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OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Koran

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0_1971-11-24
02.01_-_The_World_War
1.00_-_Introduction_to_Alchemy_of_Happiness
1.01_-_On_knowledge_of_the_soul,_and_how_knowledge_of_the_soul_is_the_key_to_the_knowledge_of_God.
1.01_-_The_Ideal_of_the_Karmayogin
1.02_-_In_the_Beginning
1.02_-_On_the_Knowledge_of_God.
1.02_-_The_Refusal_of_the_Call
1.03_-_Supernatural_Aid
1.04_-_On_Knowledge_of_the_Future_World.
1.05_-_On_the_Love_of_God.
1.05_-_Qualifications_of_the_Aspirant_and_the_Teacher
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
1.06_-_Dhyana_and_Samadhi
1.08_-_The_Historical_Significance_of_the_Fish
1.1.2_-_Commentary
1.12_-_The_Sacred_Marriage
1.14_-_Bibliography
1.15_-_Index
1.21_-_Tabooed_Things
1953-04-29
1.ia_-_My_Heart_Has_Become_Able
1.pbs_-_Hellas_-_A_Lyrical_Drama
1.whitman_-_Song_of_Myself
1.whitman_-_Song_Of_Myself-_XLIII
2.01_-_The_Road_of_Trials
2.05_-_Apotheosis
2.07_-_On_Congress_and_Politics
2.08_-_On_Non-Violence
3.01_-_Forms_of_Rebirth
3.02_-_The_Psychology_of_Rebirth
36.07_-_An_Introduction_To_The_Vedas
3.7.1.05_-_The_Significance_of_Rebirth
5.01_-_The_Dakini,_Salgye_Du_Dalma
6.0_-_Conscious,_Unconscious,_and_Individuation
7.06_-_The_Simple_Life
7.13_-_The_Conquest_of_Knowledge
7.14_-_Modesty
7.15_-_The_Family
A_Secret_Miracle
Averroes_Search
BOOK_II._--_PART_II._THE_ARCHAIC_SYMBOLISM_OF_THE_WORLD-RELIGIONS
Book_of_Imaginary_Beings_(text)
Guru_Granth_Sahib_first_part
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2
the_Eternal_Wisdom

PRIMARY CLASS

book
SIMILAR TITLES
Koran

DEFINITIONS

1. The Koran names seven angels: Gabriel, Michael, Iblis or Eblis, chief jinn in Arabian mythology, counterpart

2. Not a Koranic angel, as Poe mistakenly makes him out to be. Israfel is not mentioned in the Koran, and

31. The Koran 53:27: “Those who disbelieve in the Hereafter [are those who] name the angels with the names

8 on the day of resurrection. [Rf The Koran,

Ababel (Arabic) [cf Hebrew ’āb father] The Father Tree or mystic Tree of Life in the Koran, that sends forth new branches and leaves at every rebirth of the kerkes or phoenix, up to seven times seven or 49 times — “an allusion to the forth-nine ‘Manus,’ the Seven Rounds, and the seven times seven human cycles in each Round on each globe” (SD 2:617).

Akbar (A) Great or (still) greater, one of the attributes of Allah in the Koran. Furthermore in the Muslim world and India a name or attribute (laqab) of certain persons (for instance in the case of emperors)

al- ::: A prefix. --> All; wholly; completely; as, almighty, almost.
To; at; on; -- in OF. shortened to a-. See Ad-.
The Arabic definite article answering to the English the; as, Alkoran, the Koran or the Book; alchemy, the chemistry.


alcoranic ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to the Koran.

alcoranist ::: n. --> One who adheres to the letter of the Koran, rejecting all traditions.

alcoran ::: n. --> The Mohammedan Scriptures; the Koran (now the usual form).

alkoranic ::: a. --> Same as Alcoranic.

alkoranist ::: n. --> Same as Alcoranist.

alkoran ::: n. --> The Mohammedan Scriptures. Same as Alcoran and Koran.

Al-Zabamiya—in the Koran (sura 74, 30), a

Archangel [from Greek arch higher, original + angelos messenger] A higher or original order of angels; cosmic powers synonymous with the highest class of dhyani-chohans. In Christian legend, they number seven; in the Koran, four. In Catholic theology, the eighth of the nine divisions in the divine hierarchy. Jewish astrology associates the archangels with the planets: Raphael with the Sun, Gabriel with the Moon, Michael with Mercury, Aniel (Anael) with Venus, Samael with Mars, Zadkiel (Sachiel) with Jupiter, and Kafziel (Cassiel) with Saturn. In medieval Europe, influenced by the Islamic system of Averroes, the planets of Michael and Raphael were reversed. The archangels parallel the Babylonian planetary spirits, the Zoroastrian amesha spentas, and the Hindu adityas.

Asma (Allahi) al Husna (A) The holy names (of Allah). Traditionally there are 99 (beautiful) names of Allah in the Koran. These Asma al Husna are being used within Sufism for recitation as a wazifa (mantram).

Koran al-Qur’ān (Arabic) [from qārā to read] Book, reading; the holy scripture of Islam, regarded by Moslems as the word of God (Allah) as delivered to his prophet Mohammed. The Koran explains that in heaven there is the mother of the book, well concealed. Piece by piece it was sent down to the prophet by means of an angel, spirit, or the angel Gabriel. Mohammed issued these revelations serially, each one being called a reading (qur’an) or a writing (kitab), and each particular one was also called a sura (a series) — a word now used for each section or chapter, of which there are 114.

Koranic lore, the angel of death, identified usually

Koran. It would be incorrect therefore to identify

Koran”). Poe must have derived his quotation and

Koran: (Qoran) The name for the sacred book of the Mohammedans. Its contents consist largely of warnings, remonstrances, assertions, arguments in favor of certain doctrines, narratives for enforcing morals. It stresses the ideal of the day of judgment, and abounds in realistic description of both the pains of hell and the delights of paradise. As a collection of commandments, it resembles juristic rescripts (answers to special questions), mentioning the contradictory rulings on the same subjects. It also resembles a diary of the prophet, consisting of personal addresses by the deity to Mohammed. -- H.H.

Korans. New York and Leipzig: Paul Eger, 1908.

Koran, sura 18; also the legend related in Ginzberg,

Koran the angel is Eblis or Iblis) when the 1st

Koran, The. See Pickthall; Sale.

certain suras of the Koran. [Rf. The Encyclopaedia

choirmaster of the muses. In Koranic lore, the

derivation of the Koranic fallen angel Harut from

Die Angelologie und Ddmonologie des Korans. See Eick-

Djibril (Jibril, Gabriel)—called, in the Koran,

Djinn ::: (Islam) an invisible spirit mentioned in the Koran and believed by Muslims to inhabit the earth and influence mankind by appearing in the form of humans or animals. djinns .

djinn ::: (Islam) an invisible spirit mentioned in the Koran and believed by Muslims to inhabit the earth and influence mankind by appearing in the form of humans or animals. djinns .

Druses: A religious sect in Asia Minor, whose faith combines teachings of the Mosaic law, the Christian Gospels, the Koran and the Sufi allegories; they believe in one God, transmigration of the soul, constant spiritual evolution and final perfection.

(ft'.). In the Koran, sura 27, 24, Shaitan (Satan)

guidance for mankind as given to the Prophet Muhammad. From the Arabic root q-r-'meaning to read, recite; deliver, transmit, convey, proclaim. (in some texts as Koran or Qur'an)

hammedan legend, growing out of the Koran,

Hell. [R/ Sale, The Koran, “Preliminary Dis¬

him as a Koranic angel—which, however, is what

Houris [French of Persian huri, Arabic hawra‘ from hawira to be black-eyed] Women with large black eyes set in large whites, described in the Koran as beautiful virgins of unfading youth and free from disease, who await the devout Moslem in paradise. Every Moslem who attains paradise is allotted 72 houris.

Iblis or Eblis [from Arabic iblis] An evil being, in Islamic belief, of spiritual or angelic origin, often named Shaitan and generally equivalent to Satan. In the Koran he is represented as the leader of the angels who rebelled against Allah, and was therefore hurled from Paradise. Although doomed to death his sentence has been withheld until the Judgment Day. Before his fall he was called Haris or Azazel. Often regarded as the leader of the jinn, or the wicked genii who are commonly considered by Moslems to be of evil spirituality; but popular legend likewise endows them with powers, often great, not infrequently for the benefit of mankind. See also AZAZEL

Idris —a name for Enoch in Koranic lore. [Rf.

ignorance of Honorius.” The Koran ( sura 18, 95)

Jews. The Koran also speaks of Maroth as an angel.

Jinn, Jinni, Jinnee (Arabic) Jinnī, singular jinniy, plural jinn; also genii. In the Koran a class of beings, both male and female, between angels and human kind and represented as being created from smokeless fire, abounding particularly in desert places. Popularly jinn are regarded as being able to appear to mankind in the form of domestic animals or of human beings of gigantic size, the benevolent ones appearing in beautiful shape, the malevolent in horrible guise.

Kerkes [from Arabic] The Phoenix of the Koran, described as living for a thousand years and then consuming itself in a self-generated fire, from which it is reborn.

koran ::: n. --> The Scriptures of the Mohammedans, containing the professed revelations to Mohammed; -- called also Alcoran.

Kuran. See KORAN

lore. [Rf. Sale, The Koran, “Preliminary Dis¬

Malaku ’1-maut, angel of death, identified as Azrael. Contrary to popular belief and accreditation, the Koran docs

Malaku T-Maut —in the Koran, sura 32, 11,

Meaning of the Glorious Koran, (tr.) Mohammed M.

Michael. The Koran recognizes 4 archangels but

Mohammed dictated these suras to his immediate followers, who memorized them. But when some of these original reciters had lost their lives in the conflicts which occurred after the death of Mohammed, Omar suggested to Caliph ’Abu-Bekr (the successor of Mohammed) that they be reduced to writing. The commission to collect as many as possible of the narrations or parts of the revelations was given to Zaid, a native of Medina who had often acted as an amanuensis to Mohammed. This collection became the first Koran, which Azid wrote down in Arabic. Some years later a second redaction was made and all previous parts or manuscripts were burned: Zaid dictated the work to four scribes, and these four copies have come down to our own day.

Mohammed (in the Koran) Eblis is a jinn rather

mohammedism ::: n. --> The religion, or doctrines and precepts, of Mohammed, contained in the Koran; Islamism.

mortals the art of government (see the Koran, sura

Music, in all its various branches is represented as having been taught to man by his divine and divine-human ancestors, such as Isis-Osiris, Thoth, Edris (in the Koran), etc. It is one of the elements of the power known as mantrikasakti. Music was represented as one of four divisions of mathematics, the others being arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry. The music of sound arouses in us a power which needs to be controlled, as it can carry us to heights from which we may fall. If regarded as a sensual indulgence, even though a refined one, its true import is not realized. If carried into our lives, so as to aid in harmonizing our relationships to other lives, then it is the unfolding influence of the real music of the spheres of cosmic harmony. For music is “the most divine and spiritual of arts” (ML 188).

neither in Talmud nor in the Koran is he named.

oath ::: n. --> A solemn affirmation or declaration, made with a reverent appeal to God for the truth of what is affirmed.
A solemn affirmation, connected with a sacred object, or one regarded as sacred, as the temple, the altar, the blood of Abel, the Bible, the Koran, etc.
An appeal (in verification of a statement made) to a superior sanction, in such a form as exposes the party making the appeal to an indictment for perjury if the statement be false.


of the Resurrection. [Rf Sale, The Koran, “Pre¬

of the world, of which the Koran speaks and

of wings” who dictated to him the Koran, sura by

or from “Preliminary Discourse,” George Sale’s long introductory essay to his translation of the Koran. Scholars

other daily. [Rf. Sale, The Koran, “Preliminary

Paradise. [Rf. Sale, The Koran, “Preliminary Dis¬

Pickthall, Mohammed Marmaduke (tr.). The Koran.

Qur’an (Koran) ::: Arabic Al Qur'an, “The Recitation.” The sacred scriptures of Islam, the religion of the Muslims dictated to Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel.

Qur'an, Koran :::   lit., lecture or recitation; revelation from Allah to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) over a period of 23 years and compiled into a volume of 114 suras, or chapters

quran ::: n. --> See Koran. R () R, the eighteenth letter of the English alphabet, is a vocal consonant. It is sometimes called a semivowel, and a liquid. See Guide to Pronunciation, // 178, 179, and 250-254.

Revealing Angel, The —in the Koran, sura 51,

[Rf. Sale, The Koran, “Preliminary Discourse,” p.

Sabeanism was unquestionably the main religious belief of the ancient Chaldeans and Assyrians, but likewise the very foundation stone of practically all the great religions of all the great peoples of the past. Upon the authority of the Jewish scholar Maimonides, scholars have considered the Sabeans as an ancient race whose principal religion was that of star-worship and closely affiliated with the Babylonians and Syrians. But the Sabeans were not a race, but those who followed and practiced the divine astrological astrolatry of the hoariest antiquity. Mohammed in the Koran mentions a sect between the Jews and Christians called Sabi una — to whom certain privileges were granted; older Moslem theologians were agreed that the Sabeans possessed manuscripts which they regarded in the light of a revelation, and the Mandeans came under the same protection granted to the Sabeans; hence the Mandeans also came to be regarded as Sabeans. Another sect of polytheists, the Harranians (830 AD), also affiliated with the Sabeans and shielded themselves under the same privileges; they were a remnant of a Mesopotamian cult, and star-worship had a prominent place in their system.

Sale, George (tr., ed.). The Koran. Inch “Preliminary

satan ::: Satan From the Hebrew word for adversary, Satan is a fallen angel, demon, or minor god in many religions, playing various roles in the Koran, the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha and the New Testament, a personification of the powers of evil. Alternative names for Satan include the Devil, Lucifer, Bilial, Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness and the Serpent.

sbires (zabaniya) or guardians. In the Koran,

scholars see the Mohammed Marut (a Koranic

Shaitan [from Arab shaitan] In the Koran an angel of high degree who was expelled from heaven because he refused to worship Adam at his Lord’s command; often regarded as equivalent to Iblis.

Shi‘ites [from Arab shi‘a sectary] Moslems are divided into two main groups: the Sunnites, the most numerous, who accept the orthodox tradition (sunna), basing their beliefs on the words of the Koran); and the Shi‘ites who uphold ‘Ali as the representative of Allah, and reject the pronouncements of the other caliphs. The shi‘ites are located principally in Iran, although they are represented throughout the Moslem world. They incline towards interpreting the Koran, rather than holding to the letter of the law as do the Sunnites.

Sibylline Oracles. In the Koran he is Iblis or Eblis or Haris. And in Jewish tradition he is Yetzer-

Speculation in Jewry rose again in the ninth century in the lands of the East, particularly in Babylonia, when Judaism once more met Greek philosophy, this time dressed in Arabic garb. The philosophic tradition of the ancients transmitted through the Syrians, to the young Arabic nation created a disturbance in the minds of the devotees of the Koran who, testing its principles by the light of the newly acquired wisdom, found them often wanting. As a result, various currents of thought were set in motion. Of these, the leading was the Kalamitic or the Mutazilite philosophy, (q.v.) of several shades, the general aim ot which was both to defend doctrines of religion against heresies and also to reconcile them with the principles of reason.

Sufi, Sufi, Sufiism [from Arab suf wool; sufi he who wears woolen garments] A school of thought that emphasizes the superiority of the soul as opposed to the body. A Sufi wears harsh, raw woolen garments constantly irritating his skin to remind him that the body is the part which prevents the soul from attaining higher goals. The first public pronouncement of mysticism in Moslem lands is attributed to Rabi‘a, who lived in the 1st century of the Hejira (622 AD) and expounded the theory of divine love: God is love, and everything on earth must be sacrificed in order eventually to attain union with God. However even before the time of Mohammed there were two principal schools of Arabic thought: the Meshaiuns (the walkers), who later became the metaphysicians after the appearance of the Koran, and the Ishrachiuns (the contemplators) who became affiliated with the Sufis. The Sufis, in fact, put an esoteric interpretation on the Koran, as well as the collected saying of Mohammed, the Sufi movement representing an infiltration into the rigidity of Islamic doctrine of the pre-Islamic mystical or quasi-occult stream of thought, especially from Persia. Blavatsky states that the Sufis acquired their “proficient knowledge in astrology, medicine, and the esoteric doctrine of the ages” from the descendants of the Magi” (IU 2:306).

surrounded by winged cherubim.” The Koran

the Arabs, Enoch was Idris (Koran, sura 19, 56).

the Koran, for nothing of the kind can be found

The Koran, “Preliminary Discourse,” p. 51)

The Koran, “Preliminary Discourse,” p. 67.]

The contents of the Koran are varied both in style and material: a declaratory style predominates; denunciations abound; idolatry and deification of any beings or things are condemned — especially in regard to the worship of Jesus as the son of God, although Jesus and Moses are both regarded as holy prophets. A similarity to the Jewish Bible is observable, even to attributing customs of the Jews to the Arabs. Allah is glorified as the one, all-powerful God, and Mohammed as his prophet. Believers receive special instruction, and terrible punishments are threatened for nonbelievers. The doctrines of heaven and hell in the Moslem conception are forcefully presented.

the name of Gabriel in Koranic Scripture. As

"The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge," says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâd rtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyad astîti vâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita*

“The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,’ says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâd rtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyad astîti vâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita

“The real source of knowledge is the Lord in the heart; ‘I am seated in the heart of every man and from me is knowledge,’ says the Gita; the Scripture is only a verbal form of that inner Veda, of that self-luminous Reality, it is sabdabrahma: the mantra, says the Veda, has risen from the heart, from the secret place where is the seat of the truth, sadanâdrtasya, guhâyâm. That origin is its sanction; but still the infinite Truth is greater than its word. Nor shall you say of any Scripture that it alone is all-sufficient and no other truth can be admitted, as the Vedavadins said of the Veda, nânyadastîtivâdinah. This is a saving and liberating word which must be applied to all the Scriptures of the world. Take all the Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic religionist, not the untrammelled truth-seeking of the free and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by the heartof man in its illumined depths or heard within from the Master of all knowledge, the knower of the eternal Veda.” Essays on the Gita

Tree A variant of the cross or tau, to be considered in connection with the serpent which is wound round it. The two together symbolize the world tree with the spiritual, intellectual, psychic, and psychological aggregate of forces encircling the world tree and working in and through it — these forces often grouped in the Orient under the name of kundalini. In minor significance, the two together symbolize the life-waves, or any life-wave, passing through the planes, spirit circling through matter, fohat working in the kosmos. Thus the tree symbol stands for the universe, and correspondentially for man, in whom the monadic ray kindles activity on the several planes; while the physiological key of interpretation applies to the analogies in the human body with its various structures through which play the pranic currents. The tree, by its form, represents evolution, for it begins with a root and spreads out into branches and twigs; only as applied to the kosmos the root is conceived to be on high and the branches to extend downwards. Thus there is the Asvattha tree of India or bodhi tree, the Norse Yggdrasil, the tree Ababel in the Koran, the Sephirothal Tree which is ’Adam Qadmon. In the Garden of Eden it is stated that there were two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which signifies the two knowledges. It is said in Gnosticism that Ennoia (divine thought) and Ophis (serpent), as a unity, are the Logos; as separated they are the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, the former spiritual, the latter manasic. Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge which means in one important allegory of human evolution that mankind after the separation of the sexes became endowed with manas, or that when humanity began to be endowed with dual manas, the rays then separated into the opposite sexes; and lest he should partake of the Tree of Life and become immortal, in the then imperfect state of evolution, he is turned out of Eden. It is stated that buddhi becomes transformed into the tree whose fruit is emancipation and which finally destroys the roots of the Asvattha, which here is the symbol of the mayavi life. This latter tree is also the emblem of secret and sacred knowledge, guarded by serpents or dragons; it may also refer to a sacred scripture. Dragons guarded the tree with the golden apples of the Hesperides; the trees of Meru were guarded by a serpent; Juno, on her wedding with Jupiter, gave him a tree with golden fruit, as Eve gave the fruit to Adam. Blavatsky says of Eve: “She it was who first led man to the Tree of Knowledge and made known to him Good and Evil; and if she had been left in peace to do quietly that which she wished to do, she would have conducted him to the Tree of Life and would thus have rendered him immortal” (La Revue Theosophique 2:10). See also ASVATTHA, YGGDRASIL

tron. [Ilf. Sale, The Koran, “Preliminary Dis¬

with Metatron (q.v.). [Rf. Sale, The Koran,

“Zarathushtra is the Divine Universal Force that directs everything within the universe towards perfection. This force is known as Amesha-Spenta” (Shahrestani, Al-Melal Va Al-Nehal). This force is equivalent to the Gnostic primeval ruler or governor, the closest being to the creator; the active mind or intellect which is the source of divine bliss and providence, with the Manichaen pure or holy spirits; the Hebrew elohim, the Arabic Malaeka (angels); the Koranic soul within the angels; and the theosophic dhyani-chohans or dhyani-buddhas. They are the rulers of the seven globes of the earth-chain.



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1:Do not lose hope, nor be sad. ~ Koran, 3:139,
2:My Lord! Increase me in knowledge! ~ Koran, 20:114,
3:wither-soever ye turn, there is the Presence of Allah. ~ Koran, 2:115,
4:Blessed is he whokeepeth himself pure. ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom
5:All you have issued the one from the other. ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom
6:There is no beast on the earth, no bird flying on its wings that do not form a community like us ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom
7:The most perfect man is the one who is most useful to others. ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom
8:Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you? ~ Koran, 2:214,
9:Aid each other in practising that which is good, but aid not each other in evil and injustice. ~ Koran, the Eternal Wisdom
10:Say: "O my Servants who have transgressed against their souls! Despair not of the Mercy of Allah: for Allah forgives all sins: for He is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. ~ Koran, 39:53 (Yusuf Ali),
11:God is the light of the heavens and the earth, his light is like a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp in glass and the glass like a brilliant star, lit from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor of the West whose oil would almost give light even though no fire touched it. Light upon light; God guides to his light whomsoever he wills. ~ Koran, 24, 35

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:The unbeliever knows his Koran best. ~ omar-khayyam, @wisdomtrove
2:We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove
3:We want to lead mankind to the place where there is neither the Vedas, nor the Bible, nor the Koran; yet this has to be done by harmonizing the Vedas, the Bible, and the Koran. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
4:Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain - from cosmology to psychology to economics - has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove
5:All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove
6:To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove
7:Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all. ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove
8:All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, - those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. ~ sri-aurobindo, @wisdomtrove
9:It is often said in the Bible that God spake unto Moses, but how do you know that God spake unto Moses? Because, you will say, the Bible says so. The Koran says, that God spake unto Mahomet, do you believe that too? No. Why not? Because, you will say, you do not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don't is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mahomet was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an impostor? ~ thomas-paine, @wisdomtrove
10:Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain - from cosmology to psychology to economics - has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. ~ sam-harris, @wisdomtrove
11:It must be particularly borne in mind, that Mahomet did not profess to set up a new religion ; but to restore that derived in the earliest times from God himself. " We follow," says the Koran, " the religion of Abraham the orthodox, who was no idolater. We believe in God and that which hath been sent down to us, and that which hath been sent down unto Abraham and Ishmael, and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and that which was delivered unto Moses and Jesus, and that which was delivered unto the prophets from the Lord : we make no distinction between any of them, and to God we are resigned. ~ washington-irving, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Do not lose hope, nor be sad. ~ Koran, 3:139,
2:Blessed is he whokeepeth himself pure. ~ Koran,
3:Every age hath its book. ~ Koran, Chapter XIII.,
4:All you have issued the one from the other. ~ Koran,
5:My Lord! Increase me in knowledge! ~ Koran, 20:114,
6:Software will never replace the Koran. ~ Dan Wieden,
7:The unbeliever knows his Koran best. ~ Omar Khayyam,
8:They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. ~ Sam Harris,
9:There is no beast on the earth, no bird flying on its ~ Koran,
10:Whatever you believe and mentally create, you can have. ~ Al Koran,
11:In fact, .. Jesus is mentioned 75 times in the Koran. ~ Ken Blanchard,
12:The most perfect man is the one who is most useful to others. ~ Koran,
13:wither-soever ye turn, there is the Presence of Allah. ~ Koran, 2:115,
14:I only read the Holy Koran, the Bible and the sports pages ~ Muhammad Ali,
15:The Koran treats women with the most absolute contempt. ~ Simone de Beauvoir,
16:The Koran is a book of peace, it is a prophetic book of peace. ~ Pope Francis,
17:We will definitely not burn the Koran, no. Not today, not ever. ~ Terry Jones,
18:In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammed was 'Read. ~ Jeanette Winter,
19:The Koran is an inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror. ~ Geert Wilders,
20:Whatever your condition, you can be happy if you have the right attitude. ~ Al Koran,
21:It says in the Koran that the taking of a single life destroys a universe, ~ Terry Hayes,
22:Gain some knowledge. If not from the Bible or Koran, get a book from college. ~ LL Cool J,
23:The world sums you up by the clothes that you wear, and treats you accordingly. ~ Al Koran,
24:You can always make time to do the thing you want to do, if you want it enough. ~ Al Koran,
25:The Bible is as much a book of religion with me as the Gita and the Koran. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
26:I'm amazed at how Muslims keep their humanity after reading the Koran. ~ Mosab Hassan Yousef,
27:...the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish. ~ Sam Harris,
28:They are extreme in their devotion to the literal word of the Koran and the hadith ~ Sam Harris,
29:On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise nonbelievers. ~ Sam Harris,
30:The Gita is not only my Bible and my Koran, it is more than that, it is my mother. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
31:Aid each other in practising that which is good, but aid not each other in evil and injustice. ~ Koran,
32:I promise to crush Israel and return it to the humiliation and wretchedness of the Koran. ~ Anwar Sadat,
33:Ich mögte beten wie Moses im Koran: Herr mache mir Raum in meiner engen Brust. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
34:I just finished reading the Koran, and there's nothing in there I didn't hear in Sunday school. ~ Tom Clancy,
35:The Christian-Islamic Church, of course, wanted both the Bible and the Koran frozen forever. ~ Philip K Dick,
36:You had to see yourself poor and think of yourself as being poor, or you never would have been poor. ~ Al Koran,
37:All law is from God, not from man. So, all laws are derived from the divine text, or the Koran. ~ Anjem Choudary,
38:Apa yang akan terjadi pada koran dan TV andaikata tak ada peristiwa buruk selama berhari-hari? ~ Goenawan Mohamad,
39:I would like to say that that even the teachings of the Koran cannot be exempted from criticism. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
40:The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions. ~ Naguib Mahfouz,
41:The Koran says that there can be no heaven for one who sheds the blood of an innocent neighbour. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
42:There is no such thing as one Islam. The Koran is ambiguous and Islam is not a monolithic entity. ~ Walter Kasper,
43:The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as - it is as if he has killed all mankind. ~ Barack Obama,
44:Newspapers today have almost replaced the Bible, the Koran, the Gita and other religious scriptures. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
45:We cannot change the Koran or make no modifications, this cannot be done, or it would no longer be holy. ~ Muhammad Ali,
46:If you would bring the magic out of your mind - the magic which will transform everything - you must believe. ~ Al Koran,
47:Out of 1.6 billion Muslims, perhaps only 300 million actually understand the language of the Koran. ~ Mosab Hassan Yousef,
48:with hundreds of millions of good people believing that the illiterate Muhammad miraculously wrote the Koran. ~ Dan Barker,
49:The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books. ~ Christopher Hitchens,
50:There is only one God for us all, whether we find him through the Koran, the Zend-Avesta, The Tolmud, or the Gita. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
51:There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. ~ Malcolm X,
52:Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. ~ Anne Lamott,
53:Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you? ~ Koran, 2:214,
54:The only thing worse than the Pastor Terry Jones scheduled Koran burning is the fact that he canceled the proposed event. ~ Henry Rollins,
55:The source of the terror in Lebanon as in Iraq is to be found in the Koran and in the despotisms of the Arab Middle East. ~ David Horowitz,
56:In the East, as in the West, newspapers are fast becoming people's Bible, Koran, Zend-Avesta and Gita all rolled into one. ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
57:She must not speak in a delicate tone. This is from the Koran. Things begun with a few words will continue to other things. ~ Geraldine Brooks,
58:If it was wrong to seek God in a stone, how was it right to seek Him in a book called the Gita, the Granth Sahib or the Koran? ~ Mahatma Gandhi,
59:This is why the Holy Koran forbids sharab. Because it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk. So it does. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
60:The Koran is a fascist book which incites violence. That is why this book, just like [Adolf Hitler's] Mein Kampf, must be banned. ~ Geert Wilders,
61:When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent. ~ Michel Houellebecq,
62:Every time you think a thought it 'registers', and comes back to you according to the vibrations and wave lengths sent out from your mind. ~ Al Koran,
63:In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology ~ Barack Obama,
64:The Koran calls for belief and consequent obedience. It is, surely, calculated to inspire fear, indeed abject terror, rather than love. ~ Antony Flew,
65:I’ll quote from Ecclesiastes to the Catholics, from the Koran to the Muslims, from the Torah to the Jews, from Aristotle to the atheists. ~ Paulo Coelho,
66:Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate. (Koran 9:73) ~ Sam Harris,
67:the Koran really curses Jews and Christians (9:30) and calls for warfare against them in order to bring about their subjugation (9:29), ~ Robert Spencer,
68:Close your Koran.
Think in freedom and look with open mind
at Heaven and Earth. Forgive everyone his sins. Don't cause anyone grief. ~ Omar Khayy m,
69:In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions. ~ Reza Aslan,
70:Misuse of the Koran to provide legitimacy for violence is common, particularly in Europe, where terrorists tend not to be well-educated Muslims. ~ Mia Bloom,
71:Laila's warning from Wajma: This is why the Holy Koran forbids sharab. Because it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
72:We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal. ~ Sam Harris,
73:I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house. ~ Eve Ensler,
74:Adso of Melk: The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book …

