far as the memory or re-created memory of abnegation is strong and made stronger, it triumphs over the memories and values of self held by others. Terror thus becomes a requital and ruthlessness — requital for sins committed perhaps against self but certainly against self’s historical and contemporary cohorts, and ruthlessness in an exploding outwards.
Stephen Chan (The End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism)
he talked about Jesus Christ as “the God of love,” I was even more startled. In Islam, there are 99 names of Allah, but none of them are Love. All my life I had been taught that Allah was distant and a strict judge. If I sinned, he would punish me. I was in constant fear of him because I knew I was a sinner and that sin separated me from a relationship with him. I had done everything I could to please him with my prayers, my fasting, my good deeds and all the rest, but I had no peace. No matter how much I did, or how hard I tried, I knew in my own heart I could not possibly be enough. I was too often unable to measure up. Alim spoke of a God who was not distant and disapproving—a God who wanted a personal relationship with us. Then he said that God knew my name!
Samaa Habib (Face to Face with Jesus: A Former Muslim's Extraordinary Journey to Heaven and Encounter with the God of Love)
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.
Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
Cada vez que se acaba una etapa de ideas más o menos racionales vuelven las viejas supersticiones con renovada energía. Mira el islam, creíamos que había muerto, pero no, ese huevo estaba enterrado calentándose bajo la arena de los desiertos, incubándose (...) El pasado es un alien que llevamos todos dentro, que engorda, que está ahí siempre a punto de reventarnos el pecho y escapar.(...)Los momentos de luz son pasajeros, inestables. Hoy llamamos progreso a algo que no sabemos cómo lo llamarán los que vengan. La oscuridad es el estado natural: en cuanto el hombre se descuida, vuelve lo oscuro. En la vida privada ocurre lo misno. En cuanto te descuidas tres o cuatro días sin hacer limpieza, lo oscuro, lo sucio, lo prehumano, empieza a comerte. Cuesta mucha energía mantener encendida la lucecita de la civilización. En cualquier caso, todo eso que se nos antoja irremediable a lo mejor les parece una broma a los que vengan luego. Seguramente será así. Juan: Lo peor siempre está por llegar.
Rafel Chirbes
But the proud, wicked man of sin refuses to submit and goes about teaching ignorant people not to believe in Allah and His religion, Islam. The true religion of Allah (God) is Islam (Holy Qur-an 3:18). The emblem of Islam represents the sun, moon and stars; the meaning is Freedom (Sun), Justice (Star), and Equality (Moon). No other nation’s religion has the sun, moon, and stars as its emblem. No religion is worthwhile if its roots are not found in the universal order of things. No nation can use the sun, moon, and stars to represent their government or religion but the nation that owns it (the nation of Islam). We
Elijah Muhammad (Message To The Blackman In America)
And give to the orphans their properties and do not substitute the defective [of your own] for the good [of theirs]. And do not consume their properties into your own. Indeed, that is ever a great sin. Quran The Women 4 :2
Anonymous
irritatingly moralistic. Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil. Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan—and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay. That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil. Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true. Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine—many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is … our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson. Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later—with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights—there is no way not to know. Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism. Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy. But where? V. DEMOCRATIC REALISM The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics)
Muslims cannot know the assurance of salvation, for in the end, Allah does with each person as he desires. According to the Hadith, Muhammad himself said he was unsure of his eternal salvation. He wrote, “Though I am an Apostle of Allah, yet I do not know what Allah will do to me!” (Bukhari 5.58.266). And the Quran states that only death by jihad assures a person of instant access into paradise. Christians, however, can know the assurance of their salvation. That’s because salvation is a free gift made available through the sacrifice and triumph of Jesus. No matter how great our sin, Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf was greater. Because it is Christ who obtained our salvation and gives it to us, we cannot and will not lose it. As the apostle John said, “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:12-13). This free gift is available to anyone who receives Christ as Savior: “To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).
Erwin W. Lutzer (The Cross in the Shadow of the Crescent: An Informed Response to Islam’s War with Christianity)
La actitud del socialismo radical español hacia el islam genera infinitas perplejidades. Los dirigentes, autoproclamados grandes adalides de la modernidad y de la lucha contra el oscurantismo que para ellos es la religión en general, pero el cristianismo católico en particular, muestran una enorme condescendencia cuando no simpatía por un islamismo que sin duda se ha convertido en el mayor reto cultural y de seguridad para la sociedad occidental.
