Muhammad Asad: ...I suddenly felt in myself all the weight of Europe:...

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; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.

Muhammad Asad

islamic support perfect

It was not Muslims that had made Islam great; it was Islam that had made the Muslims great.

Muhammad Asad

islamic quran wisdom

If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings.

Muhammad Asad

water men moving

It is not enough to say, 'We are Muslims and have an ideology or our own': we must also be in a position to show that our ideology is vital enough to withstand the pressure of the changing times, and to decided in what way the fact of our being Muslims will affect the course of our lives: in other words, we must find out whether Islam can offer us precise directives for the formation of our society, and whether its inspiration is strong enough in us to translate these directives into practice.

Muhammad Asad

strong inspiration practice

We (Muslims) have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realise that it was the negligence of the Muslims - and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam - that caused our present decay.

Muhammad Asad

islam teaching past

Every age requires a new approach to the Qur’an for the simple reason that the Quran is made for all ages. It is our duty to look for deeper meanings in the Quran in order to increase our knowledge and experience. The Quran wants your intellect to be always active and trying to approach the message of God. God himself dedicated this book to people who think.

Muhammad Asad

simple book thinking

It's very impossible to live by yesterday's standards and expect extraordinary results today. Live life with passion!

Muhammad Asad

live-life passion yesterday

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a gross immorality in itself, for morality lives and dies with the human endeavour to establish its victory upon earth.

Muhammad Asad

responsibility teaching men

The religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct.

Muhammad Asad

real religious spiritual

Of all religious systems, Islam alone declares that individual perfection is possible in our earthly existence.

Muhammad Asad

islam religious perfection

I do not feel that the West has really become less condescending toward foreign cultures than the Greeks and Romans were: it has only become more tolerant. Mind you, not toward Islam—only toward certain other Eastern cultures, which offer some sort of spiritual attraction to the spirit-hungry West and are, at the same time, too distant from the Western world-view to constitute any real challenge to its values.

Muhammad Asad

real spiritual views

All cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small.

Muhammad Asad

imitation creativity people

I conceived from the outset a strong objection to Zionism. I considered it immoral that immigrants should come from abroad with the avowed intention of attaining to majority in the country and thus to dispossess the people whose country it had been since time immemorial.

Muhammad Asad

strong country people

We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision

Muhammad Asad

heart wind thinking

But who, except God, can say whether a man is right or foolish if he follows the call of his conscience?

Muhammad Asad

ifs foolish men

If the Muslims keep their heads cool and accept progress as a means and not an end in itself, they may pass on to Western man the lost secret of life's sweetness.

Muhammad Asad

secret men mean

So long as Muslims continue looking towards Western civilization as the only force that could regenerate their own stagnant society, they destroy their self-confidence and, indirectly, support the Western assertion that Islam is a "spent force".

Muhammad Asad

self-confidence civilization long

By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West, the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads, by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.

Muhammad Asad

degrees west views

...the Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ...nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love...'

Muhammad Asad

islam christian faith

...we must learn -once again- to regard Islam as the norm by which the world is to be judged.

Muhammad Asad

norm islam world