William of Baskerville: A book containing a wisdom different from ours. ~ Umberto Eco,
75:There is no lack in the world. The lack is in you , and if you will stop seeking lack and stop thinking lack... you will make marvelous demonstrations. ~ Al Koran,
76:Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past. ~ Karen Armstrong,
77:Whether the Koran is of eternity
I don't ask about that
That it is the book of books
I believe it to be so as muslim's duty. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
78:An Infidel, as far as the Koran is concerned, is anyone who refuses to submit to Allah as the one true god and to recognize Muhammad as his prophet. ~ Robert Spencer,
79:The Holy Koran tells us, 'O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.' ~ Barack Obama,
80:Men who were frightened to read the entire Koran because they knew they would be confronted with the words of a prophet who would never condone their actions. ~ Vince Flynn,
81:Just as the Torah and Bible teach concern for those in distress, the Koran instructs all Muslims to make caring for widows, orphans, and refugees a priority. ~ Greg Mortenson,
82:The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. ~ Salman Rushdie,
83:The Kazi is searching the words of the Koran, and instructing others:
but if his heart be not steeped in that love, what does it avail, though he be a teacher of men? ~ Kabir,
84:This is the real reason Thomas Jefferson owned a Koran. No proto-multiculturalist, he simply wanted to understand the threat jihadism posed to his young nation. ~ Sebastian Gorka,
85:What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes. ~ Geraldine Brooks,
86:I want to read
so I can read the Koran
read the signs in the street
know the number of the bus
I'm supposed to take
when I one day leave this house. ~ Eve Ensler,
87:The most revealing books are the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible. The Bhagavad Gita is a great book as well, and the works of Buddha. These are the major influences on the world. ~ RZA,
88:Where was this written? I wondered. Where in the Talmud or the Koran or the Bible did it say, "Lo, and Satan fetcheth the coffee for the Antichrist and her minions"? ~ Lyda Morehouse,
89:He is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
90: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. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
91:People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation - much like building a mosque at Ground Zero. ~ Sarah Palin,
92:I was a very devout boy and one day I heard the music of an Egyptian Koran singer in the mosque. The melancholy of this music touched me so deeply that it brought me to tears. ~ Shahin Najafi,
93:The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own. ~ Robert M Price,
94:The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. ~ Mark Twain,
95:There is a verse [in the Koran] that says God swears by time. Anything you gain in life, you pay for with your time. Time is the most important thing that has been given to man. ~ Shirin Ebadi,
96:If American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. ~ Virgil Goode,
97:Say: "O my Servants who have transgressed against their souls! Despair not of the Mercy of Allah: for Allah forgives all sins: for He is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. ~ Koran, 39:53 (Yusuf Ali),
98:the United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran.” What form our government’s intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door. ~ Sam Harris,
99:Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. ~ Anonymous,
100:The only real source of historical information about pre-Islamic Mecca and the circumstances of the Koran's revelation is the classical Islamic story about the religion's foundation. ~ Toby Lester,
101:We want to lead mankind to the place where there is neither the Vedas, nor the Bible, nor the Koran; yet this has to be done by harmonizing the Vedas, the Bible, and the Koran. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
102:He [Muhammed] is a prophet and not a poet and therefore his Koran is to be seen as a divine law and not as a book of a human being, made for education or entertainment. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
103:I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
104:There is no radical or moderate Islam. There is only one Islam and that is the Islam from the Koran, the holy book. That is the Islam from Mohammed. There are no two sorts of Islam. ~ Geert Wilders,
105:I can quote you lots of chapters in verse from the bible that are terrible for women. But you can use the bible to either liberate or subjugate women. And it's the same with the Koran. ~ Swanee Hunt,
106:In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a "loving concordat" between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional. ~ Sam Harris,
107:In Saudi Arabia, among other countries, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith. The Koran is not a rights-respecting document. ~ Ibn Warraq,
108:Nor should we be surprised that it is absent from the world of the Islamists – even though forgiveness has an important place in the practice of Islam and in the morality of the Koran.4 ~ Roger Scruton,
109:He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges,
110:The Koran tells Muslims to “make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies of Allah and your enemies” (8:60). ~ Robert Spencer,
111:I Orienten er de riktig Skam at mælde fæle
mens vi er noksaa reformerte og katolske sjæle.
De kalder deres Gud for Allah, Bibelen Koran,
En Djævel har de ogsaa nok; men ingen ægte Fan. ~ Knut Hamsun,
112:In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: 'Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.' Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken. ~ Conor Cruise O Brien,
113:The Holy Koran, our religious book, teaches us, that we who declare ourselves to be righteous Muslims, do not participate in no wars, in no way, fashion or form, that take the lives of other humans. ~ Muhammad Ali,
114:The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice. ~ Thomas Pynchon,
115:There are folks who burn the Koran and hold signs saying, "God hates fags" and all sorts of sick things - and they often hijack the headlines with hatred. We know that is not what Christ was like. ~ Shane Claiborne,
116:The violence in the Old Testament and New Testament is descriptive. The violence in the Koran is for all time and it is prescriptive. And Mohammed said "I have been made victorious through terror.". ~ Pamela Geller,
117:A key difference between Christianity and Islam is that Muslims believe that the Koran contains verbatim the word of God; it is written in the imperative. This precludes a comparison with Christianity. ~ Geert Wilders,
118:Heinrich Heine wrote a century ago in that scene where Christians burn the Koran? One of Heine’s characters, a Moor, says, “This is but the prologue. Where books are burnt, people in the end are burnt, too. ~ Ay e Kulin,
119:sura 3.28 of the Koran that, “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.” And, of course, there was sura 3.54, which declared that the best deceiver of all was Allah himself. ~ William R Forstchen,
120:And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. ~ Ian McEwan,
121:Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there’s a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration. ~ Jane Mayer,
122:The Koran teaches that deeds of unselfish kindness will be rewarded in heaven. I’ve given you precious food and for this unselfishness I will find reward. But now I shall go further. I am going to give you work. ~ Rose Tremain,
123:I believe in the holy Koran. It says we declare ourselves to be righteous Muslims and do not take part in wars, or in no way fashion or form take the lives of humans unless it's a holy war declared by God himself. ~ Muhammad Ali,
124:That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. ~ Mark Twain,
125:The women have been told it’s written in the Koran that they must do these things,” she said. She could tell them it wasn’t but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik. ~ Geraldine Brooks,
126:My father insisted that I learnt the Koran and encouraged me to understand the basic traditions and beliefs of Islam but without imposing any particular views. He was an overwhelming personality but open-minded and liberal. ~ Aga Khan III,
127:To be Christian means to find the decisive revelation of God in Jesus. To be Muslim means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Koran. To be Jewish means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Torah, and so forth. ~ Marcus Borg,
128:Even though Noah is in the Koran as well. But we knew going into this project that you can't make stories or render images about the Prophet. But I do believe people are missing out if they don't have the choice to see this film. ~ Russell Crowe,
129:I trained to become a professional Koran singer, from the age of 14 until I was 18. This involved learning Arabic harmony, breathing techniques, all of the things that this entails. And, of course, it involved studying the Koran. ~ Shahin Najafi,
130:One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran. ~ Salman Rushdie,
131:...he [Muhammad] declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind...The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. ~ John Quincy Adams,
132:I don't say things like "the grace of God." All that's white noise to me, not because I'm an intellectual. For many people, it's gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy. ~ Christopher Hitchens,
133:As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition. ~ Sam Harris,
134:The god of Islam tells his people, "Beat your wife. Go kill infidels. Go Kill Christians and Jews." This is in the Koran; it has been for 1400 years. Their god tells them to kill everybody who doesn't believe in the god of the Koran. ~ Mosab Hassan Yousef,
135:Every religion oppresses women. I talk about the Koran because I know this book best. It allows for torture and other mistreatment, especially for women. And I despise the Sharia laws. They cannot be changed. They must be thrown out, abolished. ~ Taslima Nasrin,
136:Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying: Beware, I am a monster? Doesn’t the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile? ~ Azar Nafisi,
137:Most people in positions of leadership in our country will say that there is no direct link between the Muslim faith and “terrorism.” It is clear, however, that Muslims hate the West in the very terms of their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred. ~ Sam Harris,
138:My heart can be pasture for deer and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and a Kaaba for the pilgrims. It is both the tables of the Torah and the Koran. It professes the religion of Love wherever its caravans are heading. Love is my law. Love is my faith. ~ Ibn Arabi,
139:Moderate Islam? That's a contradiction. It's going to be a long time before we see a new Koran, an equivalent to the New Testament. Attacks don't happen in the name of Buddhism or Christianity; nor do homosexuals get beaten up, as happens daily in Amsterdam. ~ Geert Wilders,
140:I keep the gun in a hollowed out copy of the Koran. And there the big book was, tossed on the bed, open and gunless. Nothing else disturbed. I mean, they actually checked my Koran to see if there was a gun inside. I knew I was dealing with a sick son of a bitch. ~ David Wong,
141:So it is with Moslem women and their veils,’ Michelangelo said. ‘When they saw Muhammad’s wives wearing veils, they sought to imitate them, and so now nearly all Islamic women wear veils even though there is no stipulation in their Holy Koran that they do so. ~ Matthew Reilly,
142:ISIS doesn’t crucify only because it is cruel. It crucifies because, according to the Koran, crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments for the enemies of Islam. It crucifies because it must. We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend. ~ Daniel Silva,
143:If you never engage gentiles in theological matters, they'd never even consider Theology as part of their lives and will always leave it for war to settle it. Lots of them exist among Arabs -as mentioned by name in Koran- and many more among the Romans themselves. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
144:I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals. ~ Michel Onfray,
145:he’d read the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and heard the Upanishads were no different—it was clear the battle for justice was in the heart; each soul was precious. “The great religions teach us,” he said through tears, “that the loss of one soul affects us all.” Whispers ~ Michael Capuzzo,
146:Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework. ~ Margaret Atwood,
147:It is a living embodiment of a saying often heard in this part of the world: ‘We are all People of the Book.’ It actually comes directly from the Koran. The Arabic Ahl al-kitab is usually translated as ‘people of the book’ but it literally means ‘people of an earlier revelation. ~ Dan Eaton,
148:Koran says whoever believes in God in the last day shall be saved. It is a religion whose very name, Islam, comes from the word Shalom, which means peace. It's about establishing peace. We greet each other with peace be upon you, which the Jews do in greeting each other. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf,
149:The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive. ~ Sebastian Junger,
150:My heart has become capable of every form: It is a pasture for gazelles And a monastery for Christian monks, And the pilgrim's Ka'ba, And the tablets of the Torah, And the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: Whatever way love's camel takes, That is my religion, my faith. ~ Ibn Arabi,
151:I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people's religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran. ~ Newt Gingrich,
152:From the Muslims I learned from the extraordinary pluralism of the Koran, the fact that the Koran endorses every single one of the major world faiths, but I was particularly enthralled by the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, which is so open to other religious faiths. ~ Karen Armstrong,
153:Another time he told me about two mountains—one of cork, the other of marble—which had spent thousands of years staring at each other without any mutual comprehension, and he concluded this tale by telling me about the verse in the Holy Koran which says to build your homes on high ground. ~ Orhan Pamuk,
154:Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one." ~ Tariq Ali,
155:My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and the Koran. I was reading comic books too. ~ Chris Abani,
156:Even the concept of the infidel is misleading, because the infidel is normally someone with a different faith, someone who refuses to recognize the truth of the words of the Koran, as revealed by God. He has every right to do so, as long as he does not question my right to believe in my truth. ~ Tariq Ramadan,
157:The Koran claims for itself that it is "mubeen," or clear. But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesnt make sense. Many Muslims and Orientalists will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. ~ Gerd R Puin,
158:The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The ~ Geraldine Brooks,
159:Crimes are classified into three divisions: Hudud, Tazir, and Qisas. Crimes of Hudud are crimes that are denounced by God; the punishment is made known in the Koran. Crimes of Tazir are given to the appropriate authority to determine punishment. Crimes of Qisas give the victim the right to retaliate. ~ Jean Sasson,
160:9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us. ~ Michelle Malkin,
161:The Koran is compared wrongly to the Bible. The Koran is only 14% of Islam’s sacred texts and does not contain nearly enough information to tell someone how to be a Muslim. The Muslim Bible would be the Koran, the Sira and the Hadith. Measured by the textual doctrine, Islam is 86% Mohammed and 14% Allah. ~ Bill Warner,
162:In Koran, the notion of ‘People Of The Book’ means – ‘Worshipers Of The Book’. This is Originalism, in contrast to Strict Constructionalism which the Roman Christian apologists would have you believe. By that, they try to falsely establish that they too are to be considered among Muslims as, believers. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim,
163:It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been “hijacked” by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet. ~ Sam Harris,
164:Momo: [reading Ibrahim's will] This is my will and testament. I, Ibrahim Demirdji, hereby leave all my goods to Moses Schmitt, my son Momo because he chose me as his father and because I've given him everything I've learned in this life. Now you too will know what's in my Koran, Momo. It's all there is to know. ~ ric Emmanuel Schmitt,
165:My heart is open to all the winds: It is a pasture for gazelles And a home for Christian monks, A temple for idols, The Black Stone of the Mecca pilgrim, The table of the Torah, And the book of the Koran. Mine is the religion of love. Wherever God’s caravans turn, The religion of love Shall be my religion And my faith. ~ Theodore Zeldin,
166:I told my family that, in my opinion, the remaining traditions of that era were what kept us women in bondage, and not the Koran. Few people know the facts, that the Koran does not call for veiling, nor the restrictions women endure in the Muslim world. It is the traditions passed down that so hinder us from moving forward. ~ Jean Sasson,
167:And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” Koran 9:5   “The ~ J Robert Kennedy,
168:All was there-the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message. ~ Winston Churchill,
169:All was there—the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message. ~ Winston S Churchill,
170:While Islamic apologists commonly claim that the Koran does not refer to Jews or Christians as Infidels, in fact it asserts that “they indeed have disbelieved who say: Lo! Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary” (5:17)—in other words, if you believe in the traditional Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ, you’re an Infidel. ~ Robert Spencer,
171:Most seemed to have been prepping for the Obama apocalypse, the one with FEMA storm trooping in, black helicopters dispatched by the first black president, come to seize their guns, hustling them off to camps where they’d be forced to read the Koran, eat kale, who knew what, while they waited to be dragged before death panels. ~ David Sosnowski,
172:Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life. ~ National Geographic Society,
173:Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet; each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion; and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage. ~ Edward Gibbon,
174:Absolutely. If a Muslim who has-who is-a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day-this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America. ~ Brigitte Gabriel,
175:How many Mohammedans, how many Hindus, how many Christians, have been killed for something they have read only in a book! Tremendously stupid people. One is fighting for the Koran, another is fighting for the Gita, another is fighting for the Bible—for books you are fighting and killing living people and sacrificing your tremendously valuable life! ~ Osho,
176:Enfin, il y a un livre, un livre qui semble d'un bout à l'autre une émanation supérieure, un livre qui est pour l'univers ce que le Koran est pour l'islamisme, ce que les Védas sont pour l'Inde, un livre qui contient toute la sagesse humaine éclairée par toute la sagesse divine, un livre que la vénération des peuples appelle le livre, la Bible ! ~ Victor Hugo,
177:All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. ~ Sri Aurobindo,
178:And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. ~ Ian McEwan,
179:That night, I waited until Baba fell asleep, and then folded a blanket. I used it as a prayer rug. Bowing my head to the ground, I recited half-forgotten verses from the Koran-verses the mullah had made us commit to memory in Kabul-and asked for kindness from a god I wasn't sure existed. I envied the mullah now, envied his faith and certainty. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
180:Some security experts noted that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionally those where women are marginalized. The reason there are so many Muslim terrorists, they argued, has little to do with the Koran but a great deal to do with the lack of robust female participation in the economy and society of many Islamic countries. ~ Nicholas D Kristof,
181:Why is it not possible to build a church in Saudi Arabia where as we in the Netherlands have almost 500 mosques being built; why is it not possible to buy or sell a Bible in any Muslim or most of the Muslim countries, whereas we can buy a Koran here on every street corner? This is the exact example of the fact that Islam is an intolerant society. ~ Geert Wilders,
182:I do honestly and sincerely believe in the necessity or desirability of Hindu-Muslim unity. I am also fully prepared to trust the Muslim leaders. But what about the injunctions of the Koran and Hadis? The leaders cannot over-ride them. Are we then doomed? I hope not. I hope your learned mind and wise head will find some way out of this difficulty. ~ Lala Lajpat Rai,
183:If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. ~ Oriana Fallaci,
184:Next comes svadhyaya or study. This means study that concerns the true Self, not merely analyzing the emotions and mind as the psychologists and psychiatrists do. Anything that will elevate your mind and remind you of your true Self should be studied: the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Koran, these Yoga Sutras, or any uplifting scripture. Study ~ Swami Satchidananda,
185:Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world convinced itself that the only reason people act morally is because of instruction, that in effect without superstition there can be no ethical behaviour. ~ Matt Ridley,
186:And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa ~ Ian McEwan,
187:However often we turn to it [the Koran] at first disgusting us each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence. . . . Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim is stern, grand, terrible - ever and anon truly sublime - Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
188:I affirm, along with many others, that the major enduring religions of the world are all valid and legitimate. I see them as the responses to the experience of God in the various cultures in which each originated. To be Christian means to find the decisive revelation of God in Jesus. To be Muslim means to find the decisive revelation of God in the Koran. ~ Marcus Borg,
189:In marked contrast, Ottoman scientific progress was non-existent in this same period. The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world. Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.32 ~ Niall Ferguson,
190:People of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. But, I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe. ~ Sam Harris,
191:At times, he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words. But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart. "They'll comfort you to . Mariam jo," he said. "You can summon then in your time of your need, and they won't fail you. God's words will never betray you, my girl. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
192:I am rich, thank you very much. And you are excused for being shortsighted. It is Americans, you British, and all the other Westerners who think they know what's right and what's wrong, who make money from the sale of heroin and opium with one hand, and yet pay mullahs to preach that growing poppies is against the Koran with the other." He laughed. "Hypocrites all! ~ Deborah Rodriguez,
193:My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants. ~ Gerd R Puin,
194:A language has genius. Some works translate well, others are untranslatable. Molière is effective only in French. Without knowing Arabic nobody has ever understood the Koran. Pushkin remains a possession of the Russian people, though the world has acquired Tolstoy. In general, the higher the charge of peculiarly national identity and emotion, the less translatable a work is. ~ Herman Wouk,
195:And the criterion is within you – not in bibles, not in the koran, not in the gita. The criterion is in your feeling, your existential feeling. So whatsoever the feeling says, you move with it. Sometimes it gives you great insecurity. Say okay to that. Sometimes it leads you into deep pain; say okay to that. Trust that wherever it is leading must be meaningful and significant to your growth. ~ Osho,
196:Old Lights include the resurgent fundamentalists in every religion who put a freeze on history and fortify their adherents against the "new dark age" in which they are forced to live. "Back to the Bible," Old Lights shout; "back to the Koran," Old Lights thunder. But not everything Old Lights say is wrong. Much is right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, the old adage reminds us. ~ Leonard Sweet,
197:To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. ~ Sam Harris,
198:At times , he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they comforted him , eased his heart . "They'll comfort you too . Mrariam jo , " he said . "You can summon then in your time of your need , and they won't fail you . God's words will never betray you , my girl . (pg.17) ~ Khaled Hosseini,
199:To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance. ~ Sam Harris,
200:Who anyway can define the borderline between gnosis and poetic knowledge? The two modes are not identical, and yet they interpenetrate one another. Are we to call the gnosis of Novalis, Blake, and Shelley a knowledge that is not poetic? In domesticating the Sufis in our imagination, Corbin renders Ibn 1 Arabi and Suhrawardi as a Blakl· and a Shelley whose precursor is not Milton but the Koran. ~ Harold Bloom,
201:If you trace the history of Islamist terrorism, you see that its founders were great admirers of European fascism. They read the texts of European fascism, they quoted them in speeches and letters. This is not from the Koran - the Koran doesn't teach you how to repress people; there's nothing in there about women having to cover their faces, there's certainly nothing about suicide bombing. ~ Bernard Henri Levy,
202:Just as some of the most ardent political ideologues in the West are young people, revolutionaries, the '60s generation, - in Islam some of the most religious people are the youngsters. But more important than that, the prophet - in his writings, in his traditions - and the Koran itself say that the Muslim youth are the ones whom the future depends on and that it's up to them to do the fighting. ~ Michael Scheuer,
203:Would you say that any one sacred book is superior to all others in the world? ... I say the New Testament, after that, I should place the Koran, which in its moral teachings, is hardly more than a later edition of the New Testament. Then would follow according to my opinion the Old Testament, the Southern Buddhist Tripitaka, the Tao-te-king of Laotze, the Kings of Confucius, the Veda and the Avesta. ~ Max Muller,
204:There are four main sources of the Shari’a: the Koran, which is compiled of thousands of religious verses revealed by God through his Prophet, Mohammed; the Sunna, which are the traditions the Prophet addressed that are not recorded in the Koran; the Ijma, which are the perceptions of the Ulema, or religious scholars; and the Qiyas, which is a method whereby known jurists agree upon new legal principles. ~ Jean Sasson,
205:Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however. ~ Mark Twain,
206:They’re all Tajiks, they have the same Koran, the same faith, but the Kulyabs kill the Pamirs, and the Pamirs kill the Kulyabs. First they’d go out into the city square, yelling, praying. I wanted to understand what was happening, so I went too. I asked one of the old men: “What are you protesting against?” They said: “Against the Parliament. They told us this was a very bad person, this Parliament. ~ Svetlana Alexievich,
207:I see the Koran very much as an outsider. It stands in the great prophetic tradition of trying to return people to the basic principles of spirituality. Taken for its time, it was an extraordinarily progressive declaration of principle. It is also extraordinary for a Christian to read: for example, there are more references to Mary than in the Gospels. The tragedy is that it has been so warped and misapplied. ~ Tony Blair,
208:So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us do that. ~ Gerd R Puin,
209:We will need to give you a Muslim name…does Leila suit you?” “I don’t deserve this kindness,” she whispered. “That you, Muslims, should help a Jew—” “Come now!” Serif said, realizing that she was about to cry. “Jews and Muslims are cousins, the descendants of Abraham. Your new name, do you know it means ‘evening’ both in Arabic, the language of our Holy Koran, and also in Hebrew, the language of your Torah? ~ Geraldine Brooks,
210:My heart has become able
To take on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
For monks an abbey.
It is a temple for idols
And for whoever circumambulates it, the Kaaba.
It is the tablets of the Torah
And also the leaves of the Koran.
I believe in the religion
Of Love
Whatever direction its caravans may take,
For love is my religion and my faith.