Hermann Tertsch (Libelo contra la secta (Actualidad (esfera)) (Spanish Edition))
going back to Muslim writings in the Quran, the Sunna and Hadith literature, he has developed startling parallels between what the Bible tells us about “the Beast,” “the man of sin,” “the man of lawlessness,” that is, the Antichrist (I John 2:18) and what Muslim literature says about the Mahdi. Richardson’s book is groundbreaking in prophetic literature, as there are no other available books that study and contrast Muslim end times predictions and Biblical end times prophecies.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
- Murder is a sin. It's a sin in Judaism, it's a sin in Christianity, it's a sin in Islam and every other… - I'll decide what's a sin.
Robert Ferrigno (Sins of the Assassin (Assassin Trilogy #2))
Mustapha is 'The adventurer par excellence. He expects life to have something of the variety and flavor of The Thousand and One Nights, and if the pungency is lacking he does his best to supply it. A wholehearted believer in dangerous living, he often takes outrageous chances', due says Bowles, to 'a refusal to believe that action entails result. To him, each is separate, having been determined at the beginning of time, when the inexorable design of destiny was laid out .. It is the most monstrous absurdity to fear death, the future, or the consequences of one's acts, since this would be tantamount to fearing life itself. Thus to be prudent is laughable, to be frugal is despicable, and to be provident borders on the sinful. How can a man be so presumptuous as to assume that tomorrow, let alone next year, will actually arrive ? And so how dare he tempt fate by preparing for any part of the future ? either immediate or distant ?
Charles Le Gai Eaton (Islam and the Destiny of Man)
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.
Roger Crowley (1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West)
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.
Najat El Hachmi (Siempre han hablado por nosotras)
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
عباس آل حميد (The Islamic Intellectual Framewok)
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
عباس آل حميد (The Islamic Intellectual Framewok)
When we remember who God is, when we praise and magnify Him, when we come needy and desperate for His forgiveness, we actualize who we truly are beneath the weight of our sins. Repentance is letting go of our baggage, because we understand that by Allah’s mercy we are not defined by our past. As the mystics say, “The ocean refuses no river,” so how could an infinitely merciful God refuse any sinner? We are not worthy of God’s forgiveness because of our repentance, but because God’s mercy embraces all things, including our sin. This is why the mystics cleverly repent to Allah by saying: “Oh Allah, plead on my behalf with Yourself, do what is worthy of You, not worthy of me!
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
THE ARRIVAL OF DEVIL, DEMONS, HELL, RESURRECTION AND ARMAGEDDON WERE FOREIGN TO Judaism. With the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon, (539 BCE) came many other diverse ideas about god and goddesses and sex. The philosophers and rabbis brought back a recharged and unified religious idea of one god and his power. But instead of bringing back a purer religion they brought back one filled with non-Jewish baggage. The Babylonian group returned with many diverse ideas that did not fit well with this scheme. Most biblical scholars agree that Jews brought back from Babylon numerous concepts garnered from Persian Zoroastrianism, such as a devil, demons, hell, resurrection, afterlife and Armageddon. All of these ideas entered Judaism deeply and surfaced with fantastic aberrations in Christianity and Islam. Augustine’s teaching made it clear that Christians should realize erections were a disease caused by the original sin of lust. This one man, more than any other Christian, set the Church on a path of denying the body and denying sex and sensuality, and condemning women as instrument of the devil. “...everyone is evil and carnal because of Adam,” Augustine wrote. ‘every human has been contaminated”. He declared that semen was the agent transferring this pollution from one generation to the next. Pagans had been mocking Christian celibates as being unmanly according to the Roman tradition. Augustine said no; men who had sex conquered only weak women. At this point in time, the great phallus of creation, worshiped for millennia became the organ of uncontrollable lust to be suppressed in all of Europe. Augustine’s proclamations would proliferate all over Europe, self- loathing expanding like a plague across the continent. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant religions all inherited this lasting legacy for Western culture, enduring even after the partial eclipse of Catholic Church ideology in the Renaissance.
John R Gregg
The five set Prayers are an expiation, for there is something amongst them by which major sins are repelled.
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (Inner Dimensions of Islamic Worship)
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.
Larry Collins (O Jerusalem!)
«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».
Patrick Cockburn (The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East)
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.
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)
Don`t let your sins silence your heart from calling out to your lord
Islamic teachings
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.
Franz Rosenthal (Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Brill Classics in Islam))
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.
Franz Rosenthal (Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Brill Classics in Islam))
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.
Nabeel Qureshi (No God but One: Allah or Jesus? (with Bonus Content): A Former Muslim Investigates the Evidence for Islam and Christianity)
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.
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (Complete Infidel's Guides))
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.
Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller (The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan)
Llegaba hasta el Carpanta, traído por la brisa de tierra, el olor de los montes cercanos: desnudos, secos y calcinados por el sol, con tomillo, romero, palmito y chumbera entre sus peñas pardas, ramblas secas donde crecían las higueras, y almendrales escalonados por muretes de piedra. Pese al cemento y al cristal y al acero y a las excavadoras, a la sucesión interminable de luces bastardas que mancillaba sus orillas de costa a costa, todo el Mediterráneo seguía estando allí, a poca atención que se prestase al tenue rumor de la memoria: aceite y vino rojo, Islam y Talmud, cruces, pinos, cipreses, tumbas, iglesias, ponientes cárdenos como la sangre, velas blancas a lo lejos, piedras talladas por los hombres y por el tiempo, hora singular de la tarde en que todo quedaba quieto y en silencio salvo el canto de la cigarra, noches a la luz de una hoguera hecha con madera de deriva, mientras la luna se elevaba despacio sobre un mar de islas sin agua. Y también espetones de sardinas, laurel y aceitunas, cáscaras de sandía flotando quietas en el leve ondular vespertino de la playa, rumor de guijarros en la resaca del amanecer, barcas pintadas de azul, blanco y rojo, varadas en orillas con molinos en ruinas y olivos grises, y uvas que amarilleaban en los emparrados. Y a su sombra, perdidos los ojos en el azul intenso que se extendía hacia levante, hombres inmóviles mirando el mar; héroes atezados y barbudos que sabían de naufragios en calas designadas por dioses crueles, ocultos bajo la apariencia de mutiladas estatuas que dormían, con los ojos abiertos, un silencio de siglos.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte (La Carta Esf�rica / The Nautical Chart)
Por lo tanto, no es de extrañar que en los tiempos de su autoridad social los colectivos del programa total pudieran de iure enviar condenas de muerte a sus “desertores” o a aquellos cansados de la religión, o al menos un maleficio escatológico y una maldición proveniente del corazón. Incluso hoy en día el islam está prácticamente obsesionado con el problema de la apostasía (ridda), como lo demuestra, entre otras cosas, un juicio fatal del comité de fatwas de la Universidad de al-Azhar de El Cairo (la institución más venerada por el islam sunita) de 1978, que establece que, bajo ciertas circunstancias, los apóstatas aún deben ser asesinados como traidores a Alá. Además, el islam contemporáneo está más afligido que nunca por sospechas de blasfemias reales o supuestas. Como miembros de un colectivo celoso, cuyos miembros sienten sus propias debilidades culturales con creciente claridad, algunos fanáticos musulmanes hoy no pierden la oportunidad de sentirse ofendidos por los incrédulos. Responden a estos ataques, en buena parte presumidos o de esperar, con un celoso refuerzo de fronteras. Cualquiera que esté interesado en los métodos de lograr una membresía total a principios del siglo ⅩⅪ solo necesita familiarizarse con las actividades de las escuelas de los talibanes en los centros de formación afganos y wahabíes en Arabia Saudita, cuyos graduados se vuelven más visibles como luchadores de la fe en los países de África y Asia. Y no se puede guardar silencio sobre el hecho de que suceden cosas similares en algunas mezquitas europeas del patio trasero. Sin embargo, los interesados también deben informarse sobre las universidades de las sectas protestantes en Estados Unidos, sobre los seminarios de la Fraternidad Sacerdotal San Pío X en Suiza, las asociaciones denominadas Opus Sanctorum Angelorum y el fervor mariano en Baviera, así como sobre los tratos de innumerables minirreligiones totalitarias en todo el mundo que, a pesar de todas sus diferencias, lo único que comparten es que de una manera aparentemente pasada de moda buscan la “existencia completa” de sus miembros.
Peter Sloterdijk (Fobocracia: Reflexiones sobre religión)
Islam means peace. And if that translates to loving your friend like you love yourself, then love is my truest religion.
Mwanandeke Kindembo
If your soul does'nt feel guilty for the act of sin, then do whatever you please
Atef Ashab Uddin Sahil
Tawba is not about our sins as much as it is about Allah’s forgiveness. When we seek refuge in Allah’s mercy we are turning from our human qualities towards His divine attributes. Whether we wrong ourselves or others wrong us, tawba is the vehicle that turns us from our pain, blame and disappointment back toward Allah, who is the source of all hope, mercy, and peace.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
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.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam (Inspirational Islamic Books Book 2))
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.
Aisha Utz (Psychology from the Islamic Perspective)
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.
Aisha Utz (Psychology from the Islamic Perspective)
Our darkest moments are not hidden from God. When we open our hearts to His abounding love He calls us to confess our sins; never needing to be revealed to Him, but by us removing them from our lives, we make room for His revealing.
Allene vanOirschot