Islamic Philosophy Quotes

Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.

I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad.

The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.

I can tell you squat about Islam. I don’t know anything about it. But I know a goddamn lot about al Qaeda and I want them all to burn in hell.

In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.

The mind is one of Allah's best designs.

The Mohammedan religion is the finest of all.

The French have a very deep knowledge of Islam in many areas, and we can exchange views.

Sheikh Rahman had a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Harvard of Islamic thought. He also had a long history of guiding terrorist groups.

Islam appeals to people because it appeals also to reason.

God is identical with His attributes, so that it may be said that He is the knowledge, the knower, and the known.

Moderate Islam seeks balance between intellect and the heart, between religion and the world, between spirituality and materialism and between individualism and the group

Pakistan is heir to an intellectual tradition of which the illustrious exponent was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He saw the future course for Islamic societies in a synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age.

I consider myself an ordinary Muslim who is constantly working to put himself in the framework established by the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet Mohammed. I study the works of experts of jurisprudence, Koranic commentary, hadith commentary, and Sufism.

Islam is based on naql (texts) and ‘aql (intellect). Some people just have the texts – we call them naql-heads.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.

Osama bin Laden has managed to replace fear of God and adherence to the Quran with his philosophy of jihad above all else. What's behind that facade is the true philosophical intentions of al Qaeda: the establishment of a new Islamic caliphate that will defeat democracy as the greater of the two political orders.

Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation.

Islam is not just a religion. Islam is everything.

There is nothing more Islamic than critical thinking.

Rumi is one of the great spokesmen for the Quranic instruction teaching that all prophets come from God and God does not create one religion, but many religions.

I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God's hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

Islamic subjects are taught with the aim of instilling in those students the essence of the Islamic message and its philosophy in general …. Such form of religious education is obligatory upon everyone who lives in a Muslim country regardless of whether he is a Muslim or not.