~ Ibn Arabi, My Heart Has Become Able
,
211:The Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine enforcers,” he wrote. “Its mission is to blot out, by force if necessary, oppression, moral anarchy, social disorder, and exploitation so as to finish the so-called divine role of self-styled gods and replace evil with good. ‘Fight them,’ the Koran says, ‘until there is no more oppression, and all submission is made to God alone. ~ Mark Bowden,
212:Much of what is going on and will go on could be learned by the outside world from Mein Kampf, the Bible and Koran together of the Third Reich. But—amazingly—there is no decent translation of it in English or French, and Hitler will not allow one to be made, which is understandable, for it would shock many in the West. How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination! They laughed. ~ William L Shirer,
213:he had none of the enthusiastic love of liberty which marks the independent creative spirit. On the contrary, he was dominated by the purely Asiatic conception of a monopoly of press, speech, justice, and thought by a single ruling caste, agreeing therein with the alleged Moslem saying that if the library of Alexandria contained the same things as the Koran it was useless, and if it contained things contrary it was harmful. ~ Anonymous,
214:Many of Islam's apologists insist that suicide bombing is not Islamic because the Koran forbids suicide. Mmm-hmm. So where are all the Muslims gathering in mass demonstrations to vehemently condemn this practice that slanders their religion? Why does contemporary Islam promote 'martyrdom' as the highest duty of Muslims? Why are photographs of suicide bombers plastered everywhere in Beirut? Because Islam is what Islam does. ~ Jamie Glazov,
215:Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all. ~ Thomas Paine,
216:As Napoleon later put it, when describing his feelings at this time: “I saw the way to achieve all my dreams. . . . I would found a religion, I saw myself marching on the way to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my enterprises I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds, exploiting the realm of all history for my own profit.”7 ~ Paul Strathern,
217:When the team excavated, they uncovered the shattered ruins of a fortress, over fifteen centuries old, with massive walls and eight towers, matching the description in the Koran. They also figured out what had happened: The constant removal of water from the watering hole undermined the fortress, which one day collapsed into a sinkhole and was buried by drifting sands. The legend recorded in the Koran was based on a real event. ~ Douglas Preston,
218:It is my interpretation from the Koran that all people have equal rights. That means men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims too. Oppression doesn't exist in Islam. And in a society where all people have equal rights, that means all people should make decisions equally... This doesn't mean that we're changing God's law, It just means we're reinterpreting laws according to the development of science - and the realities of the times. ~ Yousef Saanei,
219:We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran. ~ Harold Bloom,
220:Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical needs of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
221:All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only, - those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. ~ Sri Aurobindo,
222:So the Islamic Army is one of those offshoots?” Alex asked. “You’ve got it. Their motto is taken directly from that of the Brotherhood: ‘Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.’ They have been blamed for a slew of beheadings in recent times and are known to have links to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Needless to say, they are a tough bunch, and they mean business. ~ Dan Eaton,
223:I have to say that it's a weird feeling to have to respond to a Christian leader of an anti-Muslims organisation - it would be like having to respond to a Muslim leader of an anti-Jewish organisation about Judaism so the whole thing is kind of weird. Let me just say it's kind of convenient to simply pick and choose whatever violent bits and pieces one finds in the Koran and ignore the equally important versus that talk about compassion and peace. ~ Reza Aslan,
224:Mein Kampf, this terrible book of Adolph Hitler is outlawed. I made a point in the Dutch parliament that I say to all these liberal politicians and socialist politicians in my own parliament that, "Hey you are very happy here, you applauded the fact that Mein Kampf was outlawed in the Netherlands. If you are really consistent, you should, for the same arguments that you use as liberal politicians to outlaw Mein Kampf, outlaw the Koran as well." ~ Geert Wilders,
225:I have always endeavoured, as my double duty of believer and sovereign dictated, to follow the precepts of the sacred Book of Islam: precepts of balance, justice and moderation. Although my religious education was very literal, in that I learnt to understand the precepts of the Koran precisely according to the text, we have seen that on several occasions throughout my life, I have felt myself to be very particularly in the hands of the Almighty. ~ Mohammed Reza Pahlavi,
226:So where does the name Adam's apple come from? Most people say that it is from the notion that this bump was caused by the forbidden fruit getting stuck in the throat of Adam in the Garden of Eden. There is a problem with this theory because some Hebrew scholars believe that the forbidden fruit was the pomegranate. The Koran claims that the forbidden fruit was a banana. So take your pick---Adam's apple, Adam's pomegranate, Adam's banana. Eve clearly chewed before swallowing. ~ Mark Leyner,
227:It is often said in the Bible that God spake unto Moses, but how do you know that God spake unto Moses? Because, you will say, the Bible says so. The Koran says, that God spake unto Mahomet, do you believe that too? No. Why not? Because, you will say, you do not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don't is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mahomet was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an impostor? ~ Thomas Paine,
228:Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer,
229:So as not to risk appearing to introduce a duality, let alone a plurality, into the one and personal God, the Semitic texts and their commentators refuse to give the right answer by stating that God, being "all-powerful," "doeth what He wills"; we find this argument in Isaiah, Job and Saint Paul, as well as in the Koran. It is a doubl-edged argument, yet for certain psychological reasons it was efficacious for three or four millennia, in the climate for which it was destined. - p98 ~ Frithjof Schuon,
230:Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. 'The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,' Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy. ~ Graeme Wood,
231:Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. ~ Sam Harris,
232:Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. ~ Sam Harris,
233:The west is very concerned and actually afraid because the media is not informing them. There are too many moderate Muslims who are trying to whitewash the fears and concerns of the West. It's time for us to face reality - nobody is against Muslims. When I'm speaking about this situation, it's about Islamic doctrine. Islamic doctrine promotes violence and hatred against non Muslims. 60% of the Koran is dedicated to cursing and spreading hatred and violence against non-Muslims who are called 'Kaffir'. ~ Reza Aslan,
234:In Paradise it is true that I shall drink at dawn the pure wine mentioned in the Koran, but where in Paradise are the long walks with intoxicated friends in the night, or the drunken crowds shouting merrily? Where shall I find there the intoxication of Monsoon clouds? Where there is no Autumn how can Spring exist? If the beautiful houris are always there, where will be the sadness of a separation and the joy of union? Where shall we find there a girl who flees away when we would kiss her? ~ Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib,
235:What is the result of our investigation of the Moslem idea of God? Is the statement of the Koran true, "Your God and our God is the same"? In as far as Moslems are monotheists and in as far as Allah has many of the attributes of Jehovah we cannot put Him with the false gods. But neither can there be any doubt that Mohammed's conception of God is inadequate, incomplete, barren and grievously distorted. It is vastly inferior to the Christian idea of the Godhead and also inferior to the Old Testament idea of God. ~ Samuel Marinus Zwemer,
236:A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds. ~ Neal Stephenson,
237:With Islamophobic tendencies in Europe and North America it is quite possible that Islamic leaders could be charged with 'political genocide'. An extremist American pastor in a small Florida church held a trial that convicted the Koran of encouraging the murder of non-Muslims and of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It is this sort of outlook that would be encouraged to claim that Islam embodied 'political genocide', a development that would have many negative effects on inter-civilisational relations within and among countries. ~ Richard A Falk,
238:Others have questions about how it is that God and human beings can both be speaking through the one document such that you can see and read the personalities of the human authors with their individual vocabularies and literary genres, and yet this is nevertheless the word of God. How can that be? This is quite a contrast with Islam, for example, which holds that the Koran has been dictated in Arabic by God and as a result Mohammed is nothing more than the one who memorizes the word so as to pass it on. There is nothing of human contribution. ~ D A Carson,
239:Prorok zmarł w 632 roku według naszego szacunkowego kalendarza. Pierwsza relacja o jego życiu została spisana sto dwadzieścia lat później przez Ibn Ishaka, choć oryginał tej kroniki zaginął i pojawił się jako podstawa innej kroniki, autorstwa Ibn Hishama, który zmarł w 834 roku. Wiemy o tych pogłoskach i niejasnościach, należy jednak stwierdzić, że nie istnieje pewna relacja o tym, w jaki sposób wyznawcy Proroka skompilowali Koran czy też w jaki sposób różne jego wypowiedzi, „niektóre z nich zapisane ręką osobistych sekretarzy”, zostały skodyfikowane. ~ Anonymous,
240:My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as material for the purpose … How could either of these books carry fire and sword round half the world? It beats me. [writing to George Bernard Shaw] ~ John Maynard Keynes,
241:God! There is no god but He, — the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there that can intercede in His presence except as He permitteth? he knoweth what before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme. ~ Al-Baqara 255, translated by Arthur John Arberry in The Koran Interpreted (1955).,
242:The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical. ~ Dan Brown,
243:Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
244:We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking. ~ Bernd Heinrich,
245:Dhyan means meditation. Meditation means awareness, watchfulness, a silent witnessing of all the processes of the mind. And the magic of watching is that as your watchfulness deepens, the mind starts evaporating. When the watchfulness is absolute mind becomes nil, a zero. And the disappearance of the mind gives you clarity, absolute clarity, transparency; you can see through and through, you become a mirror. And then life is reflected as it is - not according to any doctrine, not according to the Bible or the Koran or the Gita but as it is. And to know life as it is, is to know god. ~ Rajneesh,
246:Their women are of surpassing beauty, and are shown more respect than the men. These people are Muslims, punctilious in observing the hours of prayer, studying the books of law, and memorizing the Koran. Yet their women show no bashfulness before men and do not veil themselves, though they are assiduous in attending prayers. Any man who wishes to marry one of them may do so, but they do not travel with their husbands, and, even if one desired to do so, her family would not allow her to go. The women have their 'friends' and 'companions' amongst the men outside their own families. ~ Ibn Battuta,
247:Crazy rumors swirled about Barack: that he’d been schooled in a radical Muslim madrassa and sworn into the Senate on a Koran. That he refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That he wouldn’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. That he had a close friend who was a domestic terrorist from the 1970s. The falsehoods were routinely debunked by reputable news sources but still blazed through anonymous email chains, forwarded not just by basement conspiracy theorists but also by uncles and colleagues and neighbors who couldn’t separate fact from fiction online. ~ Michelle Obama,
248:Turn your face toward the sacred Mosque (Koran 2:144,149,150) Commentary: The word "sacred" means that a heart which has not disengaged itself from the sphere of the soul and the sphere of created beings is forbidden to penetrate into this place. . . . "Wherever you are, turn your face" [toward the sacred Mosque] means, "Wherever you are, in the accomplishment of works of worship or in the ordinary acts of life, contemplate Him - in what you eat, in what you drink, in him or her whom you marry, always knowing that He is at once the Contemplator and the Contemplated. . . ." ~ Abdelkader El Djezairi,
249:[Über das Paradies:] Die fünf Bücher Mose, die Genesis und der Koran beschäftigen sich eingehend mit dieser hysterischen Geographie. Die muslimische Variante ist jedoch am gelungensten und lohnt wirklich die Lektüre: Bäche, Gärten, Flüsse, Quellen, Blumenbeete, jede Menge Früchte und wunderbare Getränke, großäugige Houris, allzeit jungfräulich, liebenswürdige junge Menschen, Betten im Überfluß, prächtige Kleider, wunderbare Stoffe, außergewöhnlicher Schmuck, Gold, Perlen, Parfums, kostbares Geschirr ... es fehlt nichts in diesem Werbeprospekt des ontologischen Fremdenverkehrsamtes. ~ Michel Onfray,
250:I do not know much about Mohammed or Mohammedanism. I do not take the Koran to bed with me every night. But, if I did on some one particular night, there is one sense at least in which I know what I should not find there. I apprehend that I should not find the work abounding in strong encouragements to the worship of idols; that the praises of polytheism would not be loudly sung; that the character of Mohammed would not be subjected to anything resembling hatred and derision; and that the great modern doctrine of the unimportance of religion would not be needlessly emphasised. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton,
251:A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. ~ Peter Heather,
252:It must be particularly borne in mind, that Mahomet did not profess to set up a new religion ; but to restore that derived in the earliest times from God himself. " We follow," says the Koran, " the religion of Abraham the orthodox, who was no idolater. We believe in God and that which hath been sent down to us, and that which hath been sent down unto Abraham and Ishmael, and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and that which was delivered unto Moses and Jesus, and that which was delivered unto the prophets from the Lord : we make no distinction between any of them, and to God we are resigned. ~ Washington Irving,
253:The answer to this question is obvious - if only because it has been patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden himself. The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. It is rare to find the behavior of humans so fully and satisfactorily explained. Why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation? ~ Sam Harris,
254:Muhammad professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville,
255:The admirers and followers of the Al Koran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed throughout that wild and absurd performance...Would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morality, let us attend to his narration, and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise upon such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilised society. No steady rule of right conduct seems there to be attended to: and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or harmful to the true believers. ~ David Hume,
256:Muslim feminist reformers try a third and braver tactic when they confront Koranic justifications for sexism or the endorsement of child marriage. They tell believers ‘to reject literal reads of the Koran and recognise that these verses were communicated during specific moments of war, and they aren’t edicts for all time. We, as Muslims, must reject the notion that we read these words literally.’ The reformers want to persuade the faithful that not every verse is true. Again, they do not wish away the difficulties of the enterprise by talking as if there is no conflict between modernity and tradition. ~ Nick Cohen,
257:So prevalent was the belief among Delhiwallahs that Englishmen were the product of an illicit union between apes and the women of Sri Lanka (or alternatively between ‘apes and hogs’) that the city’s leading theologian, Shah Abdul Aziz, had to issue a fatwa expressing his opinion that such a view had no basis in the Koran or the Hadiths, and that however oddly the firangis might behave, they were none the less Christians and thus People of the Book.15 As long as wine and pork were not served, it was therefore perfectly permissible to mix with them (if one should for any strange reason wish to do so) ~ William Dalrymple,
258:Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:
Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance. ~ Karen Armstrong,
259:He doesn't know what the world is like today." The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father's was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting, the live mysterious earth, that belonged to him in a way it could belong to no one else, and where anything at all might happen. ~ Paul Bowles,
260:They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau,
261:The treaty at al Hudaybiya established Islam’s attitudes about treaties to this day. Islam makes a treaty, if and only if, it is in a losing position. The treaty is good only as long as it is weak. When Islam is strong, jihad will start again. Koran 47:33 Believers! Obey Allah and the messenger, and do not let your effort be in vain. Those who do not believe and who prevent others from following Allah’s path and then die as Kafirs will not receive Allah’s forgiveness. Therefore, do not be weak and offer the Kafirs peace when you have the upper hand, for Allah is with you and will not begrudge you the reward of your deeds. ~ Bill Warner,
262:In all fundamentalisms, and they are usually religious or political, there is the sense of profound threat to what are considered fundamental beliefs and symbols, and a compensatory invocation of a sacred text (the Bible, the Koran, Mein Kampf) as a literal guide to every form of action. History stops so that murderous therapy can be applied. While medicine does not provide the sacred text, one can revert to ancient practices of shamans, witch doctors, and tricksters who could be expected to kill in order to heal. For physicians as well as charismatic spiritual physicians, there is a release from Hippocratic restraint. ~ Robert Jay Lifton,
263:You people do not have to live like this!" the man pleaded. "We are humans, made in the image of God. No machine has the right to order us around." The man reached inside his box, no bigger than a foot square, and took out a small black book. "Here is the truth. Read it!"

Before anyone could act, one of the Sentries aimed its red eye at the babbling man, and shot out a deadly energy ray. With a final shout of defiance, the man fell to the ground, dead. The contents of his container spilling out onto the spaceport's floor. Marcellus looked down at the items, so precious to the man: they were copies of The Koran and The Bible. ~ Donald Allen Kirch,
264:As the invasion fleet sailed east across the Mediterranean, Napoleon would lie in bed reading and dictating to Bourrienne. His principal reading was from the Koran. Like Alexander the Great before him, he intended to absorb the religion of the people over whom he would rule. He insisted that, if necessary, he himself was willing to become a Muslim—an intention that, at least initially, he would show every sign of wishing to fulfill. However, it should also be noted that in Napoleon’s shipboard library the Koran was shelved under “Politics.” At the same time, he also busied himself with dictating his “proclamation” to the Egyptian people. ~ Paul Strathern,
265:There is only one speaker throughout: Allah himself (although there are a few exceptions that bedevil Koranic commentators to this day). Because it is without doubt, and because it is entirely Allah’s word, without any human element whatsoever, and because he guarantees its preservation, it cannot be questioned. Historically this has made the words of the Koran—on wife-beating, the treatment of non-Muslims, and much more—a virtually insurmountable obstacle to reform within Islam. Reformers are immediately branded as heretics or apostates, and are frequently subject to persecution from authorities anxious to safeguard Islamic orthodoxy. To ~ Robert Spencer,
266:The Sumerians wrote on everything.
When they built a building, they would write in cuneiform on every brick. When
the buildings fell down, these bricks would remain, scattered across the desert.
In the Koran, the angels who are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, We are
sent forth to a wicked nation, so that we may bring down on them a shower of
clay -- stones marked by your Lord for the destruction of the sinful.' Lagos
found this interesting -- this promiscuous dispersal of information, written on
a medium that lasts forever. He spoke of pollen blowing in the wind -- I gather
that this was some kind of analogy. ~ Neal Stephenson,
267:This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price—by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions—Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to do this. ~ Sam Harris,
268:Degrees of superiority are also implied by the Revelation in its mention of the heart. In speaking of the majority, it says: ‘Not blind are the eyes, but blind are the hearts within the breasts.’ The Prophet on the other hand, like Prophets before him, said that his heart was awake, which means that its eye was open; and the Koran indicates that this possibility can be shared, if only in some measure, by others also, for it sometimes addresses itself directly to ‘those who have hearts.’ It is reported that of Abu Bakr the Prophet said: “He surpasseth you not through much fasting and prayer but he surpasseth you in virtue of something that is fixed in his heart. ~ Martin Lings,
269:It is something few Christians in the West realize, but Jesus featured as the Prophet Isa in the Islamic Scriptures. Christians, Muslims, and Jews all worship one Abrahamic God and share some of the same ancient stories. The Old Testament, the Koran, the Talmud, in many respects are all the same story. The Prophet Muhammad did not, in fact, claim to be founding a new religion when he had his visions and began to preach; he was simply bringing the old faith in the One God to the Arabs. Non-Muslim peoples, according to the Koran, received Scriptures revealed to them by God before the time of Muhammad. The Koran is taken to represent the completion of those Scriptures. ~ Dan Eaton,
270:You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and available, namely, the Koran. You say: 'Whoever denies it, let him produce a similar one.' Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly. They convey the meaning better and their rhymed prose is in better meter. … By God what you say astonishes us! You are talking about a work which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation. Then you say: 'Produce something like it'‽ ~ Muhammad ibn Zakariya al Razi,
271:Far from being tortured, the prisoners [at Guantanamo] are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London. It's not just unbecoming to buy in to Muslim psychoses; in the end, it's self-defeating. And our self-defeat is their surest shot at victory...Even a loser can win when he's up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western Civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, the jihadists figure: hey, why not us? ~ Mark Steyn,
272:However, not all Muslims have always believed that the Koran is eternal and uncreated—a fact that has important implications for modern-day hopes for the emergence of a moderate brand of Islam. The reformist Mu’tazilite movement swept through the Islamic world in the ninth century, becoming the state religion of the Abbasid Caliphate (Islamic empire). The Mu’tazilites (“Separated Ones,” or “Those Who Have Withdrawn”) held that reason rather than simply blind faith in the Koran must play a role in a Muslim’s encounter with Allah. Accordingly, Mu’tazilite theologians were uncomfortable with literal interpretations of some Koranic passages, and even declared that the book itself was created. ~ Robert Spencer,
273:The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be "fundamental-
ist" in the Western sense of the word—in that even "moderate"
approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and
inerrant word of the one true God. The difference between funda-
mentalists and moderates—and certainly the difference between all
"extremists" and moderates—is the degree to which they see political
and military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith. In any
case, people who believe that Islam must inform every dimension of
human existence, including politics and law, are now generally called
not "fundamentalists" or "extremists" but, rather, "Islamists. ~ Sam Harris,
274:Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. ~ Rebecca Solnit,
275:Islam asserts itself as the religion of the ayat, which is customarily translated as verses, but literally means signs, in the semiotic usage of the word. The Koran is a group of signs to be decoded by al-'aql, the intellect, an intellect that makes the individual responsible and in fact master of himself/herself. In order for God to exist as the locus of power, the law, and social control, it was necessary for the social institution that had previously fulfilled these functions - namely, tribal power - to disappear. The hijab reintroduced the idea that the street was under the control of the sufaha, those who did not restrain their desires and who needed a tribal chieftain to keep them under control. ~ Fatema Mernissi,
276:To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many streams flowed, a work of art that emerged from centuries of monotheistic fusions and debates, before taking its final form in the hands of a prophet in an expanding empire of newly unified Arabs pushing aside the ancient powers of Rome and Sassanid Persia. It is, in Tom Holland’s vivid words, a bloom from the seedbed of antiquity, not a guillotine dropped on the neck of antiquity. It contains bits of Roman imperial propaganda, stories of Christian saints, remnants of Gnostic gospels and parts of ancient Jewish tracts. Holland ~ Matt Ridley,
277:L’art de l’Islam allie la profusion joyeuse de la végétation avec la rigueur abstraite et pure des cristaux : une niche de prière ornée d’arabesques tient du jardin et des flocons de neige. Ce mélange de qualités se rencontre déjà dans le Koran, où la géométrie des idées est comme cachée sous le flamboiement des formes.
L’Islam, par sa hantise de l’Unité, si l’on peut dire, a aussi un aspect de simplicité désertique, de blancheur et d’austérité, qui dans l’art alterne avec la joie cristalline de l’ornementation. Le berceau des Arabes est un paysage fait de déserts et d’oasis.
L’art musulman montre d’une façon très transparente comment l’art doit répéter la nature – au sens le plus vaste – dans ses modes créateurs sans la copier dans ses résultats. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
278:The myth persists in Egypt to this day that Napoleon’s soldiers actually disfigured some of these ruins, and are even said to have used the Sphinx as target practice for their cannons, shooting off its nose. This last is a calumny: it is known that the Sphinx was defaced as early as the eighth century by the Sufi iconoclast Saim-ed-Dahr,28 and was further damaged in 1380 by fanatical Muslims prompted by the Koran’s strictures against images. During these early times the Sphinx was not regarded as a precious historical object, but instead inspired fear: through the centuries it became known to the Egyptians as Abul-Hol (Father of Terrors), and would only begin to be regarded more favorably when it became a tourist attraction in the later nineteenth century. ~ Paul Strathern,
279:Jesus reveals a God who comes in search of us, a God who makes room for our freedom, a God who is vulnerable. Above all, Jesus reveals a God who is love. Those raised in a Christian tradition may miss the shock of Jesus’ message, but in truth love has never been a normal way of describing what happens between human beings and their God. Not once does the Koran apply the word love to God. Aristotle stated bluntly, “It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus”—or that Zeus loved a human being, for that matter. In dazzling contrast the Christian Bible affirms, “God is love,” and cites love as the main reason Jesus came to earth: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ~ Philip Yancey,
280:Bible vs. Koran “Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks; at length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them: thereafter is the time for either generosity or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens. . . . But those who are slain in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.” —Koran 47:4 “And he sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?’ But he turned and rebuked them. And they went on to another village.” —Luke 9:52–56 ~ Robert Spencer,
281:The reality that the West currently enjoys far more wealth and temporal power than any nation under Islam is viewed by devout Muslims as a diabolical perversity, and this situation will always stand as an open invitation for jihad. Insofar as a person is Muslim—that is, insofar as he believes that Islam constitutes the only viable path to God and that the Koran enunciates it perfectly—he will feel contempt for any man or woman who doubts the truth of his beliefs. What is more, he will feel that the eternal happiness of his children is put in peril by the mere presence of such unbelievers in the world. If such people happen to be making the policies under which he and his children must live, the potential for violence imposed by his beliefs seems unlikely to dissipate. ~ Sam Harris,
282:And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder. They are dangerous because they give you the feeling that you know, although you know not. They give you this misconception about yourself that now questions have been solved. “I know what The Bible says, I know what the Koran says, I know what the Gita says. I have arrived.” You will become a parrot; you will repeat things but you will not know anything. This is not the way to know—knowledge is not the way to know. Then what is the way to know? Wonder. Let your heart dance with wonder. Be full of wonder: throb with it, breathe it in, breathe it out. Why be in such a hurry for the answer? Can’t you allow a mystery to remain a mystery? I know there is a great temptation not to allow it to remain a mystery, to reduce it to knowledge. ~ Osho,
283:There is a similar system of discrimination, extending far beyond a small geographical region to the entire globe; it touches every nation, perpetuating and expanding the trafficking in human slaves, body mutilation, and even legitimized murder on a massive scale. This system is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life. ~ Jimmy Carter,
284:The Revelations now began to come more copiously. They were immediately transmitted by the Prophet to those who were with him, then passed from mouth to mouth, memorised and recited - a long and rapidly increasing litany which told of the ephemeral nature of all earthly things, of death and of the certainty of the Resurrection and the Last Judgement, followed by Hell or Paradise. But above all it told of the Glory of God, of His Indivisible Oneness, his Truth, Wisdom, Goodness, Mercy, Bounty and Power; and by extension it continually referred to His Signs, the marvels of nature, and to their harmonious working together which testified so eloquently to the Oneness of their Sole Originator. Harmony is the imprint of Oneness upon multiplicity, and the Koran draws attention to that harmony as a theme for man’s meditation. ~ Martin Lings,
285:The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. ~ Richard Dawkins,
286:Scriptural determinism” sounds like an arcane academic paradigm, but it is deployed by nonacademics in a consequential way. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as Americans tried to fathom the forces at work, sales of several kinds of books rose. Some people bought books about Islam, some bought books about the recent history of the Middle East, and some bought translations of the Koran. And of course some bought more than one kind of book. But people who bought only translations of the Koran were showing signs of scriptural determinism. They seemed to think that you could understand the terrorists’ motivation simply by reading their ancient scriptures—just search the Koran for passages advocating violence against infidels and, having succeeded, end the analysis, content that you’d found the essential cause of 9/11. ~ Robert Wright,
287:One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead.... ~ Joseph Campbell,
288:Lecz, jak dotąd, przez badaczy zajmujących się Koranem nie zostały podjęte badania porównawcze. Nie podjęto też poważnej próby skatalogowania niezgodności między różnymi edycjami i rękopisami. Nawet pobieżne wysiłki w tym kierunku napotykały natychmiast szał i wściekłość o podłożu inkwizytorskim. W tej sytuacji krytyczne w tym zakresie jest dzieło Christopha Luxenburga The Syriac-Aramaic Version of the Koran (Syryjsko-aramejska wersja Koranu), opublikowane w Berlinie w 2000 roku. Luxenburg bez cienia emocji odrzuca tezę o dziele w jednym tylko języku i twierdzi, że Koran staje się o wiele lepiej zrozumiały, kiedy przyjmie się założenie, że jego oryginalna część została zapisana w języku syryjsko-aramejskim, nie zaś w arabskim. (Najbardziej znany przykład dotyczy opisu nagrody, jaką „męczennicy” otrzymają w raju: kiedy przetłumaczy się i przeredaguje ten opis, można uzyskać słodkie białe rodzynki zamiast dziewic). ~ Anonymous,
289:Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything you have to your characters and to your readers, will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three-year-old, who is, by turns, wonderful, willful, terrible, crazed, and adoring. Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel. Other times they'll reach out and touch you like adoring grandparents on their deathbeds trying to memorize your face with their fingers...Your three-year-old and your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that's one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along. ~ Anne Lamott,
290:The church maintained that having been founded by Christ, who was God incarnate, it alone, through its bishops, was the final and authoritative instrument of divine revelation. Allegiance to the church and obedience to its ordinances were the sole means to salvation. No salvation was therefore possible to anyone who remained outside the church — nulla salus extra ecclesiam. Likewise, Islam placed the main emphasis upon the Koran as the final revelation of God's will. Adherence to the teachings of the Koran, together with the recognition of Allah as God, and Mohammed as the greatest of prophets, constituted for the Moslems the sine qua non of salvation.

