The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
I'm not criticizing how people experience what they might call spirituality. I am interested in looking critically at something else - at how people use their language to articulate theories about something they call religion, to say, for example, that "in Islam religion and politics necessarily go together," or to insist that "violence has no place in religion," to universalize it.
Many people in Europe and the U. S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
They used Akbar's principles to formulate a version of Islam that could peacefully co-exist with other religions (or so they claimed). An Emperor's Bequest to Islam, their joint 1,300-page doorstopper, spent twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in hardcover alone. The fact that they remained practicing Muslims (albeit the liberal, wine-guzzling kind) put their message in high international demand.
The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.
Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.
A Muslim has five duties towards another Muslim; to return a salutation, visit the sick, follow funerals, accept an invitation and say 'God have mercy on you' when one sneezes.
Good people in the West have often failed to distinguish between Islam and Islamism.
You can keep your own religion - Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism - you just need to add Jesus to the equation. Then you become complete. You become a Buddhist with Jesus, a Hindu with Jesus, a Muslim with Jesus and so on. You can throw out the term Christianity and still be a follower of Jesus. In fact, you can throw out the term Christian too. In some countries, you could be persecuted for calling yourself a Christian, and there is no need for that. Just ask Jesus into your heart, you don't have to identify yourself as a Christian.
A growing number of Muslims in America, more than 40 percent are African-American
The difference between the three Abrahamic religions: Christianity - mumbling to the ceiling, Judaism - mumbling to the wall, Islam - mumbling to the floor.
America is not - and never will be - at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists.
The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom.
It is not difficult to destroy Islam. Islam is the pumped up ego of a megalomaniac psychopath. Muhammad was a narcissist madman. Just as a huge balloon can be deflated by a small needle, all it takes to make Islam explode is to ridicule its loony inventor and its brainless followers.
Islam is nothing but man's exclusive and total submission to God.
I am never going to write about dogs again. You can write about Islam, you can write about sexuality, but no, not dogs.
The real Da'wah to Islam is the character of a Muslim.
All of us here today understand this: We do not fight Islam, we fight against evil.
Democracy is a hegemonic tool of the West and contrary to Islam. Why do you act as though the entire world needs democracy? And when it comes to homosexuality, the issue is clearly dealt with by the Koran. It says it is forbidden and should be punished.
There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.