islam

This struggle between good and evil, fresh and stale, new and decrepit,between the vigor of moral youth and the dotage of senility, is of positive benefit, for it keeps the perennial moral values alive

And speak to people good [words]

It is known that the Quran leaves an analytical reader the impression of disarrangement, and that it seems to be a compound of diverse elements. Nevertheless, the Quran is life, not literature. Islam is a way of living rather than a way of thinking. The only authentic comment of the Quran can be life, and as we know, it was the life of the prophet Muhammad. Islam is in its written form (the Quran) may seem disorderly, but in the life of Muhammad it proves itself to be a natural union of love and force, the sublime and the real, the divine and the human. This explosive compound of religion and politics produced enormous force in the life of the peoples who accepted it. In one moment, Islam has coincided with the very essence of life.

He who at night feeling tired because of working in the daytime, then at night he was forgiven of Allah" _

This idea (Taqwa)can be effectively conveyed by the term "conscience," if the object of conscience transcends it. This is why it is proper to say that "conscience" is truly as central to Islam as love is to Christianity when one speaks of the human response to the ultimate reality__hich, therefore, is conceived in Islam as merciful justice rather than fatherhood. Taqw_, then, in the context of our argument, means to be squarely anchored within the moral tensions, the "limits of God," and not to "transgress" or violate the balance of those tensions or limits. Human conduct then becomes endowed with that quality which renders it "service to God [__b_da].

The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said: "My Companions are as stars. Whomsoever of them you follow, you will be rightly guided." When a man looks at a star, and finds his way by it, the star does not speak any word to that man. Yet, by merely looking at the star, the man knows the road from roadlessness and reaches his goal.

Islam's middle position can be recognized by the fact that Islam has always been attacked from the two opposite directions: from the side of religion, that is too natural, actual, and tuned to the world; and from the side of science that it contains religious and mystical elements. There is only one Islam, but like man, it has both soul and body.

Belief in God, without belief in the Prophet (SAWW), would still be unbelief.

We have no rational evidence that there exits another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.

Fear no one except the One.

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it__ not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It__ not about the burqa. It__ about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.

Whoever says that all music is prohibited, let him also claim that the songs of birds are prohibited.

All the dilemmas and questions of today were known in ethics more than 2,000 years ago. All the greatest teachers of mankind whether prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad or non-prophets such as Confucius , Gautama, Buddha, Socrates, Kant, Tolstoy , and Martin Buber, covering a period from the sixth century BC up to the present ( Martin Buber died in 1965) have taught essentially the same morals. As distinguished from rules about social orders and ways of production , moral truths are constant. The reason for this lies in the fact that the riddle had been established at the moment of creation in the "prologue in heaven" in the act preceding the whole of human history. Intelligence, education, and experience do not in themselves help us approach or better understand all of that. Jesus pronounced his truth when he was a child and was slightly more than thirty when he was condemned. He needed neither knowledge nor experience for his great, capital truths about God and man because these truths could not be reached by knowledge or experience. Are they not "Hidden from the wise and the learned and revealed to the little ?

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 __he 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 __dulteresses_ 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__ books enumerating the sins of the West

Taqw_ means to protect oneself against the harmful or evil consequences of one's conduct. If, then, by "fear of God" one means fear of the consequences of one's actions__hether in this world or the next (fear of punishment of the Last Day)__ne is absolutely right. In other words, it is the fear that comes from an acute sense of responsibility, here and in the hereafter, and not the fear of a wolf or of an uncanny tyrant, for the God of the Qur___ has unbounded mercy__lthough He also wields dire punishment, both in this world and in the hereafter.

There are only three integral views of the world: the religious, the materialistic, and the Islamic. They reflect three elemental possibilities (conscience, nature, and man), each of them manifesting itself as Christianity, materialism, and Islam. All variety of ideologies, philosophies, and teachings from the oldest time up to now can be reduced to one of these three basic world views. The first takes as its starting point the existence of the spirit, the second the existence of matter, and the third the simultaneous existence of spirit and matter. If only matter exists, materialism would be the only consequent philosophy. On the contrary, if the spirit exists then man also exists, and man's life would be senseless without a kind of religion and morality. Islam is the name for the unity of spirit and matter, the highest form of which is man himself. The human life is complete only if it includes both the physical and the spiritual desires of the human being. All man's failures are either because of the religious denial of man's biological needs of the materialistic denial of man's spiritual desires.

And never think that Allah is unaware of what the wrongdoers do. He only delays them for a Day when eyes will stare [in horror].

The essence of all human rights is the equality of the entire human race, which the Qur___ assumed, affirmed, and confirmed. It obliterated all distinctions among men except goodness and virtue (taqw_)