The Jews were not quite as emphatic as were the Christians and the Moslems in declaring the rest of mankind ineligible to salvation. Rabbinic teaching was inclined to concede that Gentiles, who were righteous or saintly, had a share in the world to come. ~ Mordecai Menahem Kaplan,
291:Ernst Kaltenbrunner of the Head Office replied with the disappointing news that the Koran had no suitable passages for such a claim, but he suggested that Hitler might be advertised as “the returned ‘Isa (Jesus), who is forecast in the Qur’an and who, similar to the figure of the Knight George, defeats the giant and Jew-King Dajjal at the end of the world.” Ultimately, the office printed one million copies of an Arabic-language pamphlet that sought to persuade Muslim Arabs to ally with Germany: “O Arabs, do you see that the time of the Dajjal has come? Do you recognize him, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and rules the whole world and who steals the land of the Arabs?. . . O Arabs, do you know the servant of God? He [Hitler] has already appeared in the world and already turned his lance against the Dajjal and his allies. . . . He will kill the Dajjal, as it is written, destroy his places and cast his allies into hell. ~ Anonymous,
292:the idea of demonic transmigration. There were the expected Catholic texts from the Rituale Romanum, containing the rites and guidelines for major exorcisms, but also a host of more arcane materials whose origins ranged from India to Egypt. She found passages copied from the Zohar, the Jewish mystical text of Kabbalistic teachings, describing the ways in which a demon could secretly slip into a victim’s soul, and how it could only be dislodged by a minyan reciting Psalm 91 three times; if the rabbi then blew a certain melody on the shofar, or ram’s horn, the sound would in effect “shatter the body” and shake the evil spirit loose. Even the Muslims had their methods for disposing of wandering demons. The prophet Muhammad instructed his followers to read the last three suras from the Koran—the Surat al-Ikhlas (the Fidelity), the Surat al-Falaq (the Dawn), and the Surat an-Nas (Mankind)—and drink water from the holy well of Zamzam. ~ Robert Masello,
293:Under Muslim law, a man's freedom to divorce his wife is justified in the Koran. This system of the threat of divorce looming over a woman's security is most unsettling to women in my land. It is intolerable that many men stretch this ruling to the utmost of its flexibility, demanding divorce for the most trivial causes, ending with the continuous social degradation of their women. Women do not have the same options, since a divorce in a woman's favour is given only after a thorough investigation into her life. More often than not, women will not be allowed to divorce, even when there is just cause. This female lack of freedom so enjoyed by males creates onesided, often cruel methods of male control and power over their women. The words of divorce slip most easily off the tongue of a man who wishes to punish his wife, 'I divorce thee', or 'I dismiss thee', sending the woman into exile from her married home, often without her children. ~ Jean Sasson,
294:His conversion (tawbat) was begun by Ḥasan of Baṣra. Ạt first he was a usurer and committed all sorts of wickedness, but God gave him a sincere repentance, and he learned from Ḥasan something of the theory and practice of religion. His native tongue was Persian (‘ajamí), and he could not speak Arabic correctly. One evening Ḥasan of Baṣra passed by the door of his cell. Ḥabíb had uttered the call to prayer and was standing, engaged in devotion. Ḥasan came in, but would not pray under his leadership, because Ḥabíb was unable to speak Arabic fluently or recite the Koran correctly. The same night, Ḥasan dreamed that he saw God and said to Him: “O Lord, wherein does Thy good pleasure consist?” and that God answered: “O Ḥasan, you found My good pleasure, but did not know its value: if yesternight you had said your prayers after Ḥabíb, and if the rightness of his intention had restrained you from taking offence at his pronunciation, I should have been well pleased with you. ~ Reynold Alleyne Nicholson,
295:In addition to a greater understanding of secular subjects, the invention of cryptanalysis aslo depended on the growth of religious sholarship. Major theological schools were established in Basra, Kufa and Baghdad, where thelogians scrutinized the revelations of Muhammad as contained in the Koran. The theologians were interested in establishing the chronology of the revelations, which they did by counting the frequencies of words contained in each revelation. The theory was that certain words had evolved relatively recently, and hence if a revelation contained a high number of these newer words, this would indicate that it came later in the chronology. Theologians also studied the Hadith, which consists of the Prophet's daily utterances. They tried to demonstrate that each statement was indeed attributable to Muhammad. This was done by studying the etymology of words and the structure of sentences, to test whether particular texts were consistent with the linguistic patterns of the Prophet. ~ Simon Singh,
296:We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

{Letter from the commissioners, John Adams & Thomas Jefferson, to John Jay, 28 March 1786} ~ Thomas Jefferson,
297:We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management? ~ Tom Robbins,
298:It is remarkable that circumcision, which is invariably practiced by thE
Mahometans, and forms a distinguishing rite of their faith, to which all
proselytes must conform, is neither mentioned in the Koran nor the
Sonna. It seems to have been a general usage in Arabia, tacitly adopted
from the Jews, and is even said to have been prevalent throughout the
East before the time of Moses.

It is said that the Koran forbids the making likenesses of any living
thing, which has prevented the introduction of portrait-painting among
Mahometans. The passage of the Koran, however, which is thought to
contain the prohibition, seems merely an echo of the second commandment, held sacred by Jews and Christians, not to form images or pictures
for worship. One of Mahomet's standards was a black eagle. Among the most distinguished Moslem ornaments of the Alhambra at Granada is a fountain supported by lions carved of stone, and some Moslem monarchs have had their effigies stamped on their coins. ~ Washington Irving,
299:One look at the officials in the American Consulate where we went for dreary paper routines was enough to make you realize what was wrong with American 'diplomacy' throughout the Fellaheen world: - stiff offcious squares with contempt even for their own Americans who happened not to wear neckties, as tho a necktie or whatever it stands for meant anything to the hungry Berbers who came into Tangiers every Saturday morning on meek asses, like Christ, carrying baskets of pitiful fruit or dates, and returned at dusk to silhouetted parades along the hill by the railroad track. The railroad track where barefooted prophets still walked and taught the Koran to children along the way. Why didn't the American consul ever walk into the urchin hall where Mohammed Maye sat smoking? or squat in behind empty buildings with old Arabs who talked with their hands? or any thing? Instead it's all private limousines, hotel restaurants, parties in the suburbs, an endless phoney rejection in the name of 'democracy' of all that's pith and moment of every land. ~ Jack Kerouac,
300:No Christian friends, please, we’re Muslims The Koran warns Muslims that the Jews and pagans will be their worst enemies, but “nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, ‘We are Christians,’ because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant” (5:82). One Muslim interpretation of this passage holds that it refers not to all Christians, but only to those who accept Islam; this is made clear by the following two verses, in which those Christians accept Muhammad’s message. But even if one takes the text at face value, the totality of the Koranic record suggests that while Christians may themselves feel “nearest in love” to the Muslims, Muslims are not to return the favor. For Allah commands them, “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust” (5:51). ~ Robert Spencer,
301:The Suspect
Over there, in the Other land, I was
gharb-zadeh, Farsi to the effect of westsmitten. Over here, in 'Our' land, I am
Muslim immigrant, nomenclature with grave
allusions: unemployment, anger, and
unpredictable police attention. Over there
I was an 'apostate', principal's term for
the boy who failed Koran Studies and wrote
an essay on Leonardo da Vinci. Over here
dainty high school girl rejected this thick
accented adolescent for being too hairy
and a 'Muslim rapist'. Over there, utterly guilty
of doodling Zorro; hence flogged by the irate
principal. Over here shackled to a passport
etched with 'born in Tehran'. There I was
suspected of perfidy to the Faith, an Infidelwannabe. Over here I am suspected
of terror, 'Our' values' covert enemy. My likes
aren't to belong to tribes, nations, et al; but
welcome at the cells of the Islamic Republic's
Evin Prison, pliers pinching their fingernails; or sleep-deprived and hooded indefinitely
in the dark solitaries of Guantánamo Bay.
~ Ali Alizadeh,
302:Marrying young—very young The Koran takes child marriage for granted in its directives about divorce. Discussing the waiting period required in order to determine if a woman is pregnant, it says, “If you are in doubt concerning those of your wives who have ceased menstruating, know that their waiting period shall be three months. The same shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4, emphasis added). Allah thus gives instructions for a situation in which a pre-pubescent woman is not only married, but is being divorced by her husband. Such a verse might have made its way into the Koran because of the notorious fact that Muhammad himself had a child bride. According to Sahih Bukhari, the hadith collection that Muslims consider most reliable, “The Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death).” Another tradition recalls that at the age of nine, she was playing on a swing with some of her friends when Muhammad came for her.20 ~ Robert Spencer,
303:The media suffer from an internalised as well as institutionalised Islamophilia. They could never broadcast, or print, during Ramadan, Eid or any other Muslim festival a programme or article explaining from the Christian – or any other – point of view why Islam’s founding story simply doesn’t stack up. It wouldn’t be hard to write or make it. Let any scholar loose on the materials and they could do it. Biblical or Torah scholars using the tools of criticism could use them on the Koran and have a wonderful and fascinating time of it. But would the nation’s broadcaster run it? Or the ‘paper of record’ print it? If during any day of the year – let alone a major Muslim festival – the main newspapers in Britain or America chose to commission a Christian scholar to review a book casting doubt on the likelihood of Mohammed’s existence, say, or his claims to be a prophet, I think everybody knows what would happen. The papers and broadcasters know what would happen too. Which is why they don’t do it. And which is why when it comes to Islam we begin by avoiding it, go on to treat it with kid gloves, ~ Douglas Murray,
304:The historic importance of the Khidr story is unfortunate, given another lesson that emerges from it in Islamic tradition: don’t kill children, unless you know they’re going to grow up to be unbelievers. One early Muslim, Najda, recalled, “The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) used not to kill the children, so thou shouldst not kill them unless you could know what Khadir had known about the child he killed, or you could distinguish between a child who would grow up to be a believer (and a child who would grow up to be a non-believer), so that you killed the (prospective) non-believer and left the (prospective) believer aside.”26 This interpretation may help to explain the persistent phenomenon of honor killing in Islamic countries and even among Muslims in the West, in which a Muslim kills a daughter or other relative who has “shamed” him by engaging in allegedly un-Islamic activity, such as dating a non-Muslim boy or adopting Western clothing. Muslims who take the Koran literally can find a justification in this passage for such acts by claiming his victim was turning into an unbeliever. ~ Robert Spencer,
305:The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur’an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the conquistadors and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary accompaniment. ~ Richard Dawkins,
306:I do rather like birds,’ Abdullah Unul says. ‘They’re busy, active little things. They make do. Have you ever thought, if Istanbul were to have an official bird, what would it be? I bet you’d think stork straight away. Maybe a sparrow. Me, the official bird of Istanbul would have to be the seagull. What do you see dancing around the Ramazan lights, what’ s following the ships up and down the Bosphorus, what’s facing into the wind on the rocks down by the water side. The common or garden gull, that’s what. For all those reasons, the seagull for me is Istanbul, but mostly because it practises kleptoparasitism. You may not have heard of that. I’ll explain. It’s a behaviour when one animal takes prey from another that has the job of catching or killing it. In seagulls it’s letting some other bird do all the hard work of catching the fish or a bit of bread and then taking it off them as they’re about to eat it. It’s the reason they’re the success they are. So, I’ll have that Koran. Both parts. To be honest, I’d prefer cash, but I imagine there’s a market for that gadgetry you have out there in Fenerbahçe. ~ Ian McDonald,
307:Every American should own a Koran. There are no excuses. Every day you can switch on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and hear or read pronouncements about what Islam is and“what the Koran says. Most of it is wrong—very wrong. You owe it to yourself, your family, and all the Americans killed on 9/11 and since to know the truth. Do not take anyone’s word for it. Find out for yourself by reading the actual Koran. One of the most reliable and recognized versions is the The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Once you have a Koran and start to read it, take care to note the enormous differences between the half reportedly communicated to Mohammed in the beginning in Mecca, when he was weak and without followers, and the latter half, allegedly written after he returned from Medina with thousands of followers, the leader of a mighty military force. It is the post-Medina chapters of the Koran that are naturally favored by groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. They are not in fact perverting religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause. ~ Sebastian Gorka,
308:The Second Koran tells us that the darkness in ourselves is a sinister thing. It waits until we relax, it waits until we reach the most vulnerable moments, and then it snares us. I want to be dutiful. I want to do what I should. But when I go back to the tube, I think of where I am going; to that small house and my empty room. What will I do tonight? Make more paper flowers, more wreaths? I am sick of them. Sick of the Nekropolis.

I can take the tube to my mistress' house, or I can go by the street where Mardin's house is. I'm tired. I'm ready to go to my little room and relax. Oh, Holy One, I dread the empty evening. Maybe I should go by the street just to fill up time. I have all this empty time in front of me. Tonight and tomorrow and the week after and the next month and all down through the years as I never marry and become a dried-up woman. Evenings spent folding paper. Days cleaning someone else's house. Free afternoons spent shopping a bit, stopping in tea shops because my feet hurt. That is what lives are, aren't they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning? ~ Maureen F McHugh,
309:The debate over whether the sacred book was created or existed eternally had enormous practical implications. The Mu’tazilites developed a method of Koranic interpretation that was freer from the literal meaning of the text than most Muslim divines dared to venture. For example, they reinterpreted the injunction that Allah “leads the wrongdoers astray” (14:27) so as to reject predestination; they simply denied that Allah would lead people astray and condemn them to Hell. The caliph (Islamic emperor) Ja’far al-Mutawakkil (847–861), however, crushed the Mu’tazilite movement and branded it a heresy. Asserting that the Koran was created became a crime punishable by death. And to this day, the marginalization and discrediting of the Mu’tazilites casts a long shadow over “moderate Islam.” If today’s moderates stray too far from a literal reading of the Koran (including its ferocity toward unbelievers), they risk being accused of advocating long-discredited heresies. The Mu’tazilite experience provides ample historical precedent and a ready methodology that literalists use to cast suspicion on any reading of the Koran that doesn’t take all its words at face value. ~ Robert Spencer,
310:Among the fraudulent farmworker amnesties approved by the INS was one from Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima,7 or—as he was known in the terrorist community—“Mahmud the Red.” Mahmud had come to the United States as a “tourist” from Germany—where he had been denied political asylum, but got around that by marrying an emotionally disturbed alcoholic, and then married another German woman after divorcing the first when she objected to his taking a second wife.8 At the end of 1985, Mahmud and his second wife took a “three-week” trip to the United States on tourist visas and promptly settled into an apartment in Brooklyn.9 Luckily for Mahmud, just as his tourist visa was expiring six months later, Schumer’s farmworker amnesty became law. So Mahmud submitted an application, claiming to have worked on a farm in South Carolina, despite having never left New York, except one short visit to the Michigan Islamic community.10 Mahmud was approved. Otherwise, crops would rot in the fields! And what a wonderful agricultural worker Mahmud was. He became a limo driver in New York, where he repeatedly had his license suspended for ripping off customers and speeding through red lights because he was busy reading the Koran. ~ Ann Coulter,
311:Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.

Mariam's final thoughts were a few words from the Koran, which she muttered under her breath.

He has created the heavens and the earth with the truth; He makes the night cover the day and makes the day overtake the night, and He has made the sun and the moon subservient; each one runs on to an assigned term; now surely He is the Mighty, the Great Forgiver.

"Kneel," the Talib said.

O my Lord! Forgive and have mercy, for you are the best of the merciful ones.

"Kneel here, hamshira. And look down."

One last time, Mariam did as she was told. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
312:The following two examples bear witness to the same state of mind: a certain believer asks God for various favors not because he wishes to obtain them but “to obey the divine command” expressed in the Koran—as if in commanding or permitting personal prayer God was not considering the ends of this prayer and as if He could appreciate a form of obedience that disregarded the sufficient reason for the act commanded or permitted! In this case “command” is actually a rather grand word, for in reality God does not command us to have needs or make requests of Him but rather invites us out of mercy to ask Him for what we lack; we can pray for our daily bread or for a cure just as we can pray for inward graces, but there is no question of praying for the sake of praying because God ordered for the sake of ordering. The second example is the following: another believer, unlike the first, begins with the idea that everything is predestined, and he therefore abstains from formulating any prayers, in spite of the “divine command” this time, because “everything that must happen will happen anyway”—as if God would give Himself the trouble of commanding or permitting superfluous attitudes and as if prayer too were not predestined! ~ Frithjof Schuon,
313:as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where large numbers of women turned out during the June 2009 post-election demonstrations. Clearly, these women’s grievances went far beyond a single rigged election. One explained, “I see lots of girls and women in these demonstrations. They are all angry, ready to explode, scream out and let the world hear their voice. I want the world to know that as a woman in this country, I have no freedom.” This was not surprising, since Iranian law was formulated in scrupulous adherence to the Koran and Islamic tradition and law. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter, Zahra Eshraghi, declared that under Islamic law, “a woman is there to fill her husband’s stomach and raise children.” And just weeks after President Barack Obama defended the right of women in non-Muslim countries to cover their heads, brave Iranian women were throwing off their head coverings as a sign of protest against the Islamic regime—with no peep of support from Obama. Journalist Azadeh Moaveni, author of the feminist book Lipstick Jihad, noted that “while it’s not at the top of women’s grievances, the hijab is symbolic. Taking it off is like waving a red flag. Women are saying they are a force to be reckoned with.”10 ~ Robert Spencer,
314:Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other, it will unriddle many riddles, it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unbiased Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unbiased Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic--for that is part of his insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his. All democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the republicans and mugwumps know it. All the republicans are insane, but only thee democrats and mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect; in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. When I look around me I am often troubled to see how many people are mad.

This should move us to be charitable toward one anothers lunacies. ~ Mark Twain,
315:Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations. ~ Paul Bowles,
316:But again we must be
careful to bear in mind that for Ibn Arabi fana is never absolute annihilation ( the failure to do so has been a source of
countless misunderstandings in regard both to Sufismm and to
Buddhism ). Fana and baqa are always relative terms. Accord-
ing to Ibn Arabi, one must always state toward what there is
annihilation, and wherein there is survival, persistence. In
the state of fana, of concentration, of "Koran," in which the
essential unity of Creator and Creature is experienced, the
Divine Attributes become predicables of the mystic ( discrimi-
nation is suspended ). Then we may say not only that the mystic
"creates" in the same sense as God Himself creates ( that is to
say, causes something which already existed in the world of
Mystery to be manifested in the sensible world ), but in addi-
tion that God creates this effect through him. It is one and the
same divine operation, but through the intermediary of the
gnostic, when he is "withdrawn" (fana) from his human at-
tributes and when he persists, survives ( baqa' ) in his divine
attributes. The mystic is then the medium, the intermediary,
through whom the divine creative power is expressed and
manifested. ~ Henry Corbin,
317:Divinely sanctioned wife-beating “There is no basis in Islamic theology to support domestic abuse of any kind,” declared Qanta A. Ahmed, author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, in May 2009.43 But it all depends on one’s definition of “abuse:” wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction. The Koran tells men to beat their disobedient wives after first warning them and then sending them to sleep in separate beds (4:34)—a punishment that suggests the Koran regards women as sexually insatiable and needing to be kept under control. This is, of course, an extremely controversial verse, so it is worth noting how several translators render the key word here, waidriboohunna:              Pickthall: “and scourge them”              Yusuf Ali: “(and last) beat them (lightly)”              Al-Hilali/Khan: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful)”              Shakir: “and beat them”              Sher Ali: “and chastise them”              Khalifa: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them”              Arberry: “and beat them”              Rodwell: “and scourge them”              Sale: “and chastise them”              Asad: “then beat them”              Dawood: “and beat them ~ Robert Spencer,
318:What about Jerusalem? When discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, pundits and politicians often tell us that Jerusalem is one of the holy cities of Islam—indeed, its third holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina. But in reality, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is extremely tenuous, based only on a legendary journey of Muhammad—a journey that is at best a dream and at worst a fabrication. The Koran refers to this journey only obliquely and in just one place; Islamic tradition fills in the details and connects Jerusalem with the words of the Koran. But the Koran itself never mentions Jerusalem even once—an exceptionally inconvenient fact for Muslims who claim that the Palestinians must have a share of Jerusalem because the city is sacred to Islam. Muhammad’s famous Night Journey is the basis of the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. The Koran’s sole reference to this journey appears in the first verse of sura 17, which says that Allah took Muhammad from “the Sacred Mosque” in Mecca “to the farthest [al-aqsa] Mosque.” There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time, so the “farthest” mosque probably wasn’t really the one that now bears that name in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa mosque located on the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, Islamic tradition is firm that this mosque was in Jerusalem. ~ Robert Spencer,
319:The Blossoming Of Love Is Strange And Wondrous
The blossoming of love is strange and wondrous!
When I acquired the knowledge of love,
I dreaded the mosque.
I fled to my lord’s dwelling,
Where a thousand sounds reverberate.
When love revealed its mystery to me,
The parroted words vanished.
Inside and out, I was cleansed.
I saw my beloved wherever I looked.
Heer and Ranjha are already one.
But Heer, deluded, still searches the woods.
Her Ranjha is with her,
And she doesn’t even know it.
I am tired of reading the Vedas and the Koran!
Obeisance has only abraded my forehead .
God was not in Mecca, nor any holy place.
But who ever found him became brightly illuminated.
Burn the prayer rug, break the clay pot,
Divest yourself of rosary, bowl and staff.
Those who love proclaim repeatedly and loudly,
‘Eat the forbidden! Forsake halaal!’
You have spent your life in the mosque,
Your heart still filled with filth.
Not once did you declare that god is one!
What is the point of making this racket now?
Your devotion was loveless.
Now your protestations are worthless.
Bulla says, I would have remained silent,
It is love that compels me to speak forcefully.
The blossoming of love is strange and wonderful
43
~ Bulleh Shah,
320:115 The month of fasting has come, the emperor’s banner has arrived; withhold your hand from food, the spirit’s table has arrived. The soul has escaped from separation and bound nature’s hands; the heart of error is defeated, the army of faith has arrived. The army of the snorting chargers has put its hand to plunder, from the fire of the strikers of fire the soul is brought to lamentation. The Cow was goodly, Moses son of ‘Imrān appeared; through him the dead became living when it was sacrificed. Fasting is as our sacrifice, it is the life of our soul; let us sacrifice all our body, since the soul has arrived as guest. Fortitude is as a sweet cloud, wisdom rains from it, because it was in such a month of fortitude that the Koran arrived. When the carnal soul is in need, the spirit goes into Ascension; when the gate of the prison is broken, the soul reaches the Beloved. The heart has rent the curtain of darkness and winged up to the sky; the heart, being of the angels, has again arrived at them. Quickly clutch the rope out of this body’s well; at the top of the well of water cry, “Joseph of Canaan has arrived.” When Jesus escaped from the ass his prayers became accepted; wash your hands, for the Table has arrived from heaven. Wash your hands and your mouth, neither eat nor speak; seek that speech and that morsel which has come to the silent ones. ~ Rumi,
321:For the study of Middle Eastern history, and at the present time one might even add of world history, some knowledge of Islam’s origins and of its scriptures is necessary. Already in my student years I was reading the Koran, the biography of the Prophet, and the extensive literature concerned with them. But at no time did I specialize in these topics. I am not an expert in theology or scripture, and I looked at these, if at all, only with a historian’s eye. I am, by vocation and profession, a historian, principally interested in the history of civilization. Looking back, I see that by this choice I saved myself a lot of trouble. This was not my purpose at the time but I have become well aware of my narrow and fortunate escape from one of the most difficult and dangerous topics of our profession. Even for Muslims, and far more so for non-Muslims, the study of the sacred biography and the sacred text has become highly sensitive, not so much a field of research as a minefield. This has not prevented my critics from attacking me for my treatment of Muslim scripture and sacred biography. In this as in other matters, the attacks came from both sides. On the one side I am accused of traducing Islam and its sanctities, on the other of defending and even concealing its flaws. As long as the attacks continue to come from both sides, I shall remain confident of my scholarly objectivity. Once, ~ Bernard Lewis,
322:The writer encountered a Muslim woman once in a narrow street of a predominantly Hindu town, in the quarter inhabited by moneylenders. The feeling he had was that she was coming in search of a loan. She wore the burkha, that unhygienic head-to-toe covering that turns a woman into a walking symbol of inefficient civic refuse collection and leaves you without even an impression of her eyes behind the slits she watches the gay world through, tempted but not tempting; a garment in all probability inflaming to her passions but chilling to her expectations of having them satisfied. Pity her for the titillation she must suffer. After she had passed there was a smell of Chanel No. 5, which suggested that she needed money because she liked expensive things. Perhaps she had a rebellious spirit, or laboured under a confusion of ideas and intentions. On the other hand she may merely have been submissive to her husband, drenching herself for his private delight with a scent she did not realize was also one of public invitation – and passed that day through the street of the moneylenders only because it was a short cut to the mosque. It was a Friday, and it is written in the Koran: ‘Believers, when the call is made for prayer on Friday, hasten to the remembrance of Allah and leave off all business. That would be best for you, if you but knew it. Then, when the prayers are ended, disperse and go in quest of Allah’s bounty.’ Perhaps, when the service was over, it was her intention to return by the way she had come. ~ Paul Scott,
323:I do not know if you read some time ago how one of the Marshals of the Russian army reporting to the Polit Bureau, said that in the army they were training soldiers under hypnosis —you know what that means? You are put under hypnosis and taught how to kill, how to obey completely, function with complete independence, but within a pattern, under the authority of a superior. Now culture and society are doing exactly the same thing to each one of us. Culture and society have hypnotized you. Do please listen to this very carefully, it is not only being done in the army in Russia, but it is being done all over the world. When you read the Gita endlessly, or the Koran, or repeat some mantram, some endlessly repeated words, you are doing exactly the same thing. When you say, “I am a Hindu”, “I am a Buddhist”, “I am a Muslim”, “I am a Catholic”, the same pattern is being repeated, you have been mesmerized, hypnotized; and technology is doing exactly the same thing. You can be a clever lawyer, a first-class engineer, or an artist, or a great scientist, but always within a fragment of the whole. I do not know if you see this, not because I describe it, but actually see what is taking place. The Communists are doing it, the Capitalists are doing it, everybody, parents, schools, education, they are all shaping the mind to function within a certain pattern, a certain fragment. And we are always concerned with bringing about a change within the pattern, within the fragment.


