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Islam Quotes

This is a small page with views from supporters, critics and historians, and none of its entries is flagged as misattributed. The names at the top are the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Harari, Hillary Clinton, Richard Dawkins and Tsai Ping-kun.

The sourced entries take different angles. Gandhi, speaking in 1939, says that the very word Islam means peace. Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens (2011), says Christian success served as a model for another monotheist religion that appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century. The philosopher Antony Flew, in a 2009 book, says he could never regard it with anything but horror and fear. Each quote page gives the full text and source, which matter more here than on most topics.

Random quote on Islam

Most quoted on islam:

I often think that woman is more free in Islam than in Christianity. Woman is more protected by Islam than by the faith which preaches monogamy. In AI Quran the law about woman is juster and more liberal.

Annie Besant

You need to understand that Islam is the problem. I am sick and tired of people here in the West asking me to soften my message. I am sick and tired of people asking me, "Are you trying to change 1.3 billion people?" Yes, I am trying!

Wafa Sultan

Your religion, although it has some good points, such as worship of the great Being, and the necessity of being just and charitable, is otherwise nothing but a rehash of Judaism and a tedious collection of fairy tales.

Voltaire Reason in The Philosophical Dictionary selected and translated by H.I. Woolf (1924)

Islam is a religion of continuous personal and societal reform through disciplined worship.

Mahmoud M. Ayoub

Islam has been built on five [pillars]: testifying that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, establishing the salah (prayer), paying the zakat (obligatory charity), making the hajj (pilgrimage) to the House, and fasting in Ramadhan.

Muhammad

Purer than the system of Zoroaster, more liberal than the law of Moses, the religion of Muhammad might seem less inconsistent with reason than the creed of mystery and superstition which, in the seventh century, disgraced the simplicity of the gospels.

Edward Gibbon

It is not the intention of Islam to force its beliefs on people, but Islam is not merely ‘belief’. As we have pointed out, Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men. Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another. When Islam releases people from this political pressure and presents to them its spiritual message, appealing to their reason, it gives them complete freedom to accept or not to accept its beliefs.

Sayyid Qutb Ma'alim fi'l-Tariq (Signposts on the Road, or Milestones) (1964)

Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking, with the result of an absolute balance and solid composure. Probably this feeling that everything in the teachings and postulates of Islam is "in its proper place" has created the strongest impression on me.

Muhammad Asad Islam at the Crossroads (1934)

Islam does not command narrowmindedness and racial and religious prejudice. It does not make the recognition of merit and virtue, of human benevolence, mercy and love dependent upon and subject to distinctions of religion and race. It teaches us to respect every man who is good, whatever his religion.

Abul Kalam Azad

No other religion in history spread so rapidly as Islam . . . The West has widely believed that this surge of religion was made possible by the sword. But no modern scholar accepts that idea, and the Qur'an is explicit in support of the freedom of conscience."

James A. Michener

From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished. What was lost to Christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but quite the contrary… To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization; but this is a narrow view."

Bertrand Russell

'I believe in 'One God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God,' is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the honours of the Prophet of God have never transgressed the measure of human virtue, and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion."

Edward Gibbon

In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Sense of justice is one of the most wonderful ideals of Islam, because as I read in the Quran I find those dynamic principles of life, not mystic but practical ethics for the daily conduct of life suited to the whole world.

Sarojini Naidu

Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

Christopher Hitchens God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007)

Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.

Pope Benedict XVI

Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.

Peter Seewald

From a new angle and with a fresh vigour, Islam took up that systematic development of positive knowledge which the Greeks had begun and relinquished. If the Greek was the father, then the Arab was the foster-father of the scientific method of dealing with reality, that is to say, by absolute frankness, the utmost simplicity of statement and explanation, exact record and exhaustive criticism. Through the Arabs it was, and not by the Latin route, that the modem world received that gift of light and power.

H. G. Wells

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the West at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death… Muhammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

Karen Armstrong

Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.

Theodore Roosevelt Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916)

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