“Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence.”
“Keadaan universiti-universiti di negara-negara Islam yang mengajar agama dan tamadun Islam telah menjadi amat lemah kerana ketiadaan koleksi perpustakaan yang lengkap, program akademik kukuh, penyeliaan serius dan bersifat terlalu berpihak kepada politik. Segelintir institusi pengajian tinggi yang baik, dirosakkan oleh perasaan hasad, dengki dan fikiran sempit.”
“In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.”
“Not all Muslims become involved in acts of violence. Yet all might be held culpable. THis is because that section of Muslim--in fact, the majority--who are not personally involved, neither disown those members of their community who are engaged in violence, nor even condemn them. In such a case, according to the Islamic Shariah itself, if the involved Muslims are directly responsible, the uninvolved Muslims are also indirectly responsible. (p. 91)”
“نحن المسلمين ! ديننا الفضيلة الظاهرة ، الحق الأبلج. لا حجب ولا أستار ولا خفايا ولا أسرار. هو واضح وضوح المئذنة . أفليس فيها ذلك المعنى ؟ هل في الدنيا جماعه او نحلة تكرر مبادئها وتذاع عشر مرات في اليوم كما تذاع مبادئ ديننا نحن المسلمون ،على ألسنة المؤذنين : أشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وأشهد أن محمداً رسول الله”
“The first thing I would like to share with you here is that when you help people, you don’t wait around until they say thank you because you didn’t help them so you can hear appreciation.”
“[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical — I would even say “Mediterranean” — current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity. […] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam — one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world s most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.”
“وإذا بالأوامر العليا تنزل من فوق السماء السابعة لأجل ذلك المهموم المكروب.. تنهي في ساعة سنوات العذاب، ليأتي عهد الشفاء.. لماذا تذهب إلى غيره؟ لماذا تلتجئ إلى سواه؟ لماذا تثق بكل هؤلاء الموتى الذين يتحركون حولك وتنسى الحي الذي لا يموت؟”
“فكما خلقتك من عدم فأنا وحدي الذي أرفع عن جسدك السقم!”
“ليس هناك آهة إلا ويسمعها، ولا ألم إلا ويعلم موضعه، ولا زفرة إلا ويرى نيرانها في الفؤاد”
“An oft-quoted statistic from the [United Nations] reports is that the amount of literature translated into Spanish in a single year exceeds the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.”
“إن أمة تفخر بالموالي والعبيد كما تفخر بالأشراف لأمة عظيمة وإن ديناً يتساوى فيه البشر ليستحق الخلافة في الأرض ..كل الأرض”
“The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.”
“Carilah tiga tipe teman yang harus didekati dan miliki, kegembiraan, ketenangan dan semangat yang tinggi. Tiga musuh yang engkau harus jauhi, yaitu sifat pesimis, bimbang dan putus asa.”
“All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.”
“Allah exalts whom he wills!”
“People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?”