Madras
3 January 1968 ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti,
324:But what is sovereignty? It is, they say, the power to make laws. Another absurdity, a relic of despotism. The nation had long seen kings issuing their commands in this form: for such is our pleasure; it wished to taste in its turn the pleasure of making laws. For fifty years it has brought them forth by myriads; always, be it understood, through the agency of representatives. The play is far from ended.
The definition of sovereignty was derived from the definition of the law. The law, they said, is the expression of the will of the sovereign: then, under a monarchy, the law is the expression of the will of the king; in a republic, the law is the expression of the will of the people. Aside from the difference in the number of wills, the two systems are exactly identical: both share the same error, namely, that the law is the expression of a will; it ought to be the expression of a fact. Moreover they followed good leaders: they took the citizen of Geneva for their prophet, and the contrat social for their Koran.
Bias and prejudice are apparent in all the phrases of the new legislators. The nation had suffered from a multitude of exclusions and privileges; its representatives issued the following declaration: All men are equal by nature and before the law; an ambiguous and redundant declaration. Men are equal by nature: does that mean that they are equal in size, beauty, talents, and virtue? No; they meant, then, political and civil equality. Then it would have been sufficient to have said: All men are equal before the law. ~ Pierre Joseph Proudhon,
325:Les deux exemples suivants témoignent du même état d’esprit : tel croyant demande à Dieu diverses faveurs, non parce qu’il désire les obtenir, mais « pour obéir à l’ordre divin » exprimé par le Koran ; comme si Dieu, en ordonnant ou en permettant la prière personnelle, n’avait pas en vue le but de cette prière, et comme si Dieu pouvait apprécier une obéissance dédaigneuse de la raison suffisante de l’acte ordonné ou permis ! Dans le cas présent, « ordre » est d’ailleurs un bien grand mot ; en réalité, Dieu ne nous ordonne pas d’avoir des besoins ni de lui adresser des demandes, mais il nous invite par miséricorde à lui demander ce qui nous manque ; nous pouvons prier pour notre pain quotidien ou pour une guérison comme nous pouvons prier pour des grâces intérieures, mais il n’est pas question de prier pour prier parce que Dieu a ordonné pour ordonner. Le deuxième exemple que nous avons en vue est le suivant : inversement tel autre croyant, partant de l’idée que tout est prédestiné, s’abstient de formuler des prières - malgré « l’ordre divin » cette fois-ci ! - car « tout ce qui doit arriver, arrive de toutes façons » ; comme si Dieu se donnait la peine d’ordonner, ou de permettre, des attitudes superflues, et comme si la prière n’était pas prédestinée elle aussi ! Certes, l’homme est le « serviteur » (abd), et la servitude (ubûdiyah) comporte l’obéissance ; mais elle n’est pas de « l’art pour l’art », elle n’est que par ses contenus, d’autant que l’homme est « fait à l’image de Dieu » ; l’oublier, c’est vider la notion même de l’homme de toute sa substance. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
326:Will you be traveling there again? To Istanbul and Arabia and the places where they follow the Koran?"
"I hope so," he said, laying aside the golden book very carefully. "The air is so hot there, warm and fragrant, the sky so blue, and the food tastes like nothing here. They have olives and dates and soft cheeses. I think you would like it, my Séraphine. You could dress in pink and gold and mahogany and lounge on silken pillows, listening to strange music. I'd buy you a little monkey with a vest and a hat to make you laugh and I'd sit and watch you and feed you juicy grapes."
She smiled sadly and drew off her stays. "And how would we get there, Val?"
"I'd hire a ship," he said taking a sip of his red wine. "No, I'd buy a ship- one of our very own. It'll have blue sails and a flag with a rooster on it. We'll take your mongrel and Mehmed and all his cats and set sail with fifty strong men. During the day we'll sit on deck and watch for mermaids and monsters in the waves, and at night we'll stare at the stars and then I'll make love to you until dawn."
"And after far Arabia?" she whispered as she drew off her chemise and stood nude save for her stockings and shoes. "What then?"
His smile faded and he looked very grave as she took off her shoes and stockings. "Why, Séraphine, then we would journey on to Egypt or India or China or indeed wherever else you please. Or even come round about here, back to foggy, bustling London, where, if nothing else, the pies and sausages are quite good, if that was what you wished. Just as long as I were with you and you with me, my sweet Séraphine. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,
327:The Koran is empathetic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs. It unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. It states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many of the new atheists with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. This kind of terror, in fact, has its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, which invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb: a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on September 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by Mario Buda, an Italian immigrant, in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200.

Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon during the suicide attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Three were carried out by Christians. ~ Chris Hedges,
328:Sadiq al-Mahdi, former prime minister of Sudan, would agree. On March 24, 1999, he wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, that “the traditional concept of JIHAD does allow slavery as a by-product.”11 And so slavery persists to this day in some areas of the Islamic world. The BBC reported in December 2008 that “strong evidence has emerged of children and adults being used as slaves in Sudan’s Darfur region”—where a jihad rages today.12 Mauritanian human rights activist Boubakar Messaoud asserted in 2004 that in that country, people are born and bred as slaves: “A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn’t need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal.”13 Three years later, nothing had changed. Messaoud explained in March 2007, “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”14 Likewise in Niger, which formally abolished slavery only in 2003, slavery is a long-standing practice. Journalist and anti-slavery activist Souleymane Cisse explained that even Western colonial governments did nothing to halt the practice: “The colonial rulers preferred to ignore it because they wanted to co-operate with the aristocracy who kept these slaves.”15 Islamic slavery has not been unknown even in the United States. When the Saudi national Homaidan Al-Turki was imprisoned for holding a woman as a slave in Colorado, he complained that “the state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.”16 Where did he get the idea that slavery was a “traditional Muslim behavior”? From the Koran. Slavery: it’s in the Koran. And if it’s in the Koran, it is unquestionably right. ~ Robert Spencer,
329:The Gospel--with its exclusively spiritual, hence in a sense extra-social, morality--says not one word about war; the Koran on the contrary regulates it; be that as it may, the Christian conquerors of the Moors were far more pitiless and intolerant than the Moors who conquered the Christians. Muslims see a mark of "hypocrisy" in such disproportions whereas Christians reproach Muslims for the "down-to-earth" quality of their morality; Muslims will say that morality should be socially effective, to which Christians will reply that it should be a spiritual ideal, and so on. If we mention these things, it is not with the intention of depicting an irresolvable polemic but in order to show the inevitable interplay of compensations that regulates the entire human order, just as it does the entire cosmic order. No truth is ever responsible for human frailties; no truth can neutralize them completely in collective life. In order to forestall certain objections let us add that those modern Europeans who dominate--or have dominated--Muslim peoples are clearly no longer representatives of Christianity; they represent a civilization that necessarily involves a certain humanitarianism by virtue of its religious indifference, its over-estimation of earthly comfort, and its idolatrous worship of the human animal; but the only legitimate humanitarianism is that which takes account--to the extent this is possible, that is, in conformity with the nature of things--of human welfare in its entirety, hence above all man's spiritual well-being; when this is neglected or even rejected, all the treasures of the earth cease to have any value. Unfortunately it is impossible for man--especially collective man--to concentrate his efforts simultaneously on all the dimensions of what is true and good. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
330:[Asked by an audience member at a public Q&A session] Considering that atheism cannot possibly have any sense of 'absolute morality', would it not then be an irrational leap of faith – which atheists themselves so harshly condemn – for an atheist to decide between right and wrong?
[Dawkins] Absolute morality...the absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include, what, stoning people for adultery? Death for apostasy? [...] These are all things which are religiously-based absolute moralities. I don't think I want an absolute morality; I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed, and based on – you could almost say intelligent design. [...]
If you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people – among 21st century people – we don't believe in slavery anymore; we believe in equality of women; we believe in being gentle; we believe in being kind to animals...these are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Koranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time; through a consensus of reasoning, sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the 'good bits' in religious scriptures, you have to cherry-pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Koran, and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality – and you say, look at that! That's religion!...and you leave out all the horrible bits. And you say, 'Oh, we don't believe that anymore, we've grown out of that.' Well, of course we've grown out of it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion. ~ Richard Dawkins,
331:Maintes histoires koraniques nous proposent, avec plus d'insistance encore que la Bible, le schéma suivant : les prophètes prêchent et les peuples rejettent le message ; Dieu les punit pour ce rejet ; et Il récompense les hommes qui croient.

L'objection des agnostique et autres sceptique est des plus faciles : les peuples sont psychologiquement excusables de ne pas accepter les Messages ; les païens arabes avaient humainement et traditionnellement le droit de croire à la réalité de leurs divinités et à l'efficacité de leurs idoles ; ils n'avaient pas de motif de croire le prophète à l'encontre de leurs traditions et de leurs moeurs. [...] l'excuse des moderne, - facile de la part de gens qui ne croient à rien et à qui la nature plénière de l'homme échappe, - cette excuse disons-nous, ne tient pas compte du facteur suivant : si les Mecquois et les Bédouins dans leur majorité tenaient obstinément à leur coutumes, ce fut, non a priori pour des raison sincères et logiques, mais fondamentalement parce que leur soi-disant religion, qui ne leur enseignait même pas les vérités eschatologiques indispensables, au contraire flattait leur attachement passioné à l'ici bas et leur amour désordonné et même exclusif des biens terrestres(*).

* "Quand Nos versets (le Koran) sont récitées devant lui (le païen arabe), il dit : conte des anciens !" (Sourate du Calame, 15) Cette information, que le Koran fournit à plusieurs reprises, prouve que la religion des Arabe païens fut une hérésie à l'égard de leur propres traditions, que les païens rejetaient, précisément, comme étant des "conte des anciens" (el-awwalîn = "des primordiaux"). De nombreux passage du Koran indiquent également que ces Arabes ne croyaient ni à l'immortalité de l'âme ni à la résurrection, alors que leurs ancêtre y croyaient. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
332:Although Saudi authorities promised after the September 11 attacks to revise textbooks that taught hatred against Jews and Christians, as late as 2006 Saudi texts still referred to Jews as “apes” and Christians as “swine.”27 And in April 2008 a British employment tribunal awarded 70,000 pounds ($115,000) to a teacher who had been fired from a Saudi-funded Islamic school for exposing that the school’s textbooks spoke of “the repugnant characteristics of the Jews” and asserted, “Those whom God has cursed and with whom he is angry, he has turned into monkeys and pigs. They worship Satan.”28 There is an endless parade of similar examples. In March 2004 Sheikh Ibrahim Mudayris, speaking on official Palestinian Authority television, railed against “the Jews today taking revenge for their grandfathers and ancestors, the sons of apes and pigs.”29 And during the swine flu scare in May 2009, Sheikh Ahmad ‘Ali ‘Othman, the superintendent of da’wa [Islamic proselytizing] affairs at the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments, declared that “all pigs are descended from the Jews whom Allah transformed into apes, swine and worshippers of Satan, and must therefore be slaughtered.” Othman based his argument on Koran 5:60, one of the Koran’s notorious “apes and pigs” passages.30 In his televised sermon denouncing the Jews regardless of their actions in Israel or elsewhere, Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub also invoked this theme: “As for you Jews—the curse of Allah upon you. The curse of Allah upon you, whose ancestors were apes and pigs. . . . Allah, we pray that you transform them again, and make the Muslims rejoice again in seeing them as apes and pigs. You pigs of the earth! You pigs of the earth! You kill the Muslims with that cold pig [blood] of yours.”31 Jews as apes and pigs: it’s in the Koran, holy book of the religion of peace. ~ Robert Spencer,
333:Koranic polygamy has also come to the United States. In November 2007, a Muslim woman sent a letter to Board of Directors of the Islamic Center of New England complaining that her husband “was able to marry illegally and secretly and without my knowledge three [A]merican [M]uslim women, and because of that my self and my children have suffered and still suffering tremendously.” She laid some of the responsibility at the feet of the leaders of the Islamic Center: “Because of the failure of the Islamic center as well the Imams to prevent such misconduct, I had no choice but to file for divorce.” She threatened to “expose this misconduct to the court and media if I have to, I also hope through this letter that you will make sure that this victimizations [sic] doesn’t happen to any other sisters.”38 This was no isolated case. According to researcher David Rusin, “estimates for the United States typically run into the tens of thousands of polygamous unions.”39 In May 2008 researchers estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Muslims were living in polygamous arrangements in the United States.40 And Muslim imams don’t seem concerned about U.S. laws forbidding the practice: Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations asserted that a “minority” of Muslims in America were polygamous, and that “Islamic scholars would differ on whether one could do so while living in the United States.”41 He didn’t say anything about the necessity of obeying U.S. laws in this regard. Toronto imam Aly Hindy explained that such laws would have no force for Muslims: “This is in our religion and nobody can force us to do anything against our religion. If the laws of the country conflict with Islamic law, if one goes against the other, then I am going to follow Islamic law, simple as that.”42 The Koran has further gifts for men as well. As we have seen, it stipulates that if a man cannot deal justly with multiples wives, then he should marry only one, or resort to “the captives that your right hands possess”—that is, slave girls (4:3). ~ Robert Spencer,
334:Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could see Laila again, wished to hear the clamour of her laugh, to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and left over halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up, would not see the beautiful young woman that she would one day become, would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding. She would never play with Aziza's children. She would have liked that very much, to be old and play with Aziza's children.

Near the goalpost, the man behind her asked her to stop. Mariam did. Through the crisscrossing grid of the burqa, she saw his shadow arms lift his shadow Kalashnikov. Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad,
Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.

Mariam's final thoughts were a few words from the Koran, which she muttered under her breath.
He has created the heavens and the earth with the truth; He makes the night cover the day and makes the day overtake the night, and He has made the sun and the moon subservient; each one runs on to an assigned term; now surely He is the Mighty, the Great Forgiver.

"Kneel," the Talib said

O my Lord! Forgive and have mercy, for you are the best of the merciful ones.

"Kneel here, hamshira and look down."

One last time, Mariam did as she was told. ~ Khaled Hosseini,
335:The differences between religions are reflected very clearly in the different forms of sacred art: compared with Gothic art, above all in its “flamboyant” style, Islamic art is contemplative rather than volitive: it is “intellectual” and not “dramatic”, and it opposes the cold beauty of geometrical design to the mystical heroism of cathedrals. Islam is the perspective of “omnipresence” (“God is everywhere”), which coincides with that of “simultaneity” (“Truth has always been”); it aims at avoiding any “particularization” or “condensation”, any “unique fact” in time and space, although as a religion it necessarily includes an aspect of “unique fact”, without which it would be ineffective or even absurd. In other words Islam aims at what is “everywhere center”, and this is why, symbolically speaking, it replaces the cross with the cube or the woven fabric: it “decentralizes” and “universalizes” to the greatest possible extent, in the realm of art as in that of doctrine; it is opposed to any individualist mode and hence to any “personalist” mysticism.

To express ourselves in geometrical terms, we could say that a point which seeks to be unique, and which thus becomes an absolute center, appears to Islam—in art as in theology—as a usurpation of the divine absoluteness and therefore as an “association” (shirk); there is only one single center, God, whence the prohibition against “centralizing” images, especially statues; even the Prophet, the human center of the tradition, has no right to a “Christic uniqueness” and is “decentralized” by the series of other Prophets; the same is true of Islam—or the Koran—which is similarly integrated in a universal “fabric” and a cosmic “rhythm”, having been preceded by other religions—or other “Books”—which it merely restores. The Kaaba, center of the Muslim world, becomes space as soon as one is inside the building: the ritual direction of prayer is then projected toward the four cardinal points.

If Christianity is like a central fire, Islam on the contrary resembles a blanket of snow, at once unifying and leveling and having its center everywhere. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
336:You killed a Christian? Fine. But if the victim had been a Muslim. . . The rules for restitution for wrongful death are also illuminating for Infidels. The Koran (2:178) establishes a law of retaliation (qisas) for murder: equal recompense must be given for the life of the victim, which can take the form of blood money (diyah): a payment to compensate for the loss suffered. In Islamic law (Sharia), the amount of compensation varies depending on the identity of the victim. ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), a Sharia manual that Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar University certifies as conforming to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community,” says that the payment for killing a woman is half that to be paid for killing a man. Likewise, the penalty for killing a Jew or Christian is one-third that paid for killing a male Muslim.1 The Iranian Sufi Sheikh Sultanhussein Tabandeh, one of the architects of the legal codes of the Islamic Republic of Iran, explains that punishments in Iran for other crimes differ as well, depending on whether the perpetrator is a Muslim. If a Muslim “commits adultery,” Tabandeh explains, “his punishment is 100 lashes, the shaving of his head, and one year of banishment.” (He is referring, of course, to a Muslim male; a Muslim female would in all likelihood be sentenced to be stoned to death.) “But if the man is not a Muslim,” Tabandeh continues, “and commits adultery with a Muslim woman his penalty is execution.”   Bible vs. Koran “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves.” —Koran 48:29 “So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.” —Matthew 7:12 Furthermore, if a Muslim kills a Muslim, he is to be executed, but if he kills a non-Muslim, he incurs a lesser penalty: “If a Muslim deliberately murders another Muslim he falls under the law of retaliation and must by law be put to death by the next of kin. But if a non-Muslim who dies at the hand of a Muslim has by lifelong habit been a non-Muslim, the penalty of death is not valid. Instead the Muslim murderer must pay a fine and be punished with the lash. ~ Robert Spencer,
337:The Clash
Civilisations, it’s often shouted,
clash. Particularly mine
and yours. At Thermopylae
the Persians crashed
into and squashed the Spartan
infantry. At Salamis
the Athenians sank the Persian
fleet. Romans were crushed
by Parthian horsed-archers
but they later skilfully
smashed Cleopatra and took
Egypt. Then Christianity
and the destruction
of Jerusalem’s temples. Yet
my religion untouched by your
god’s self-sacrifice
Zoroastrian, polytheist, Jewish
and Islam: your Romanised tribes
unified in the exigent cause
of the Cross. My side took Spain.
Yours defeated the Saracens
at Poitiers. Then the Crusades. Then
the Ottomans. Scimitars clashed
chainmail, cannons fired
on muskets. Then the tanks,
the air-raids and suicide bombers.
72
But do I forget to tell
you about the Muslim scholars
studying Aristotle? The English
poets translating the ghazals
and rubaiyats of Persians? Or my
watching sneakily the pirated
videos of Friday the 13th
and Mad Max? Or your eating
kebabs and saving to buy
an Afghan rug? Perhaps. But my
forgetting to include
the images of exchange
in the midst of the clatter
of the chronology of hostility
proves a little more than dubious
compared to the fallacy
of classification. How did I
become Eastern and you
my Other? Vice versa? How
am I grouped? According to what
mischievous logic? Am I
shrunken to an ethnic type? But I
don’t wear turban, ride camel
have never spoken Arabic or bothered
with the Koran. Your pride in
the Acropolis, Colosseum
and Westminster Abbey, frankly
nonexistent. To what cultures
73
do we belong? To repeat:
mine, not of sensuality
and hashish-induced lassitude, but
a love of Rimbaud
and Belgian beer. Yours, not of greed
and rationalist modernity
but baklavas and the Book
of Thoth. Why determine us
by the trite significance
of hair-colour and nose-shape? What
does it take to overcome the logic
of the Third Reich? But enough
questions. What use when The Answer
is being shouted and proliferates
above the murmur of my individual’s
doubt.
~ Ali Alizadeh,
338:Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly - at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarding bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Córdoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet’s teaching that ‘Cleanliness is part of faith’. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, ‘God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty’.

In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying Yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and no to quietism, Yes to life and No to ascetism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little layer of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword’, was the explanation of Islam’s amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history.

It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilisation waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay. ~ Muhammad Asad,
339:Consequently, when Muslims today say they revere Jesus and even that they recognize Christianity as a legitimate faith, they are being disingenuous. For the Christianity that the Koran recognizes is not Christianity as millions practice it around the world today. This is a key source of much of the enduring suspicion and mistrust between Muslims and Christians. The Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Muhsin Al-Qadhi expatiated on the Koranic view of mainstream Christianity in a recent sermon, in which he also elaborated a contemptuous view of Christian charity:            Today we will talk about one of the distorted religions, about a faith that deviates from the path of righteousness . . . about Christianity, this false faith, and about the people whom Allah described in his book as deviating from the path of righteousness. We will examine their faith, and we will review their history, full of hate, abomination, and wars against Islam and the Muslims. In this distorted and deformed religion, to which many of the inhabitants of the earth belong, we can see how the Christians deviate greatly from the path of righteousness by talking about the concept of the Trinity. As far as they are concerned, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three who are one.                   . . . They see Jesus, peace be upon him, as the son of Allah. . . . It is the Christians who believe Jesus was crucified. According to them, he was hanged on the cross with nails pounded through his hands, and he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” According to them, this was so that he would atone for the sins of mankind. . . . Regardless of all these deviations from the path of righteousness, it is possible to see many Muslims . . . who know about Christianity only what the Christians claim about love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans. . . . After all this, we still find people who promote the idea of bringing our religion and theirs closer, as if the differences were miniscule and could be eliminated by arranging all those [interfaith] conferences, whose goal is political.18 The idea that Christianity is a “distorted, deformed religion” created by people who were bent on rejecting the prophet Muhammad fuels a great deal of Muslim hatred for Christianity, Christians, and the West to this day. ~ Robert Spencer,
340:Nigeria is not alone, either in the prevalence of child marriage or in attempts to end the practice. In September 2008, Moroccan officials closed sixty Koranic schools operated by Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al-Maghraoui, because he issued a decree justifying marriage to girls as young as nine. “The sheikh,” according to Agence France-Presse, “said his decree was based on the fact that the Prophet Mohammed consummated his marriage to his favourite wife when she was that age.”23 It should come as no surprise, then, given the words of the Koran about divorcing prepubescent women and Muhammad’s example in marrying Aisha, that in some areas of the Islamic world the practice of child marriage enjoys the blessing of the law. Time magazine reported in 2001 that “in Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys,” and notes that “the law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move.”24 Likewise, the New York Times reported in 2008 that in Yemen, “despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old.”25 (The characterization of proponents of Islamic law as “conservatives” is notable—the Times doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that “conservatives” in the U.S. are not typically advocates of child marriage.) And so child marriage remains prevalent in many areas of the Islamic world. In 2007, photographer Stephanie Sinclair won the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition for a wedding photograph of an Afghani couple: the groom was said to be forty years old but looked older; the bride was eleven. UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler explained, “The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age. Most of theses child brides are forever denied a self-determined life.”26 According to UNICEF, about half the women in Afghanistan are married before they reach the age of eighteen.27 ~ Robert Spencer,
341:Women are inherently crooked? Certainly some Muslim clerics think so—or at least, they do not believe in legal equality for women. Bangladeshi Islamic cleric Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini read the same Koran that Tony Blair found so progressive and yet complained about attempts in his native country to establish equal property rights for women. The problem? That would be “directly against Islam and the holy Koran.”7 And where do Muslims get such ideas? They stem from the overall inferior status of women promulgated in the Koran, which specifically refutes the notion that women have as much basic human dignity as men. To the contrary, Allah says men are superior. When giving regulations for divorce, Allah stipulates that women “have rights similar to those (of men) over them in kindness.” Similar, but not identical, for “men are a degree above them” (2:228). Far from mandating equality, the Koran portrays women as essentially possessions of men. The Koran likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: “Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will” (2:223). And in a tradition Muhammad details the qualities of a good wife, including that “she obeys when instructed” and “the husband is pleased to look at her.”8 The Koran decrees women’s subordination to men in numerous other verses:            •    It declares that a woman’s legal testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (2:282).            •    It allows men to marry up to four wives, and also to have sex with slave girls: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3).            •    It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children’s (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” (4:11).            •    It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4). ~ Robert Spencer,
342:The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue. ~ Jack Weatherford,
343:What do you learn at school, then?"
"We learn about the Prophet and his three hundred authenticated miracles,and about Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Omar and Ali and Hind and Fatima and the saints, and sometimes the big battles of Saladin against the barbarians. And we recite the Holy Koran because we have to learn al-Fatihah by heart."
"What's that?"
"It's the beginning."
"What's it like?"
Karatavuk closed his eyes and recited:'Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim...' When he's finished he opened his eyes, and mopped his forehead. "It's difficult" he observed.
"I didn't understand any of it" complained Mehmetcik. " It sounds nice though. was it language?"
"Of course it was language, stupid. It's Arabic."
"What's that then?"
"It's what Arabs speak. And it's what God speaks, and that's why we have to learn to recite it. It's something about being merciful and the Day of Judgement and showing us the right path, and if anything is going wrong, or you're worried, or someone's sick, you just have to say al-Fatihah and everything will probably be all right."
"I didn't know that God spoke language." observed Mehmetcik. Father Kristoforos speaks to him in Greek, but we don't understand that either."
"What do you learn, then."
"We learn more than you," answered Mehmetcik self-importantly. "We learn about Jesus Son of Mary and his miracles and St Nicholas and St Dmitri and St Menas and the saints and Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Emperor Constantine and Alexander the Great and the Marble Emperor, and the great battles against barbarians, and the War of Independence, and we learn reading and writing and adding up and taking away and multiplication and division."
"Don't you learn al-Fatihah,then?"
"When things go wrong we say 'Kyrie elesion'. and we've got a proper prayer as well."
"What's that like?"
Mehmetcik screwed up his eyes in unconcious imitation of his friend, and recited: 'Pater imon, o en tois ouranis, agiasthito to onoma sou, eltheto i vasileia sou..'
When Mehmetcik has finished, Karatavuk asked, "What's that about, then? is that some kind of language?"
"It's Greek. It's what we speak to God.I don't know exactly what it means, it's something about our father who is in heaven and forgive us our daily bread, and led us not into temptation, but it doesn't matter if we don't understand it, because God does"
"Maybe," pondered Karatavuk, " Greek and Arabic are actually the same language, and that's how God understands us, like sometimes I'm Abdul and sometimes I'm Karatavuk, and sometimes you're Nico and sometimes you're Mehmetcik, but it's two names and there's only one me and there's only one you, so it might be all one language that's called Greek sometimes and Arabic sometimes. ~ Louis de Berni res,
344:Now that we have seen what is in the Koran, let’s consider what is not in the Muslim holy book. Islam, being one of the “world’s great religions,” as well as one of the “three great Abrahamic faiths,” enjoys the benefit of certain assumptions on the part of uninformed Americans and Europeans. Many people believe that since Islam is a religion, it must teach universal love and brotherhood—because that is what religions do, isn’t it? It must teach that one ought to be kind to the poor and downtrodden, generous, charitable, and peaceful. It must teach that we are all children of a loving God whose love for all human beings should be imitated by those whom he has created. Certainly Judaism and Christianity teach these things, and they are found in nearly equivalent forms in Eastern religions. But when it comes to Islam, the assumptions are wrong. Islam makes a distinction between believers and unbelievers that overrides any obligation to general benevolence. A moral code from the Koran As we have seen, the Koran recounts how Moses went up on the mountain and encountered Allah, who gave him tablets—but says nothing about what was written on them (7:145). Although the Ten Commandments do not appear in the Koran, the book is not bereft of specific moral guidelines: its seventeenth chapter enunciates a moral code (17:22–39). Accordingly, Muslims should:           1.    Worship Allah alone.           2.    Be kind to their parents.           3.    Provide for their relatives, the needy, and travelers, and not be wasteful.           4.    Not kill their children for fear of poverty.           5.    Not commit adultery.           6.    Not “take life—which Allah has made sacred—except for just cause.” Also, “whoso is slain wrongfully, We have given power unto his heir, but let him not commit excess in slaying”—that is, one should make restitution for wrongful death.           7.    Not seize the wealth of orphans.           8.    “Give full measure when ye measure, and weigh with a balance that is straight”—that is, conduct business honestly.           9.    “Pursue not that of which thou hast no knowledge.”           10.  Not “walk on the earth with insolence.” Noble ideals, to be sure, but when it comes to particulars, these are not quite equivalent to the Ten Commandments. The provision about not taking life “except for just cause” is, of course, in the same book as the thrice-repeated command to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5; 4:89; 2:191)—thus Infidels must understand that their infidelity, their non-acceptance of Islam, is “just cause” for Muslims to make war against them. In the same vein, one is to be kind to one’s parents—unless they are Infidels: “O ye who believe! Choose not your fathers nor your brethren for friends if they take pleasure in disbelief rather than faith. Whoso of you taketh them for friends, such are wrong-doers” (9:23). You ~ Robert Spencer,
345:It is futile to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and hope that it will go away. Yet, absurdly, this has been American policy since the September 11 attacks. U.S. officials seem to believe that if they act as if Islam is a religion of peace and the Koran a book of peace, Muslims will feel themselves compelled to behave accordingly. An extreme example of this bizarre assumption came in President Obama’s heralded speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, 2009.16 Obama was extremely anxious to appear sympathetic and accommodating to Muslim grievances—so much so that he not only quoted the Koran (and did so ham-handedly and out of context, as we have seen), but also signaled in several ways, whether by ignorance or by design, that he was Muslim himself. For example, Obama extended “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum”—that is, peace be upon you. According to Islamic law, however, this is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided”—in other words, “Peace be upon the Muslims.” Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naïve, non-Muslim, Islamophilic presidents offer the greeting to Muslims. Obama also said the words that Muslims traditionally utter after mentioning the names of prophets—“peace upon them”—after mentioning Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Does he, then, accept Muhammad as a prophet? No reporter has asked him, but that was decidedly the impression he gave, intentionally or not, to the Islamic world. Obama spoke of a “relationship between Islam and the West” marked by “centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars.” He then named three sources of present-day tensions between Muslim countries and the United States: the legacy of Western colonialism; “a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations;” and “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization,” which “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Significantly, Obama only listed ways in which the West has allegedly mistreated the Islamic world. He said not a word about the Koran’s doctrines of jihad and religious supremacism. Nothing at all about the Koranic imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that arises from Koranic teachings and which existed long before the ostensibly harmful spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world. Obama did refer to “violent extremists” who have “exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The idea that Islamic jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, born of ignorance of the Koran’s contents. The jihadists may indeed be a minority of Muslims, but there is no solid evidence that the vast majority of Muslims reject in principle what the jihadists do—and indeed, how could they, given the Koran’s explicit mandates for warfare against Infidels? ~ Robert Spencer,
346:Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 221-228 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:41:32 Those who are introduced to the Quran only through the media, generally have the impression that the Quran is a book of jihad, and jihad to them is an attempt to achieve one’s goal by means of violence. But this idea is based on a misunderstanding. Anyone who reads the Quran for himself will easily appreciate that its message has nothing to do with violence. The Quran is, from beginning to end, a book which promulgates peace and in no way countenances violence. It is true that jihad is one of the teachings of the Quran. But jihad, taken in its correct sense, is the name of peaceful struggle rather than of any kind of violent action. The Quranic concept of jihad is expressed in the following verse, ‘Do greater jihad (i.e strive more strenuously) with the help of this [Quran]’ (25:52). Obviously, the Quran is not a weapon, but a book which gives us an introduction to the divine ideology of peaceful struggle. The method of such a struggle, according to the Quran, is ‘to speak to them a word to reach their very soul’ (4:63). ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Note at location 228 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:41:45 jihad ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 232-235 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:43:12 It is true that there are certain verses in the Quran, which convey injunctions similar to the following, ‘Slay them wherever you find them’ (2:191). Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is totally untrue. Such verses relate, in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 239-244 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:44:16 This division of commands into different categories is a natural one and is found in all religious books. For instance, the Gita, the holy book of the Hindus, pertains to wisdom and moral values. Yet along with this is the exhortation of Krishna to Arjuna, encouraging him to fight (Bhagavad Gita, 3:30). This does not mean that believers in the Gita should wage wars all the time. Mahatma Gandhi, after all, derived his philosophy of non-violence from the same Gita. The exhortation to wage war in the Gita applies only to exceptional cases where circumstances leave no choice. But for general day-to-day existence it gives the same peaceful commands as derived from it by Mahatma Gandhi. ========== Quran: A Simple English Translation (Goodword ! Koran) (Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin;Goodword) - Your Highlight at location 244-245 | Added on Friday, 10 April 2015 19:44:39 Similarly, Jesus Christ said, ‘Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ (Matthew, 10:34). ========== ~ Anonymous,
347:The contemporary Christian Church, precisely, has understood them in this' 'wrong way, to the letter, 'like the Jews,' exoterically, not esoterically. Nevertheless to say 'like the Jews' is an error. One would have to say 'as the Jews want.' Because they also possess an exotericism, for their masses, represented by the Torah and Talmud, and an esotericism, in the Cabala (which means: 'Received Tradition'), in the Zohar ('brightness'), the Merkaba or Chariot being the most secret part of the Cabala which only initiated rabbis know and use as the powerful tool of their magic. We have already said that the Cabala reached them from elsewhere, like everything else, in the Middle Ages, even though they tell us otherwise, using and transforming it in concordance with their Archetype. The Hasidim, from Poland, represent an exclusively esoteric sect of Judaism.

Islam also has its esoteric magic, represented by Sufism and the sect of the Assassins, Hassanists, oflran. They interpret the Koran symbolically. And it was because of contact with this sect of the 'Old Man of the Mountain' that the Templars felt compelled to secede more and more from the direction of Rome, centering themselves in their Esoteric Kristianity and Mystery of the Gral. This was also why Rome destroyed them, like the esoteric Cathars (katharos = pure in Greek), the Bogomils, the Manichees and the gnostics.

In the Church of Rome, called Catholic, there only remains a soulless ritual of the Mass, as a liturgical shell that no longer reaches the Symbol, which no longer touches it, no longer puts it into action. The Nordic contribution has been lost, destroyed by prejudice and the ethnological persecution of Nordicism, Germanism and the complete surrender to Judaism.

Zen Buddhism preserves the esotericism of Buddha. In Japan Shinto and Zen are practiced by a racially superior warrior caste, the Samurai. The most esoteric side of Hinduism is found in Tantrism, especially in the Kaula or Kula Order.

So understood, esotericism is what goes beyond the exterior form and the masses, the physical, and puts an elite in contact with invisible superior forces. In my case, the condition that paralysed me in the midst of dreaming and left me without means to influence the phenomena. The visible is symbol of invisible forces (Archetypes, Gods). By means of an esoteric knowledge, of an initiation in this knowledge, a hierarchic minority can make contact with these invisible forces, being able to act on the Symbol, dynamizing and controlling the physical phenomena that incarnate them. In my case: to come to control the involuntary process which, without knowing how, was controlling me, to be able to guide it, to check or avoid it. Jung referred to this when he said 'if someone wisely faces the Archetype, in whatever place in the world, he acquires universal validity because the Archetype is one and indivisible'.

And the means to reach this spiritual world, 'on the other side of the mirror,' is Magic, Rite, Ritual, Ceremony. All religions have possessed them, even the Christian, as we have said. And the Rite is not something invented by humans but inspired by 'those from beyond,' Jung would say by the Collective Unconscious. ~ Miguel Serrano,
348:Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of
informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take
advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name.
In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the
Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.
But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid
legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it
resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling.
The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub,
an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message
explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his
tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people. ~ Neal Stephenson,
349:L’état humain — ou tout autre état « central » analogue — est comme entouré d’un cercle de feu : il n’y a là qu’un choix, ou bien échapper au « courant des formes » par le haut, en direction de Dieu, ou bien sortir de l’humanité par le bas, à travers le feu, lequel est comme la sanction de la trahison de ceux qui n’ont pas réalisé le sens divin de la condition humaine; si « la condition humaine est difficile à atteindre», comme l’estiment les Asiates « transmigrationnistes », elle est également difficile à quitter, pour la même raison de position centrale et de majesté théomorphe. Les hommes vont au feu parce qu’ils sont des dieux, et ils en sortent parce qu’ils ne sont que des créatures; Dieu seul pourrait aller éternellement en enfer s’il pouvait pécher. Ou encore : l’état humain est tout près du Soleil divin, s’il est possible de parler ici de « proximité »; le feu est la rançon éventuelle — à rebours — de cette situation privilégiée; on peut mesurer celle-ci à l’intensité et à l’inextin-guibilité du feu. Il faut conclure de la gravité de l’enfer à la grandeur de l’homme, et non pas, inversement, de l’apparente innocence de l’homme à l’injustice supposée de l’enfer.

[...] Bien des hommes de notre temps tiennent en somme le langage suivant : « Dieu existe ou il n ’existe pas ; s’il existe et s’il est ce qu’on dit, il reconnaîtra que nous sommes bons et que nous ne méritons aucun châtiment » ; c’est-a-dire qu’ils veulent bien croire à son existence s’il est conforme à ce qu’ils s’imaginent et s’il reconnaît la valeur qu’ils s’attribuent à eux-mêmes. C’est oublier, d’une part, que nous ne pouvons connaître les mesures avec lesquelles l’Absolu nous juge, et d’autre part, que le « feu » d’outre-tombe n’est rien d ’autre, en définitive, que notre propre intellect qui s’actualise à l'encontre de notre fausseté, ou en d’autres termes, qu’il est la vérité immanente qui éclate au grand jour. A la mort, l’homme est confronté avec l’espace inouï d’une réalité, non plus fragmentaire, mais totale, puis avec la norme de ce qu’il a prétendu être, puisque cette norme fait partie du Réel ; l’homme se condamne donc lui-même, ce sont — d’après le Koran — ses membres mêmes qui l’accusent ; ses violations, une fois le mensonge dépassé, le transforment en flammes ; la nature déséquilibrée et faussée, avec toute sa vaine assurance, est une tunique de Nessus. L’homme ne brûle pas que pour ses péchés; il brûle pour sa majesté d’image de Dieu. C’est le parti pris d’ériger la déchéance en norme et l’ignorance en gage d’impunité que le Koran stigmatise avec véhémence — on pourrait presque dire : par anticipation — en confrontant l’assurance de ses contradicteur avec les affres de la fin du monde (1).
En résumé, tout le problème de la culpabilité se réduit au rapport de la cause à l’effet. Que l’homme soit loin d'être bon, l’histoire ancienne et récente le prouve surabondamment, l’homme n’a pas l’innocence de l’animal, il a conscience de son imperfection, puisqu’il en possède la notion ; donc il est responsable. Ce qu’on appelle en terminologie morale la faute de l’homme et le châtiment de Dieu, n’est rien d ’autre, en soi, que le heurt du déséquilibre humain avec l’Equilibre immanent ; cette notion est capitale.[...]

(1) C'est la même un des thèmes les plus instamment répétés de ce livre sacré, qui marque parfois son caractère d'ultime message par une éloquence presque désespérée. ~ Frithjof Schuon,
350:My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I saw in the pages of the Koran was not a ‘crudely materialistic’ world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God-consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.

For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God’s creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet’s message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman’: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet’s saying, ‘God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well’, they realised that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God’s will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, ‘We create every living thing out of water’ - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator’s glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervour which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth’s rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planet’s around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries - for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained - without ever being accused of hearsay - that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that ‘If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise’; that ‘The scientist walks in the path of God’; that ‘The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars’; and that ‘The ink of the scholars is more precious that the blood of martyrs’.

Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history - that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time - science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilisation and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme. ~ Muhammad Asad,
351:Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in ~ Anonymous,
352:The Bush
I wonder if the spell, the mystery,
That like a haze about your silence clings,
Moulding your void until we seem to see
Tangible Presences of Deathless Things,
Patterned but little to our spirits' woof,
Yet from our love or hate not all aloof,
Can. be the matrix where are forming slowly
Troy tales of Old Australia, to refine
Eras to come of ordered melancholy
'Neath lily-pale Perfection's anodyne.
For Troy hath ever been, and Homer sang
Its younger story for a lodging's fee,
While o'er Scamander settlers' axes rang
Amid the Bush where Ilium was to be.
For Cretan Art, dim centuries before,
Minoan Dream-times some Briseis bore.
Sumerian Phoebus by a willowed water
Song-built a Troy for far Chaldea, where
The sons of God, beholding Leda's daughter,
Bartered eternal thrones for love of her.
Across each terraced aeon Time hath sowed
With green tautology of vanished years,
Gaping aghast or webbed with shining lode,
Achilles' anger's earthquake-rift appears.
The towers that Phoebus builds can never fall:
Desire that Helen lights can never pall:
Yea, wounded Love hath still but gods to fly to,
When lust of war inflames Diomedes:
Must some Australian Hector vainly die, too?
Captives in ships? (0 change that omen, Trees!)
Yea, Mother Bush, in your deep dreams abide
Cupids alert for man and maid unborn,
Apprentice Pucks amid your saplings hide,
And wistful gorges wait a Roland horn:
Wallet of Sigurd shall this swag replace,
And centaurs curvet where those brumbies race.
39
That drover's tale of love shall greaten duly
Through magic prisms of a myriad years,
Till bums Isolde to Tristram's fervour newly,
Or Launcelot to golden Guinevere's.
The miner cradling washdirt by the creek,
Or pulled through darkness dripping to the plat:
The navvy boring tunnels through the peak:
The farmer grubbing box-trees on the flat:
The hawker camping by the roadside spring:
The hodman on the giddy scaffolding:
Moths that around the fashion windows flutter:
The racecourse spider and the betting fly:
The children romping by the city gutter,
While baby crows to every passer-byFrom these rough blocks strewn o'er our ancient stream
Sculptors shall chisel brownie, fairy, faun,
Any myrmidons of some Homeric dream
From Melbourne mob and Sydney push be drawn.
The humdrum lives that now we tire of, then
Romance shall be, and 'we heroic men
Treading the vestibule of Golden Ages,
The Isthmus of the Land of Heart's Desire:
For lo! the Sybil's final volume's pages
Ope with our Advent, close when we expire.
Forgetful Change in one 'antiquity'
Boreal gleams shall drown, and southern glows;
Out of some singing woman's heart-break plea
Australia's dawn shall flush with Sappho's rose:
Strong Shirlow's hand shall trace Mantegna's line,
And Soma foam from Victor Daley's wine:
Scholars to be our prehistoric drama
From Esson's 'Woman Tamer' shall restore,
Or find in Gilbert's 'Lotus Stream and Lama'
An Austral Nile and Buddhas we adore.
The sunlit Satyrs follow Hugh McCrae,
Quinn spans the ocean with a Celtic ford,
And Williamson the Pan-pipe learns to play
From magpie-songs our schoolboy ears ignored:
40
A sweeter woe no keen of Erin gave
Than Kendall sings o'er Araluen's grave:
Tasmanian Wordsworth to his chapel riding
The Burning Bush and Ardath mead shall pass,
Or, from the sea-coast of Bohemia gliding
On craft of dream, behold a shepherd lass.
Jessie Mackay on Southern Highlands sees
The elves deploy in kem and gallowglass:
Our Gilbert Murray writes 'Euripides':
Pirani merges in Pythagoras:
Marsyas plunges into Lethe, flayed,
From Rhadamanthine Stephens' steady blade:
While Benvenuto Morton, drunk with singing,
Sees salamanders in a bush-fire's bed,
And Spencer sails from Alcheringa bringing
Intaglios, totems and Books of the Dead.
On Southern fiords shall Brady's Long Snakes hiss,
Heavy with brides he wins to Viking troth:
O'Reilly's Sydney shall be Sybaris,
While Melbourne's Muses sup their Spartan broth:
Murdoch, Zenobia's counsellor, in time,
Redacts from Burke his book on The Sublime:
By Way was Homer into Greek translated:
And Shakespeare's self is Sophocles so plain
They know the kerb whereon the Furies waited
Outside the Mermaid Inn in Brogan's Lane.
Vane shall divide with Vern Eureka's fame;
Tillett and Mann are Tyler then and Cade:
Dowie's entwines with Cagliostro's name,
And in Tarpeia's, lo, those fair forms fade
Who drug the poor, for social bread and wine,
And lift the furtive latch to Catiline:
There, where the Longmore-featured Gracchi hurry,
And Greek-browed Higinbotham walks, anon,
The 'wealthy lower orders' leap the Murray
Before the stockwhip cracks of Jardine Don.
Cleons in 'Windsor dress at Syracuse
Their thin plebeians' promised meal delay;
41
And Archibald begets Australia's Muse
Upon an undine red of Chowder Bay:
Paterson's swan draws Amphitrite's car,
And Sidon learns from Young what purples are:
Rose Scott refutes dogmatic Cyril gaily,
Hypatia turns the anti-suffrage flank,
And Herod's daughter sools her 'morning daily'
On John the Baptist by the Yarra Bank.
Yon regal bustard, fading hence ere long,
Shall seem the guide we followed to the Grail;
This lyre-bird on his dancing-mound of song
Our mystagogue of some Bacchantic vale,
Where feathered Pan guffaws 'Evoe!' above,
And Maenad curlews shriek their midnight love:
That trailing flight of distant swans is bearing
Sarpedon's soul to its eternal joy:
This ibis, from the very Nile, despairing,
Memnon our own would warn from fatal Troy.
Primeval gnomes distilled the golden bribes
That have impregnated your musing waste with men;
But shall the spell of your pathetic tribes
Curl round, in time, our fairer limbs again?
Through that long tunnel of your gloom, I see
Gardens of a metropolis to be!
Out of the depths the mountain ash is soaring
To embryon gods of what unsounded space?
Out of the heights what influence is pouring
Thin desolation on your haunted face?
Many there are who see no higher lot
For all your writhing centuries of toil
Than that the avaricious plough should blot
Their wilding burgeon, and the red brand spoil
Your cyclopean garniture, to sow
The cheap parterres of Europe on your woe.
They weave all sorceries but yours, and borrow
The tinkling spells of alien winds and seas
To drown the chord of purifying sorrow,
Bom ere the world, that pulses through your trees.
42
For, save when we, in not o'er-subtle mood,
Hear magpies warbling soft November in,
Or, hand in hand with Love, a dreaming wood
Or bouldered crest of crisper April win,
Your harps, unblurred by glozing strings, intone
The dirges that behind Creation moan'Where, riding reinless billows, new lives dash on
The souring beach of yesterday's decay,
Where Love's chord leaps from mandrake shrieks of passion,
And groping gods mould man from quivering clay.
(Is Nature deaf and blind and dumb? A cruse
Unfilled of wine? Clay for an unbreathed soul?
Alien to man, till his desires transfuse
Their flames through wind and water, leaf and bole,
And each crude fane elaborately fit
With oracles that echo all his wit?
The living wilds of Greece saw death returning
When Pan that men had made fell from his throne:
Till through her sap our very blood is churning
The Bush her lonely alien woe shall moan!
Or is she reticent but to be kind?
Whispers she not beneath her mask of clods'Who asks he shall receive, who seeks shall find,
Who knocks shall open every door of God's?'
Dumb Faith's, blind Hope's eternal consort she,
Gravid with all that is on earth to be;
Corn, wine and oil in hungry granite hiding,
All Beauty under sober wings of clay,
All life beneath her dead heart long abiding,
Yea, all the gods her sons and she obey!)
What sin's wan expiation strewed your Vast
With mounded pillage of what conquering fire?
Slumbering throes of what prodigious Past
Exhale these lingering ghosts of its desire?
Sunshine that bleached corruption out, that glare?
Desolate blue of Purgatory, there?
Flagellant winds through guilty Eden scouring?
Sahara drowning Prester John's domain?
Satumian dam her progeny devouring?
Hath dawn-time Hun these footprints left? Hath Cain?
43
Even the human wave, that shall at length
To man's endurance key your strident surge,
Sings in your poignant tones and sombre strength,
And makes, as yet, its own your primal dirge:
A gun-shot startles dawn back from the sky,
And mourning tea-trees echo Gordon's sigh:
Nardoo with Burke's faint sweat is dank for ever:
Spectral a tribe round poisoned rations shrieks:
Till doomday Leichhardt walks die Never Never:
Pensive, of Boake, the circling stock-whip speaks.
The wraiths unseen of roadside crimes unnamed
About that old-time shanty's ruins roam:
This squatter's fenceless acres hide ashamed
The hearth and battered zinc of Naboth's home:
Deserted 'yam-holes' pit your harmonies
With sloughing pock-marks of the gold-disease:
The sludgy creek 'mid hungry rushes rambles,
Where teal once dived and lowan raised her mound:
That tree, with crows, o'erlooks the township shambles:
These paddocks, ordure-smeared, the city bound.
0 yield not all to factory and farm!
For we, who drew a milk no stranger knows
From her scant paps, yearn for the acrid charm
That gossamers the Bush Where No Tree Grows.
And we have ritual moments when we crave
For worship in some messmate-pillared nave,
Where contrite 'bears' for woodland sins are kneeling,
And, 'mid the censers of the mountain musk,
Acolyte bell-birds the Angelus are pealing,
And boobooks moan lone vespers in the dusk,
And you have Children of the Dreaming Star,
Who care but little for the crowded ways
Where meagre spirits' vapid prizes are,
Or for the paddocked ease of dreamless days
And hedges clipped of every sunny growth
That plights the soul to God in daily troth:
Their wayward love prefers your desolation,
Or (where the human trail hath seared its charm)
44
The briar-rose on some abandoned 'station',
To all the tilled obedience of the farm.
Vineyards that purblind thrift shall never glean
The weedy waste and thistly gully hold:
No mint shall melt to currency unclean
Yon river-rounded hillock's Cape-broom gold:
The onion-grass upon that dark green slope
Returns our gaze from eyes of heliotrope:
But more we seek your underflowered expanses
Of scrub monotonous, or, where, O Bush,
The craters of your fiery noon's romances,
Like great firm bosoms, through the bare plains push.
As many. Mother, are your moods and forms
As all the sons who love you. Here, you mow
Careering grounds for every brood of storms
The wild sea-mares to desert stallions throw;
Anon, up through a sea of sand you glance
With green ephemeral exuberance,
And then quick seeds dive deep to years of slumber
From hot-hoofed drought's precipitate return:
There, league on league, the snow's cold fingers number
The shrinking nerves of supple-jack and fern.
To other eyes and ears you are a great
Pillared cathedral tremulously green,
An odorous and hospitable gate
To genial mystery, the happy screen
Of truants or of lovers rambling there
'Neath sun-shot boughs o'er miles of maidenhair.
Wee rubies dot the leaflets of the cherries,
The wooing wagtails hop from log to bough,
The bronzewing comes from Queensland for the berries,
The bell-bird by the creek is calling now.
And you can ride, an Eastern queen, they say,
By living creatures sumptuously borne,
With all barbaric equipages gay,
Beneath the torrid blue of Capricorn.
That native lotus is the very womb
That was the Hindoo goddess' earthly tomb.
45
The gang-gang screams o'er cactus wildernesses,
Palm trees are there, and swampy widths of rice,
Unguents and odours ooze from green recesses,
The jungles blaze with birds of Paradise.
But I, in city exile, hear you sing
Of saplinged hill and box-tree dotted plain,
Or silver-grass that prays the North Wind's wing
Convey its sigh to the loitering rain:
And Spring is half distraught with wintry gusts,
Summer the daily spoil of tropic lusts
The sun and she too fiercely shared together
Lingering thro' voluptuous Hindoo woods,
But o'er my windless, soft autumnal weather
The peace that passes understanding broods.
When, now, they say 'The Bush!', I see the top
Delicate amber leanings of the gum
Flutter, or flocks of screaming green leeks drop
Silent, where in the shining morning hum
The gleaning bees for honey-scented hours
'Mid labyrinthine leaves and white gum flowers.
Cantering midnight hoofs are nearing, nearing,
The straining bullocks flick the harpy flies,
The 'hatter' weeds his melancholy clearing,
The distant cow-bell tinkles o'er the rise.
You are the brooding comrade of our way,
Whispering rumour of a new Unknown,
Moulding us white ideals to obey,
Steeping whate'er we learn in lore your own,
And freshening with unpolluted light
The squalid city's day and pallid night,
Till we become ourselves distinct, Australian,
(Your native lightning charging blood and nerve),
Stripped to the soul of borrowed garments, alien
To that approaching Shape of God you serve.
Brooding, brooding, your whispers murmur plain
That searching for the clue to mystery
In grottos of decrepitude is vain,
That never shall the eye of prophet see
46
In crooked Trade's tumultuous streets the plan
Of templed cities adequate to man.
Brooding, brooding, you make us Brahmins waiting
(While uninspired pass on the hurtling years),
Faithful to dreams your spirit is creating,
Till Great Australia, born of you, appears.
For Great Australia is not yet: She waits
(Where o'er the Bush prophetic auras play)
The passing of these temporary States,
Flaunting their tawdry flags of far decay.
Her aureole above the alien mists
Beacons our filial eyes to mountain trysts:
'Mid homely trees with all ideals fruited,
She shelters us till Trade's Simoom goes by,
And slakes our thirst from cisterns unpolluted .
For ages cold in brooding deeps of sky.
We love our brothers, and to heal their woe
Pluck simples from the known old gardens still:
We love our kindred over seas, and grow
Their symbols tenderly o'er plain and hill;
We feel their blood rebounding in our hearts,
And speak as they would speak our daily parts:
But under all we know, we know that only
A virgin womb unsoiled by ancient fear
Can Saviours bear. So, we, your Brahmins, lonely,
Deaf to the barren tumult, wait your Year.
The Great Year's quivering dawn pencils the Night
To be the morning of our children's prime,
And weave from rays of yet ungathered Light
A richer noon than e'er apparelled Time.
If it must be, as Tuscan wisdom knew,
Babylon's seer, and wistful Egypt too,
That mellow afternoon shall pensive guide us
Down somnolent Decay's ravine to rest,
Then you, reborn, 0 Mother Bush, shall hide us
All the long night at your dream-laden breast.
Australian eyes that heed your lessons know
Another world than older pilgrims may:
47
Prometheus chained in Kosciusko's snow
Sees later gods than Zeus in turn decay:
Boundless plateaux expand the spirit's sight,
Resilient gales uphold her steeper flight:
And your close beating heart, 0 savage Mother,
Throbs secret words of joy and starker pain
Than reach the ears all old deceptions smother
In Lebanon, or e'en in Westermain.
We marvel not, who hear your undersong,
And catch a glimpse in rare exalted hours
Of something like a Being gleam along
Festooned arcades of flossie creeper flowers,
Or, toward the mirk, seem privileged to share
The silent rapture of the trees at prayerWe marvel not that seers in other ages,
With eyes unstrained by peering logic, saw
The desolation glow with Koran pages,
Or Sinai stones with Tables of the Law.
Homers are waiting in the gum trees now,
Far driven from the tarnished Cyclades:
More Druids to your green enchantment bow
Than 'neath unfaithful Mona's vanished trees:
A wind hath spirited from ageing France
To our fresh hills the carpet of Romance:
Heroes and maids of old with young blood tingling
In ampler gardens grow their roses new:
And races long apart their manas mingling
Prepare the cradle of an Advent due.
And those who dig the mounded eld for runes
To read Religion's tangled cipher, here,
Where all Illusion haunts the fainting noons
Of days hysteric with the tireless leer
Of ravenous enamoured suns, shall find
How May a flings her mantle o'er the mind,
Till sober sand to shining water changes,
Dodona whispers from the she-oak groves,
Afreets upon the tempest cross the ranges,
And Fafnir through the bunyip marshes roves.
48
Once, when Uranian Love appeared to glow
Through that abysmal Night that bounds our reignLove that a man may scarcely feel and know i
Quite the same world as other men againWith earthward-streaming frontier wraiths distraught,
Your oracles, 0 Mother Bush, I sought:
But found, dismayed, that eerie light revealing
Those wraiths already in your depths on sleuth,
Termagant Scorns along your hillsides stealing,
Remorse unbaring slow her barbed tooth.
My own thoughts first from far dispersion flew
Back to their sad creator, with the crops
Of woes in flower and all the harvests due
Till tiring Time the fearful seeding stops:
In pigmy forms of friends and foes, anon
In my own image, they came, stung, were gone:
And then I heard the voice of Him Who Questions,
Knowing the faltered answer ere it came,
Chilling the soul by hovering suggestions
Of wan damnation at a wince of blame.
And all your leaves in symbols were arranged,
Despairs long dead would leap from bough to bough,
A gum-tree buttress to a goblin changed
Grinning the warmth of some old broken vow:
Furtive desires for scarce-remembered maids
Glanced in a fearful bo-peep from your shades:
Till you became a purgatory cleansing
With rosy flakes in form of manikins,
To fiercer shame within my soul condensing,
The dim pollution of forgotten sins.
And She, the human symbol of that Love,
Would, as my cleansed eyes forgot their fear,
Comrade beside me. Comforter above,
With sunny smile ubiquitous appear:
Run on before me to the nooks we knew,
Walk hand in hand as glad young lovers do,
Gravely reprove me toying with temptation,
Show me the eyes and ears in roots and clods,
Bend with me o'er some blossom's revelation,
49
Or read from clouds the judgments of the gods.
My old ideals She would tune until
The grating note of self no longer rang:
She drove the birds of gloom and evil will
Out of the cote wherein my poems sang.
Time at Her wand annulled his calendar,
And Space his fallacy of Near and Far,
For through my Bush along with me She glided,
And crowded days of Beauty made more fair,
Though lagging weeks and ocean widths divided
Her mortal casing from Her Presence there.
Her wetted finger oped my shuttered eyes
To boyhood's scership of the Real again:
Upon the Bush descended from the skies
The rapt-up Eden of primordial men:
August Dominions through the vistas strode:
On white-maned clouds the smiling cherubs rode:
Maltreated Faith restored my jangled hearing
Till little seraphs sang from chip and clod:
And prayers were radiant children that, unfearing,
Floated as kisses to the lips of God.
It matters not that for some purpose wise
Myopic Reason censored long ago
The revelations of that Paradise,
When, back of all I feel or will or know,
Its silent angels beacon through the Dark
And point to harbours new my drifted ark.
Nor need we dread the fogs that round us thicken
Questing the Bush for Grails decreed for man,
When Powers our fathers saw unseen still quicken
Eyes that were ours before the world began.
'Twas then I saw the Vision of the Ways,
And 'mid their gloom and glory seemed to live,
Threaded the coverts of the Dark Road's maze,
Toiled up, with tears, the Track Retributive,
And, on the Path of Grace, beheld aglow
The love-lit Nave of all that wheeled below.
And She who flowered, my Mystic Rose, in Heaven,
50
And lit the Purging Mount, my Guiding Star,
Trudged o'er the marl, my mate, through Hell's wan levin,
Nor shrank, like lonely Dante's love, afar.
High towered a cloud over one leafy wild,
And to a bridged volcano grew. Above,
A great Greek group of father, mother, child,
Illumed a narrow round with radiant love.
Below, a smoke-pool thick with faces swirled,
The mutinous omen. of an Under-world,
Defeated, plundered, blackened, but preparing,
E'en though that calm, white dominance fell down,
To overflow the rim, and, sunward faring,
Shape myriad perfect groups from slave and clown.
Or thus I read the symbol, though 'twas sent
To hound compunction on my wincing pride,
That dreamed of raceless brotherhood, content
Though all old Charm dissolved and Glory died.
For often signs will yield their deeper signs,
Virginal Bush, in your untrodden shrines,
Than where the craven ages' human clamour
Distorts the boldest oracle with fear,
Or where dissolving wizards dew with glamour
Arden, Broceliande, or Windermere.
Once while my mother by a spreading tree
Our church's sober rubric bade me con,
My vagrant eyes among the boughs would see
Forbidden wings and •wizard aprons on
Father's 'wee people' from their Irish glades
Brighten and darken with your lights and shades.
And I would only read again those stern leaves
For whispered bribe that, when their tale I told,
We would go and look for fairies in the fern-leaves
And red-capped leprechauns with crocks of gold.
Anon, my boyhood saw how Sunbursts flamed
Or filmy hinds lured on a pale Oisin,
Where lithe indignant saplings crowding claimed
The digger's ravage for their plundered queen:
And heard within yon lichened 'mullock-heap'
51
Lord Edward's waiting horsemen moan in sleep:
Or flew the fragrant path of swans consoling
Lir's exiled daughter wandering with me,
And traced below the Wattle River rolling
Exuberant and golden toward the sea.
Here, would the •wavering wings of heat uplift
Some promontory till the tree-crowned pile
Above a phantom sea would swooning drift,
St. Brendan's vision of the Winged Isle:
Anon, the isle divides again, again,
Till archipelagos poise o'er the main.
There, lazy fingers of a breeze have scattered
The distant blur of factory chimney smoke
hi poignant groups of all the young lives shattered
To feed the ravin of a piston-stroke!
Or when I read the tale of what you were
Beyond these hungry eyes' home-keeping view,
I peopled petrel rocks with Sirens fair,
In Maid Mirage the Fairy Morgan knew,
Steered Quetzalcoatl's skiff to coral coasts,
On Chambers' Pillar throned the Olympian hosts,
Heard in white sulphur-crested parrots' screeches
Remorseful Peris vent their hopeless rage,
Atlantis' borders traced on sunken beaches,
m Alcheringa found the Golden Age.
Sibyl and Siren, with alternate breaths
You read our foetal nation's boon and bane,
And lure to trysts of orgiastic Deaths
Adventurous love that listens to your strain:
Pelsarts and Vanderdeckens of the world
Circle your charms or at your feet are hurled:
And, Southern witch, whose glamour drew De Quiros
O'er half the earth for one unyielded kiss,
Were yours the arms that healed the scalded Eros
When Psyche's curious lamp darkened their bliss?
Ye, who would challenge when we claim to see
The bush alive with Northern wealth of wings,
Forget that at a common mother's knee
52
We learned, with you, the lore of Silent Things.
There is no New that is not older far
Than swirling cradle of the first-born star:
Our youngest hearts prolong the far pulsation
And churn the brine of the primordial sea:
The foetus writes the précis of Creation:
Australia is the whole world's legatee.
Imagination built her throne in us
Before your present bodies saw the sky:
Your myths were counters of our abacus,
And in your brain developed long our eye:
We from the misty folk have also sprung
Who saw the gnomes and heard the Ever Young:
Do Southern skies the fancy disinherit
Of moly flower and Deva-laden breeze?
Do nerves attuned by old defect and merit
Their timbre lose by crossing tropic seas?
All mysteries ye claim as yours alone
Have wafted secrets over oceans here:
Our living soil Antiquity hath sown
With just the corn and tares ye love and fear:
Romance and song enthral us just as you,
Nor change of zenith changes spirit too:
Our necks as yours are sore with feudal halters:
To the Pole ye know our compasses are set;
And shivering years that huddled round your altars
Beneath our stars auspicious tremble yet.
Who fenced the nymphs in European vales?
Or Pan tabooed from all but Oxford dreams?
Warned Shakespeare off from foreign Plutarch's tales?
Or tethered Virgil to Italian themes?
And when the body sailed from your control
Think ye we left behind in bond the soul?
Whate'er was yours is ours in equal measure,
The Temple was not built for you alone,
Altho' 'tis ours to grace the common treasure
With Lares and Penates of our own!
Ye stole yourselves from gardens fragrant long
53
The sprouting seed-pods of your choicest blooms,
And wove the splendid garments of your song
From Viking foam on grave Hebraic looms:
'Twas Roman nerve and rich Hellenic lymph
Changed your pale pixie to a nubile nymph:
Yea, breathed at dawn around Atlantis' islands,
Wind-home o'er some Hesperidean road,
The morning clouds on dim Accadian highlands
Spring-fed the Nile that over Hellas flowed!
As large-eyed Greek amid Sicilian dews
Saw Dis, as ne'er before, pursue the Maid,
Or, safe 'neath screening billows, Arethuse
Alpheus' rugged sleuth unsoiled evade:
We shall complete the tale ye left half-told,
Under the ocean lead your fountains old,
To slake our sceptic thirst with haunted water,
And tame our torrents with a wedding kiss,
Shall loose, mayhap, the spell on Ceres' daughter,
And show, unclouded, God in very Dis.
(Yet, there are moods and mornings when I hear,
Above the music of the Bush's breath,
The rush of alien breezes far and near
Drowning her oracles to very death:
Exotic battle-cries the silence mar,
Seductive perfumes drive the gum-scent far;
And organ-tones august a moment show me
Miltonic billows and Homeric gales
Until I feel the older worlds below me,
And all her wonder trembles, thins and fails.)
Yea, you are all that we may be, and yet
In us is all you are to be for aye!
The Giver of the gifts that we shall get?
An empty womb that waits the wedding day?
Thus drifting sense by age-long habit buoyed
Plays round the thought that knows all nature void!
And so, my song alternate would believe her
Idiot Bush and Daughter of the Sun,
A worthless gift apart from the receiver,
An empty womb, but in a Deathless One.
54
To shapes we would of Freedom, Truth and Joy
Shall we your willing plasm mould for man:
Afresh rebuild the world, and thus destroy
What only Ragnarok in Europe can:
There is no Light but in your dark blendes sleeps,
Drops from your stars or through your ether leaps:
Yea, you are Nature, Chaos since Creation,
Waiting what human Word to chord in song?
Matrix inert of what auspicious nation?
For what far bees your nectar hiving long?
Exhausted manas of the conquering North
Shall rise refreshed to vivid life again
At your approach, and in your lap pour forth
Grateful the gleanings of his mighty reign:
As, when a tropic heat-king southward crawls,
Blistering the ranges, till he hears the calls
Of some cold high-browed bride, her streaming tresses,
Sprinkled with rose-buds, make his wild eyes thrill
To such desire for her superb caresses
He yields his fiery treasures to her will.
'Where is Australia, singer, do you know?
These sordid farms and joyless factories,
Mephitic mines and lanes of pallid woe?
Those ugly towns and cities such as these
With incense sick to all unworthy power,
And all old sin in full malignant flower?
No! to her bourn her children still are faring:
She is a Temple that we are to build:
For her the ages have been long preparing:
She is a prophecy to be fulfilled!
All that we love in olden lands and lore
Was signal of her coming long ago!
Bacon foresaw her, Campanella, More
And Plato's eyes were with her star aglow!
Who toiled for Truth, whate'er their countries were,
Who fought for Liberty, they yearned for her!
No corsair's gathering ground, or tryst for schemers,
55
No chapman Carthage to a huckster Tyre,
She is the Eldorado of old dreamers,
The Sleeping Beauty of the world's desire!
She is the scroll on which we are to write
Mythologies our own and epics new:
She is the port of our propitious flight
From Ur idolatrous and Pharaoh's crew.
She is our own, unstained, if worthy we,
By dream, or god, or star we would not see:
Her crystal beams all but the eagle dazzle;
Her wind-wide ways none but the strong-winged sail:
She is Eutopia, she is Hy-Brasil,
The watchers on the tower of morning hail I
Yet she shall be as we, the Potter, mould:
Altar or tomb, as we aspire, despair:
What wine we bring shall she, the chalice, hold:
What word we write shall she, the script, declare:
Bandage our eyes, she shall be Memphis, Spain:
Barter our souls, she shall be Tyre again:
And if we pour on her the red oblation
All o'er the world shall Asshur's buzzards throng:
Love-lit, her Chaos shall become Creation:
And dewed with dream, her silence flower in song.
~ Bernard O'Dowd,
353:MANTIS EIM ESQLWN AGWNWN
--Oedip. Colon.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY PRINCE ALEXANDER MAVROCORDATO LATE SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO THE HOSPODAR OF WALLACHIA THE DRAMA OF HELLAS IS INSCRIBED AS AN IMPERFECT TOKEN OF THE ADMIRATION, SYMPATHY, AND FRIENDSHIP OF THE AUTHOR.

PROLOGUE TO HELLAS
Herald of Eternity.
It is the day when all the sons of God
Wait in the roofless senate-house, whose floor
Is Chaos, and the immovable abyss
Frozen by His steadfast word to hyaline...
The shadow of God, and delegate
Of that before whose breath the universe
Is as a print of dew.

           Hierarchs and kings
Who from your thrones pinnacled on the past
Sway the reluctant present, ye who sit
Pavilioned on the radiance or the gloom
Of mortal thought, which like an exhalation
Steaming from earth, conceals the...of heaven
Which gave it birth,...assemble here
Before your Father's throne; the swift decree
Yet hovers, and the fiery incarnation
Is yet withheld, clothd in which it shall
...annul
The fairest of those wandering isles that gem
The sapphire space of interstellar air,
That green and azure sphere, that earth enwrapped
Less in the beauty of its tender light
Than in an atmosphere of living spirit
Which interpenetrating all the...
...it rolls from realm to realm
And age to age, and in its ebb and flow
Impels the generations
To their appointed place,
Whilst the high Arbiter
Beholds the strife, and at the appointed time
Sends His decrees veiled in eternal...

Within the circuit of this pendent orb
There lies an antique region, on which fell
The dews of thought in the world's golden dawn
Earliest and most benign, and from it sprung
Temples and cities and immortal forms
And harmonies of wisdom and of song,
And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair.
And when the sun of its dominion failed,
And when the winter of its glory came,
The winds that stripped it bare blew on and swept
That dew into the utmost wildernesses
In wandering clouds of sunny rain that thawed
The unmaternal bosom of the North.
Haste, sons of God,...for ye beheld,
Reluctant, or consenting, or astonished,
The stern decrees go forth, which heaped on Greece
Ruin and degradation and despair.
A fourth now waits: assemble, sons of God,
To speed or to prevent or to suspend,
If, as ye dream, such power be not withheld,
The unaccomplished destiny...

Chorus.

The curtain of the Universe
Is rent and shattered,
The splendour-wingd worlds disperse
Like wild doves scattered.

  Space is roofless and bare,
And in the midst a cloudy shrine,
Dark amid thrones of light.
In the blue glow of hyaline
Golden worlds revolve and shine.
In...flight
From every point of the Infinite,
Like a thousand dawns on a single night
The splendours rise and spread;
And through thunder and darkness dread
Light and music are radiated,
And in their pavilioned chariots led
By living wings high overhead
The giant Powers move,
Gloomy or bright as the thrones they fill...
A chaos of light and motion
Upon that glassy ocean...
The senate of the Gods is met,
Each in his rank and station set;
  There is silence in the spaces
Lo! Satan, Christ, and Mahomet
Start from their places!

Christ.

             Almighty Father!
Low-kneeling at the feet of Destiny. . .
There are two fountains in which spirits weep
When mortals err, Discord and Slavery named,
And with their bitter dew two Destinies
Filled each their irrevocable urns; the third,
Fiercest and mightiest, mingled both, and added
Chaos and Death, and slow Oblivion's lymph,
And hate and terror, and the poisoned rain. . .
The Aurora of the nations. By this brow
Whose pores wept tears of blood, by these wide wounds,
By this imperial crown of agony,
By infamy and solitude and death,
For this I underwent, and by the pain
Of pity for those who would...for me
The unremembered joy of a revenge,
For this I feltby Plato's sacred light,
Of which my spirit was a burning morrow
By Greece and all she cannot cease to be,
Her quenchless words, sparks of immortal truth,
Stars of all nighther harmonies and forms,
Echoes and shadows of what Love adores
In thee, I do compel thee, send forth Fate,
Thy irrevocable child: let her descend,
A seraph-wingd Victory [arrayed]
In tempest of the omnipotence of God
Which sweeps through all things.

From hollow leagues, from Tyranny which arms
Adverse miscreeds and emulous anarchies
To stamp, as on a wingd serpent's seed,
Upon the name of Freedom; from the storm
Of faction, which like earthquake shakes and sickens
The solid heart of enterprise; from all
By which the holiest dreams of highest spirits
Are stars beneath the dawn...

                 She shall arise
Victorious as the world arose from Chaos!
And as the Heavens and the Earth arrayed
Their presence in the beauty and the light
Of Thy first smile, O Father,as they gather
The spirit of Thy love which paves for them
Their path o'er the abyss, till every sphere
Shall be one living Spirit,-- so shall Greece--

Satan.
Be as all things beneath the empyrean,
Mine! Art thou eyeless like old Destiny,
Thou mockery-king, crowned with a wreath of thorns?
Whose sceptre is a reed, the broken reed
Which pierces thee! whose throne a chair of scorn;
For seest thou not beneath this crystal floor
The innumerable worlds of golden light
Which are my empire, and the least of them
...which thou wouldst redeem from me?
Know'st thou not them my portion?
Or wouldst rekindle the...strife
Which our great Father then did arbitrate
Which he assigned to his competing sons
Each his apportioned realm?

               Thou Destiny,
Thou who art mailed in the omnipotence
Of Him who sends thee forth, whate'er thy task,
Speed, spare not to accomplish, and be mine
Thy trophies, whether Greece again become
The fountain in the desert whence the earth
Shall drink of freedom, which shall give it strength
To suffer, or a gulf of hollow death
To swallow all delight, all life, all hope.
Go, thou Vicegerent of my will, no less
Than of the Father's; but lest thou shouldst faint,
The wingd hounds, Famine and Pestilence,
Shall wait on thee, the hundred-forkd snake
Insatiate Superstition still shall...
The earth behind thy steps, and War shall hover
Above, and Fraud shall gape below, and Change
Shall flit before thee on her dragon wings,
Convulsing and consuming, and I add
Three vials of the tears which daemons weep
When virtuous spirits through the gate of Death
Pass triumphing over the thorns of life,
Sceptres and crowns, mitres and swords and snares,
Trampling in scorn, like Him and Socrates.
The first is Anarchy; when Power and Pleasure,
Glory and science and security,
On Freedom hang like fruit on the green tree,
Then pour it forth, and men shall gather ashes.
The second Tyranny--

Christ.
           Obdurate spirit!
Thou seest but the Past in the To-come.
Pride is thy error and thy punishment.
Boast not thine empire, dream not that thy worlds
Are more than furnace-sparks or rainbow-drops
Before the Power that wields and kindles them.
True greatness asks not space, true excellence
Lives in the Spirit of all things that live,
Which lends it to the worlds thou callest thine...

Mahomet.
Haste thou and fill the waning crescent
With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow
Of Christian night rolled back upon the West,
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow...
                       Wake, thou Word
Of God, and from the throne of Destiny
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May Triumph...........
Be thou a curse on them whose creed
Divides and multiplies the most high God.

HELLAS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Mahmud.
Hassan.
Daood.
Ahasuerus, a Jew.
Chorus of Greek Captive Women.
The Phantom of Mahomet II.
Messengers, Slaves, and Attendants.

Scene, Constantinople. Time, Sunset.

Scene--A Terrace on the Seraglio. Mahmud sleeping, an Indian Slave sitting beside his Couch.
Chorus of Greek Captive Women.
We strew these opiate flowers
  On thy restless pillow,
They were stripped from Orient bowers,
  By the Indian billow.
   Be thy sleep
   Calm and deep,
Like theirs who fellnot ours who weep!
Indian.
Away, unlovely dreams!
  Away, false shapes of sleep!
Be his, as Heaven seems,
  Clear, and bright, and deep!
Soft as love, and calm as death,
Sweet as a summer night without a breath.
Chorus.
Sleep, sleep! our song is laden
  With the soul of slumber;
It was sung by a Samian maiden,
  Whose lover was of the number
   Who now keep
   That calm sleep
Whence none may wake, where none shall weep.
Indian.
I touch thy temples pale!
  I breathe my soul on thee!
And could my prayers avail,
  All my joy should be
Dead, and I would live to weep,
So thou mightst win one hour of quiet sleep.
Chorus.
  Breathe low, low
The spell of the mighty mistress now!
When Conscience lulls her sated snake,
And Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake.
  Breathe lowlow
The words which, like secret fire, shall flow
Through the veins of the frozen earthlow, low!
Semichorus I.
Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not;
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed,but it returneth!
Semichorus II.
Yet were life a charnel where
Hope lay coffined with Despair;
Yet were truth a sacred lie,
Love were lust
Semichorus I.
         If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet's robe to wear,
Love its power to give and bear.
Chorus.
In the great morning of the world,
The Spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled,
Like vultures frighted from Imaus,
Before an earthquake's tread.
So from Time's tempestuous dawn
Freedom's splendour burst and shone:
Thermopylae and Marathon
Caught, like mountains beacon-lighted,
The springing Fire.The wingd glory
On Philippi half-alighted,
Like an eagle on a promontory.
Its unwearied wings could fan
The quenchless ashes of Milan.[1]
From age to age, from man to man,
It lived; and lit from land to land
Florence, Albion, Switzerland.
Then night fell; and, as from night,
Reassuming fiery flight,
From the West swift Freedom came,
Against the course of Heaven and doom,
A second sun arrayed in flame,
To burn, to kindle, to illume.
From far Atlantis its young beams
Chased the shadows and the dreams.
France, with all her sanguine steams,
Hid, but quenched it not; again
Through clouds its shafts of glory rain
From utmost Germany to Spain.
As an eagle fed with morning
Scorns the embattled tempest's warning,
When she seeks her aerie hanging
In the mountain-cedar's hair,
And her brood expect the clanging
Of her wings through the wild air,
Sick with famine:Freedom, so
To what of Greece remaineth now
Returns; her hoary ruins glow
Like Orient mountains lost in day;
Beneath the safety of her wings
Her renovated nurslings prey,
And in the naked lightenings
Of truth they purge their dazzled eyes.
Let Freedom leavewhere'er she flies,
A Desert, or a Paradise:
Let the beautiful and the brave
Share her glory, or a grave.
Semichorus I.
With the gifts of gladness
Greece did thy cradle strew;
Semichorus II.
With the tears of sadness
Greece did thy shroud bedew!
Semichorus I.
With an orphan's affection
She followed thy bier through Time;
Semichorus II.
And at thy resurrection
Reappeareth, like thou, sublime!
Semichorus I.
If Heaven should resume thee,
To Heaven shall her spirit ascend;
Semichorus II.
If Hell should entomb thee,
To Hell shall her high hearts bend.
Semichorus I.
If Annihilation
Semichorus II.
Dust let her glories be!
And a name and a nation
Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!
Indian.
His brow grows darkerbreathe notmove not!
He startshe shuddersye that love not,
With your panting loud and fast,
Have awakened him at last.
Mahmud
(starting from his sleep).
Man the Seraglio-guard! make fast the gate!
What! from a cannonade of three short hours?
'Tis false! that breach towards the Bosphorus
Cannot be practicable yetwho stirs?
Stand to the match; that when the foe prevails
One spark may mix in reconciling ruin
The conqueror and the conquered! Heave the tower
Into the gapwrench off the roof!
(Enter Hassan.)
                  Ha! what!
The truth of day lightens upon my dream
And I am Mahmud still.
Hassan.
            Your Sublime Highness
Is strangely moved.
Mahmud.
          The times do cast strange shadows
On those who watch and who must rule their course,
Lest they, being first in peril as in glory,
Be whelmed in the fierce ebb:and these are of them.
Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me
As thus from sleep into the troubled day;
It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea,
Leaving no figure upon memory's glass.
Would thatno matter. Thou didst say thou knewest
A Jew, whose spirit is a chronicle
Of strange and secret and forgotten things.
I bade thee summon him:'tis said his tribe
Dream, and are wise interpreters of dreams.
Hassan.
The Jew of whom I spake is old,so old
He seems to have outlived a world's decay;
The hoary mountains and the wrinkled ocean
Seem younger still than he;his hair and beard
Are whiter than the tempest-sifted snow;
His cold pale limbs and pulseless arteries
Are like the fibres of a cloud instinct
With light, and to the soul that quickens them
Are as the atoms of the mountain-drift
To the winter wind:but from his eye looks forth
A life of unconsumd thought which pierces
The Present, and the Past, and the To-come.
Some say that this is he whom the great prophet
Jesus, the son of Joseph, for his mockery,
Mocked with the curse of immortality.
Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-adamite and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.
The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence
And conquering penance of the mutinous flesh,
Deep contemplation, and unwearied study,
In years outstretched beyond the date of man,
May have attained to sovereignty and science
Over those strong and secret things and thoughts
Which others fear and know not.
Mahmud.
                 I would talk
With this old Jew.
Hassan.
          Thy will is even now
Made known to him, where he dwells in a sea-cavern
'Mid the Demonesi, less accessible
Than thou or God! He who would question him
Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream
Of Ocean sleeps around those foamless isles,
When the young moon is westering as now,
And evening airs wander upon the wave;
And when the pines of that bee-pasturing isle,
Green Erebinthus, quench the fiery shadow
Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water,
Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud
'Ahasuerus!' and the caverns round
Will answer 'Ahasuerus!' If his prayer
Be granted, a faint meteor will arise
Lighting him over Marmora, and a wind
Will rush out of the sighing pine-forest,
And with the wind a storm of harmony
Unutterably sweet, and pilot him
Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus:
Thence at the hour and place and circumstance
Fit for the matter of their conference
The Jew appears. Few dare, and few who dare
Win the desired communionbut that shout
Bodes
[A shout within.
Mahmud.
    Evil, doubtless; like all human sounds.
Let me converse with spirits.
Hassan.
                That shout again.
                Mahmud.
This Jew whom thou hast summoned
Hassan.
                  Will be here
                  Mahmud.
When the omnipotent hour to which are yoked
He, I, and all things shall compelenough!
Silence those mutineersthat drunken crew,
That crowd about the pilot in the storm.
Ay! strike the foremost shorter by a head!
They weary me, and I have need of rest.
Kings are like starsthey rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.
[Exeunt severally.
Chorus[2].
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
  But they are still immortal
  Who, through birth's orient portal
And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
  Clothe their unceasing flight
  In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go;
  New shapes they still may weave,
  New gods, new laws receive,
Bright or dim are they as the robes they last
  On Death's bare ribs had cast.
   A power from the unknown God,
  A Promethean conqueror, came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
  The thorns of death and shame.
  A mortal shape to him
  Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light;
  Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,
  Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed, until their Lord had taken flight;
  The moon of Mahomet
  Arose, and it shall set:
While blazoned as on Heaven's immortal noon
The cross leads generations on.
  Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep
  From one whose dreams are Paradise
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
  And Day peers forth with her blank eyes;
  So fleet, so faint, so fair,
  The Powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem:
  Apollo, Pan, and Love,
  And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them;
  Our hills and seas and streams,
  Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their watrs turned to blood, their dew to tears,
  Wailed for the golden years.
  Enter Mahmud, Hassan, Daood, and others.
Mahmud.
More gold? our ancestors bought gold with victory,
And shall I sell it for defeat?
Daood.
                 The Janizars
Clamour for pay.
Mahmud.
         Go! bid them pay themselves
With Christian blood! Are there no Grecian virgins
Whose shrieks and spasms and tears they may enjoy?
No infidel children to impale on spears?
No hoary priests after that Patriarch[3]
Who bent the curse against his country's heart,
Which clove his own at last? Go! bid them kill,
Blood is the seed of gold.
Daood.
              It has been sown,
And yet the harvest to the sicklemen
Is as a grain to each.
Mahmud.
            Then, take this signet,
Unlock the seventh chamber in which lie
The treasures of victorious Solyman,
An empire's spoil stored for a day of ruin.
O spirit of my sires! is it not come?
The prey-birds and the wolves are gorged and sleep;
But these, who spread their feast on the red earth,
Hunger for gold, which fills not.See them fed;
Then, lead them to the rivers of fresh death. [Exit Daood.

O miserable dawn, after a night
More glorious than the day which it usurped!
O faith in God! O power on earth! O word
Of the great prophet, whose o'ershadowing wings
Darkened the thrones and idols of the West,
Now bright!For thy sake cursd be the hour,
Even as a father by an evil child,
When the orient moon of Islam rolled in triumph
From Caucasus to White Ceraunia!
Ruin above, and anarchy below;
Terror without, and treachery within;
The Chalice of destruction full, and all
Thirsting to drink; and who among us dares
To dash it from his lips? and where is Hope?
Hassan.
The lamp of our dominion still rides high;
One God is GodMahomet is His prophet.
Four hundred thousand Moslems, from the limits
Of utmost Asia, irresistibly
Throng, like full clouds at the Sirocco's cry;
But not like them to weep their strength in tears:
They bear destroying lightning, and their step
Wakes earthquake to consume and overwhelm,
And reign in ruin. Phrygian Olympus,
Tmolus, and Latmos, and Mycale, roughen
With horrent arms; and lofty ships even now,
Like vapours anchored to a mountain's edge,
Freighted with fire and whirlwind, wait at Scala
The convoy of the ever-veering wind.
Samos is drunk with blood;the Greek has paid
Brief victory with swift loss and long despair.
The false Moldavian serfs fled fast and far,
When the fierce shout of 'Allah-illa-Allah!'
Rose like the war-cry of the northern wind
Which kills the sluggish clouds, and leaves a flock
Of wild swans struggling with the naked storm.
So were the lost Greeks on the Danube's day!
If night is mute, yet the returning sun
Kindles the voices of the morning birds;
Nor at thy bidding less exultingly
Than birds rejoicing in the golden day,
The Anarchies of Africa unleash
Their tempest-wingd cities of the sea,
To speak in thunder to the rebel world.
Like sulphurous clouds, half-shattered by the storm,
They sweep the pale Aegean, while the Queen
Of Ocean, bound upon her island-throne,
Far in the West, sits mourning that her sons
Who frown on Freedom spare a smile for thee:
Russia still hovers, as an eagle might
Within a cloud, near which a kite and crane
Hang tangled in inextricable fight,
To stoop upon the victor;for she fears
The name of Freedom, even as she hates thine.
But recreant Austria loves thee as the Grave
Loves Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war
Fleshed with the chase, come up from Italy,
And howl upon their limits; for they see
The panther, Freedom, fled to her old cover,
Amid seas and mountains, and a mightier brood
Crouch round. What Anarch wears a crown or mitre,
Or bears the sword, or grasps the key of gold,
Whose friends are not thy friends, whose foes thy foes?
Our arsenals and our armouries are full;
Our forts defy assault; ten thousand cannon
Lie ranged upon the beach, and hour by hour
Their earth-convulsing wheels affright the city;
The galloping of fiery steeds makes pale
The Christian merchant; and the yellow Jew
Hides his hoard deeper in the faithless earth.
Like clouds, and like the shadows of the clouds,
Over the hills of Anatolia,
Swift in wide troops the Tartar chivalry
Sweep;the far flashing of their starry lances
Reverberates the dying light of day.
We have one God, one King, one Hope, one Law;
But many-headed Insurrection stands
Divided in itself, and soon must fall.
Mahmud.
Proud words, when deeds come short, are seasonable:
Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon, emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud
Which leads the rear of the departing day;
Wan emblem of an empire fading now!
See how it trembles in the blood-red air,
And like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent
Shrinks on the horizon's edge, while, from above,
One star with insolent and victorious light
Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams,
Like arrows through a fainting antelope,
Strikes its weak from to death.
Hassan.
                 Even as that moon
Renews itself
Mahmud.
        Shall we be not renewed!
Far other bark than ours were needed now
To stem the torrent of descending time:
The Spirit that lifts the slave before his lord
Stalks through the capitals of armd kings,
And spreads his ensign in the wilderness:
Exults in chains; and, when the rebel falls,
Cries like the blood of Abel from the dust;
And the inheritors of the earth, like beasts
When earthquake is unleashed, with idiot fear
Cower in their kingly densas I do now.
What were Defeat when Victory must appal?
Or Danger, when Security looks pale?
How said the messengerwho, from the fort
Islanded in the Danube, saw the battle
Of Bucharest?that
Hassan.
           Ibrahim's scimitar
Drew with its gleam swift victory from Heaven,
To burn before him in the night of battle
A light and a destruction.
Mahmud.
              Ay! the day
Was ours: but how?
Hassan.
           The light Wallachians,
The Arnaut, Servian, and Albanian allies
Fled from the glance of our artillery
Almost before the thunderstone alit.
One half the Grecian army made a bridge
Of safe and slow retreat, with Moslem dead;
The other
Mahmud.
      Speaktremble not.
      Hassan.
                 Islanded
By victor myriads, formed in hollow square
With rough and steadfast front, and thrice flung back
The deluge of our foaming cavalry;
Thrice their keen wedge of battle pierced our lines.
Our baffled army trembled like one man
Before a host, and gave them space; but soon,
From the surrounding hills, the batteries blazed,
Kneading them down with fire and iron rain:
Yet none approached; till, like a field of corn
Under the hook of the swart sickleman,
The band, intrenched in mounds of Turkish dead,
Grew weak and few.Then said the Pacha, 'Slaves,
Render yourselvesthey have abandoned you
What hope of refuge, or retreat, or aid?
We grant your lives.' 'Grant that which is thine own!'
Cried one, and fell upon his sword and died!
Another'God, and man, and hope abandon me;
But I to them, and to myself, remain
Constant:'he bowed his head, and his heart burst.
A third exclaimed, 'There is a refuge, tyrant,
Where thou darest not pursue, and canst not harm
Shouldst thou pursue; there we shall meet again.'
Then held his breath, and, after a brief spasm,
The indignant spirit cast its mortal garment
Among the slaindead earth upon the earth!
So these survivors, each by different ways,
Some strange, all sudden, none dishonourable,
Met in triumphant death; and when our army
Closed in, while yet wonder, and awe, and shame
Held back the base hyaenas of the battle
That feed upon the dead and fly the living,
One rose out of the chaos of the slain:
And if it were a corpse which some dread spirit
Of the old saviours of the land we rule
Had lifted in its anger, wandering by;
Or if there burned within the dying man
Unquenchable disdain of death, and faith
Creating what it feigned;I cannot tell
But he cried, 'Phantoms of the free, we come!
Armies of the Eternal, ye who strike
To dust the citadels of sanguine kings,
And shake the souls throned on their stony hearts,
And thaw their frostwork diadems like dew;
O ye who float around this clime, and weave
The garment of the glory which it wears,
Whose fame, though earth betray the dust it clasped,
Lies sepulchred in monumental thought;
Progenitors of all that yet is great,
Ascribe to your bright senate, O accept
In your high ministrations, us, your sons
Us first, and the more glorious yet to come!
And ye, weak conquerors! giants who look pale
When the crushed worm rebels beneath your tread,
The vultures and the dogs, your pensioners tame,
Are overgorged; but, like oppressors, still
They crave the relic of Destruction's feast.
The exhalations and the thirsty winds
Are sick with blood; the dew is foul with death;
Heaven's light is quenched in slaughter: thus, where'er
Upon your camps, cities, or towers, or fleets,
The obscene birds the reeking remnants cast
Of these dead limbs,upon your streams and mountains,
Upon your fields, your gardens, and your housetops,
Where'er the winds shall creep, or the clouds fly,
Or the dews fall, or the angry sun look down
With poisoned lightFamine, and Pestilence,
And Panic, shall wage war upon our side!
Nature from all her boundaries is moved
Against ye: Time has found ye light as foam.
The Earth rebels; and Good and Evil stake
Their empire o'er the unborn world of men
On this one cast;but ere the die be thrown,
The renovated genius of our race,
Proud umpire of the impious game, descends,
A seraph-wingd Victory, bestriding
The tempest of the Omnipotence of God,
Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom,
And you to oblivion!'More he would have said,
But
Mahmud.
   Diedas thou shouldst ere thy lips had painted
Their ruin in the hues of our success.
A rebel's crime, gilt with a rebel's tongue!
Your heart is Greek, Hassan.
Hassan.
               It may be so:
A spirit not my own wrenched me within,
And I have spoken words I fear and hate;
Yet would I die for
Mahmud.
           Live! oh live! outlive
Me and this sinking empire. But the fleet
Hassan.
Alas!
Mahmud.
    The fleet which, like a flock of clouds
Chased by the wind, flies the insurgent banner!
Our wingd castles from their merchant ships!
Our myriads before their weak pirate bands!
Our arms before their chains! our years of empire
Before their centuries of servile fear!
Death is awake! Repulse is on the waters!
They own no more the thunder-bearing banner
Of Mahmud; but, like hounds of a base breed,
Gorge from a stranger's hand, and rend their master.
Hassan.
Latmos, and Ampelos, and Phanae saw
The wreck
Mahmud.
      The caves of the Icarian isles
Told each to the other in loud mockery,
And with the tongue as of a thousand echoes,
First of the sea-convulsing fightand, then,
Thou darest to speaksenseless are the mountains:
Interpret thou their voice!
Hassan.
               My presence bore
A part in that day's shame. The Grecian fleet
Bore down at daybreak from the North, and hung
As multitudinous on the ocean line,
As cranes upon the cloudless Thracian wind.
Our squadron, convoying ten thousand men,
Was stretching towards Nauplia when the battle
Was kindled.
First through the hail of our artillery
The agile Hydriote barks with press of sail
Dashed:ship to ship, cannon to cannon, man
To man were grappled in the embrace of war,
Inextricable but by death or victory.
The tempest of the raging fight convulsed
To its crystlline depths that stainless sea,
And shook Heaven's roof of golden morning clouds,
Poised on an hundred azure mountain-isles.
In the brief trances of the artillery
One cry from the destroyed and the destroyer
Rose, and a cloud of desolation wrapped
The unforeseen event, till the north wind
Sprung from the sea, lifting the heavy veil
Of battle-smokethen victoryvictory!
For, as we thought, three frigates from Algiers
Bore down from Naxos to our aid, but soon
The abhorrd cross glimmered behind, before,
Among, around us; and that fatal sign
Dried with its beams the strength in Moslem hearts,
As the sun drinks the dew.What more? We fled!
Our noonday path over the sanguine foam
Was beaconed,and the glare struck the sun pale,
By our consuming transports: the fierce light
Made all the shadows of our sails blood-red,
And every countenance blank. Some ships lay feeding
The ravening fire, even to the water's level;
Some were blown up; some, settling heavily,
Sunk; and the shrieks of our companions died
Upon the wind, that bore us fast and far,
Even after they were dead. Nine thousand perished!
We met the vultures legioned in the air
Stemming the torrent of the tainted wind;
They, screaming from their cloudy mountain-peaks,
Stooped through the sulphurous battle-smoke and perched
Each on the weltering carcase that we loved,
Like its ill angel or its damnd soul,
Riding upon the bosom of the sea.
We saw the dog-fish hastening to their feast.
Joy waked the voiceless people of the sea,
And ravening Famine left his ocean cave
To dwell with War, with us, and with Despair.
We met night three hours to the west of Patmos,
And with night, tempest
Mahmud.
              Cease!
              Enter a Messenger.
Messenger.
                 Your Sublime Highness,
That Christian hound, the Muscovite Ambassador,
Has left the city.If the rebel fleet
Had anchored in the port, had victory
Crowned the Greek legions in the Hippodrome,
Panic were tamer.Obedience and Mutiny,
Like giants in contention planet-struck,
Stand gazing on each other.There is peace
In Stamboul.
Mahmud.
       Is the grave not calmer still?
Its ruins shall be mine.
Hassan.
             Fear not the Russian:
The tiger leagues not with the stag at bay
Against the hunter.Cunning, base, and cruel,
He crouches, watching till the spoil be won,
And must be paid for his reserve in blood.
After the war is fought, yield the sleek Russian
That which thou canst not keep, his deserved portion
Of blood, which shall not flow through streets and fields,
Rivers and seas, like that which we may win,
But stagnate in the veins of Christian slaves!
Enter second Messenger.
Second Messenger.
Nauplia, Tripolizza, Mothon, Athens,
Navarin, Artas, Monembasia,
Corinth, and Thebes are carried by assault,
And every Islamite who made his dogs
Fat with the flesh of Galilean slaves
Passed at the edge of the sword: the lust of blood,
Which made our warriors drunk, is quenched in death;
But like a fiery plague breaks out anew
In deeds which make the Christian cause look pale
In its own light. The garrison of Patras
Has store but for ten days, nor is there hope
But from the Briton: at once slave and tyrant,
His wishes still are weaker than his fears,
Or he would sell what faith may yet remain
From the oaths broke in Genoa and in Norway;
And if you buy him not, your treasury
Is empty even of promiseshis own coin.
The freedman of a western poet-chief[4]
Holds Attica with seven thousand rebels,
And has beat back the Pacha of Negropont:
The agd Ali sits in Yanina
A crownless metaphor of empire:
His name, that shadow of his withered might,
Holds our besieging army like a spell
In prey to famine, pest, and mutiny;
He, bastioned in his citadel, looks forth
Joyless upon the sapphire lake that mirrors
The ruins of the city where he reigned
Childless and sceptreless. The Greek has reaped
The costly harvest his own blood matured,
Not the sower, Aliwho has bought a truce
From Ypsilanti with ten camel-loads
Of Indian gold.
Enter a third Messenger.
Mahmud.
        What more?
        Third Messenger.
              The Christian tribes
Of Lebanon and the Syrian wilderness
Are in revolt;Damascus, Hems, Aleppo
Tremble;the Arab menaces Medina,
The Aethiop has intrenched himself in Sennaar,
And keeps the Egyptian rebel well employed,
Who denies homage, claims investiture
As price of tardy aid. Persia demands
The cities on the Tigris, and the Georgians
Refuse their living tribute. Crete and Cyprus,
Like mountain-twins that from each other's veins
Catch the volcano-fire and earthquake-spasm,
Shake in the general fever. Through the city,
Like birds before a storm, the Santons shriek,
And prophesyings horrible and new
Are heard among the crowd: that sea of men
Sleeps on the wrecks it made, breathless and still.
A Dervise, learnd in the Koran, preaches
That it is written how the sins of Islam
Must raise up a destroyer even now.
The Greeks expect a Saviour from the West[5],
Who shall not come, men say, in clouds and glory,
But in the omnipresence of that Spirit
In which all live and are. Ominous signs
Are blazoned broadly on the noonday sky:
One saw a red cross stamped upon the sun;
It has rained blood; and monstrous births declare
The secret wrath of Nature and her Lord.
The army encamped upon the Cydaris
Was roused last night by the alarm of battle,
And saw two hosts conflicting in the air,
The shadows doubtless of the unborn time
Cast on the mirror of the night. While yet
The fight hung balanced, there arose a storm
Which swept the phantoms from among the stars.
At the third watch the Spirit of the Plague
Was heard abroad flapping among the tents;
Those who relieved watch found the sentinels dead.
The last news from the camp is, that a thousand
Have sickened, and
Enter a fourth Messenger.
Mahmud.
           And thou, pale ghost, dim shadow
Of some untimely rumour, speak!
Fourth Messenger.
                 One comes
Fainting with toil, covered with foam and blood:
He stood, he says, on Chelonites'
Promontory, which o'erlooks the isles that groan
Under the Briton's frown, and all their waters
Then trembling in the splendour of the moon,
When as the wandering clouds unveiled or hid
Her boundless light, he saw two adverse fleets
Stalk through the night in the horizon's glimmer,
Mingling fierce thunders and sulphureous gleams,
And smoke which strangled every infant wind
That soothed the silver clouds through the deep air.
At length the battle slept, but the Sirocco
Awoke, and drove his flock of thunder-clouds
Over the sea-horizon, blotting out
All objectssave that in the faint moon-glimpse
He saw, or dreamed he saw, the Turkish admiral
And two the loftiest of our ships of war,
With the bright image of that Queen of Heaven,
Who hid, perhaps, her face for grief, reversed;
And the abhorrd cross
Enter an Attendant.
Attendant.
             Your Sublime Highness,
The Jew, who
Mahmud.
       Could not come more seasonably:
Bid him attend. I'll hear no more! too long
We gaze on danger through the mist of fear,
And multiply upon our shattered hopes
The images of ruin. Come what will!
To-morrow and to-morrow are as lamps
Set in our path to light us to the edge
Through rough and smooth, nor can we suffer aught
Which He inflicts not in whose hand we are.
[Exeunt.
Semichorus I.
Would I were the wingd cloud
Of a tempest swift and loud!
  I would scorn
  The smile of morn
And the wave where the moonrise is born!
  I would leave
  The spirits of eve
A shroud for the corpse of the day to weave
From other threads than mine!
Bask in the deep blue noon divine.
   Who would? Not I.
   Semichorus II.
Whither to fly?
Semichorus I.
Where the rocks that gird th'Aegean
Echo to the battle paean
  Of the free
  I would flee
A tempestuous herald of victory!
  My golden rain
  For the Grecian slain
Should mingle in tears with the bloody main,
And my solemn thunder-knell
Should ring to the world the passing-bell
  Of Tyranny!
  Semichorus II.
Ah king! wilt thou chain
The rack and the rain?
Wilt thou fetter the lightning and hurricane?
The storms are free,
  But we
  Chorus.
O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime,
Killing its flowers and leaving its thorns bare!
Thy touch has stamped these limbs with crime,
These brows thy branding garland bear,
  But the free heart, the impassive soul
   Scorn thy control!
   Semichorus I.
Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose!Around her born,
Shone like mountains in the morn
Glorious states;and are they now
Ashes, wrecks, oblivion?
Semichorus II.
             Go,
Where Thermae and Asopus swallowed
Persia, as the sand does foam;
Deluge upon deluge followed,
Discord, Macedon, and Rome:
And lastly thou!
Semichorus I.
         Temples and towers,
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay;
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystlline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits,
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.
Semichorus II.
           Hear ye the blast,
Whose Orphic thunder thrilling calls
From ruin her Titanian walls?
Whose spirit shakes the sapless bones
Of Slavery? Argos, Corinth, Crete
Hear, and from their mountain thrones
The daemons and the nymphs repeat
The harmony.
Semichorus I.
      I hear! I hear!
      Semichorus II.
The world's eyeless charioteer,
  Destiny, is hurrying by!
What faith is crushed, what empire bleeds
Beneath her earthquake-footed steeds?
What eagle-wingd victory sits
At her right hand? what shadow flits
Before? what splendour rolls behind?
  Ruin and renovation cry
'Who but We?'
Semichorus I.
       I hear! I hear!
The hiss as of a rushing wind,
The roar as of an ocean foaming,
The thunder as of earthquake coming.
  I hear! I hear!
The crash as of an empire falling,
The shrieks as of a people calling
'Mercy! mercy!'How they thrill!
Then a shout of 'kill! kill! kill!'
And then a small still voice, thus
Semichorus II.
                    For
Revenge and Wrong bring forth their kind,
The foul cubs like their parents are,
Their den is in the guilty mind,
And Conscience feeds them with despair.
Semichorus I.
In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity's altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain,
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate and tears for blood.
Enter Mahmud and Ahasuerus.
Mahmud.
Thou art a man, thou sayest, even as we.
Ahasuerus.
No more!
Mahmud.
    But raised above thy fellow-men
By thought, as I by power.
Ahasuerus.
              Thou sayest so.
              Mahmud.
Thou art an adept in the difficult lore
Of Greek and Frank philosophy; thou numberest
The flowers, and thou measurest the stars;
Thou severest element from element;
Thy spirit is present in the Past, and sees
The birth of this old world through all its cycles
Of desolation and of loveliness,
And when man was not, and how man became
The monarch and the slave of this low sphere,
And all its narrow circlesit is much
I honour thee, and would be what thou art
Were I not what I am; but the unborn hour,
Cradled in fear and hope, conflicting storms,
Who shall unveil? Nor thou, nor I, nor any
Mighty or wise. I apprehended not
What thou hast taught me, but I now perceive
That thou art no interpreter of dreams;
Thou dost not own that art, device, or God,
Can make the Future presentlet it come!
Moreover thou disdainest us and ours;
Thou art as God, whom thou contemplatest.
Ahasuerus.
Disdain thee?not the worm beneath thy feet!
The Fathomless has care for meaner things
Than thou canst dream, and has made pride for those
Who would be what they may not, or would seem
That which they are not. Sultan! talk no more
Of thee and me, the Future and the Past;
But look on that which cannot changethe One,
The unborn and the undying. Earth and ocean,
Space, and the isles of life or light that gem
The sapphire floods of interstellar air,
This firmament pavilioned upon chaos,
With all its cressets of immortal fire,
Whose outwall, bastioned impregnably
Against the escape of boldest thoughts, repels them
As Calpe the Atlantic cloudsthis Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers,
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision;all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The Future and the Past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flightthey have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be.
Mahmud.
What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
Of dazzling mist within my brainthey shake
The earth on which I stand, and hang like night
On Heaven above me. What can they avail?
They cast on all things surest, brightest, best,
Doubt, insecurity, astonishment.
Ahasuerus.
Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which isthe absent to the present. Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o'er, worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions. What has thought
To do with time, or place, or circumstance?
Wouldst thou behold the Future?ask and have!
Knock and it shall be openedlook, and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the Past
As on a glass.
Mahmud.
       Wild, wilder thoughts convulse
My spiritDid not Mahomet the Second
Win Stamboul?
Ahasuerus.
       Thou wouldst ask that giant spirit
The written fortunes of thy house and faith.
Thou wouldst cite one out of the grave to tell
How what was born in blood must die.
Mahmud.
                    Thy words
Have power on me! I see
Ahasuerus.
              What hearest thou?
              Mahmud.
A far whisper
Terrible silence.
Ahasuerus.
         What succeeds?
         Mahmud.
                 The sound
As of the assault of an imperial city[6],
The hiss of inextinguishable fire,
The roar of giant cannon; the earthquaking
Fall of vast bastions and precipitous towers,
The shock of crags shot from strange enginery,
The clash of wheels, and clang of armd hoofs,
And crash of brazen mail as of the wreck
Of adamantine mountainsthe mad blast
Of trumpets, and the neigh of raging steeds,
The shrieks of women whose thrill jars the blood,
And one sweet laugh, most horrible to hear,
As of a joyous infant waked and playing
With its dead mother's breast, and now more loud
The mingled battle-cry,ha! hear I not
'En toutwi nikh!' 'Allah-illa-Allah!'?
Ahasuerus.
The sulphurous mist is raisedthou seest
Mahmud.
                       A chasm,
As of two mountains, in the wall of Stamboul;
And in that ghastly breach the Islamites,
Like giants on the ruins of a world,
Stand in the light of sunrise. In the dust
Glimmers a kingless diadem, and one
Of regal port has cast himself beneath
The stream of war. Another proudly clad
In golden arms spurs a Tartarian barb
Into the gap, and with his iron mace
Directs the torrent of that tide of men,
And seemshe isMahomet!
Ahasuerus.
              What thou seest
Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.
A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that
Thou call'st reality. Thou mayst behold
How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned,
Bow their towered crests to mutability.
Poised by the flood, e'en on the height thou holdest,
Thou mayst now learn how the full tide of power
Ebbs to its depths.Inheritor of glory,
Conceived in darkness, born in blood, and nourished
With tears and toil, thou seest the mortal throes
Of that whose birth was but the same. The Past
Now stands before thee like an Incarnation
Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with
That portion of thyself which was ere thou
Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,
Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion
Which called it from the uncreated deep,
Yon cloud of war, with its tempestuous phantoms
Of raging death; and draw with mighty will
The imperial shade hither.
[Exit Ahasuerus. The Phantom of Mahomet the Second appears.
Mahmud.
              Approach!
              Phantom.
                   I come
Thence whither thou must go! The grave is fitter
To take the living than give up the dead;
Yet has thy faith prevailed, and I am here.
The heavy fragments of the power which fell
When I arose, like shapeless crags and clouds,
Hang round my throne on the abyss, and voices
Of strange lament soothe my supreme repose,
Wailing for glory never to return.
A later Empire nods in its decay:
The autumn of a greener faith is come,
And wolfish change, like winter, howls to strip
The foliage in which Fame, the eagle, built
Her aerie, while Dominion whelped below.
The storm is in its branches, and the frost
Is on its leaves, and the blank deep expects
Oblivion on oblivion, spoil on spoil,
Ruin on ruin:Thou art slow, my son;
The Anarchs of the world of darkness keep
A throne for thee, round which thine empire lies
Boundless and mute; and for thy subjects thou,
Like us, shalt rule the ghosts of murdered life,
The phantoms of the powers who rule thee now
Mutinous passions, and conflicting fears,
And hopes that sate themselves on dust, and die!
Stripped of their mortal strength, as thou of thine.
Islam must fall, but we will reign together
Over its ruins in the world of death:
And if the trunk be dry, yet shall the seed
Unfold itself even in the shape of that
Which gathers birth in its decay. Woe! woe!
To the weak people tangled in the grasp
Of its last spasms.
Mahmud.
          Spirit, woe to all!
Woe to the wronged and the avenger! Woe
To the destroyer, woe to the destroyed!
Woe to the dupe, and woe to the deceiver!
Woe to the oppressed, and woe to the oppressor!
Woe both to those that suffer and inflict;
Those who are born and those who die! but say,
Imperial shadow of the thing I am,
When, how, by whom, Destruction must accomplish
Her consummation!
Phantom.
         Ask the cold pale Hour,
Rich in reversion of impending death,
When he shall fall upon whose ripe gray hairs
Sit Care, and Sorrow, and Infirmity
The weight which Crime, whose wings are plumed with years,
Leaves in his flight from ravaged heart to heart
Over the heads of men, under which burthen
They bow themselves unto the grave: fond wretch!
He leans upon his crutch, and talks of years
To come, and how in hours of youth renewed
He will renew lost joys, and
Voice without.
                Victory! Victory!
                [The Phantom vanishes.
Mahmud.
What sound of the importunate earth has broken
My mighty trance?
Voice without.
         Victory! Victory!
         Mahmud.
Weak lightning before darkness! poor faint smile
Of dying Islam! Voice which art the response
Of hollow weakness! Do I wake and live?
Were there such things, or may the unquiet brain,
Vexed by the wise mad talk of the old Jew,
Have shaped itself these shadows of its fear?
It matters not!for nought we see or dream,
Possess, or lose, or grasp at, can be worth
More than it gives or teaches: Come what may,
The Future must become the Past, and I
As they were to whom once this present hour,
This gloomy crag of time to which I cling,
Seemed an Elysian isle of peace and joy
Never to be attained.I must rebuke
This drunkenness of triumph ere it die,
And dying, bring despair. Victory! poor slaves!
Exit Mahmud.
Voice without.
Shout in the jubilee of death! The Greeks
Are as a brood of lions in the net
Round which the kingly hunters of the earth
Stand smiling. Anarchs, ye whose daily food
Are curses, groans, and gold, the fruit of death,
From Thule to the girdle of the world,
Come, feast! the board groans with the flesh of men;
The cup is foaming with a nation's blood,
Famine and Thirst await! eat, drink, and die!
Semichorus I.
Victorious Wrong, with vulture scream,
Salutes the rising sun, pursues the flying day!
I saw her, ghastly as a tyrant's dream,
Perch on the trembling pyramid of night,
Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay
In visions of the dawning undelight.
  Who shall impede her flight?
  Who rob her of her prey?
  Voice without.
Victory! Victory! Russia's famished eagles
Dare not to prey beneath the crescent's light.
Impale the remnant of the Greeks! despoil!
Violate! make their flesh cheaper than dust!
Semichorus II.
Thou voice which art
The herald of the ill in splendour hid!
Thou echo of the hollow heart
Of monarchy, bear me to thine abode
When desolation flashes o'er a world destroyed:
Oh, bear me to those isles of jaggd cloud
Which float like mountains on the earthquake, mid
The momentary oceans of the lightning,
Or to some toppling promontory proud
Of solid tempest whose black pyramid,
Riven, overhangs the founts intensely bright'ning
Of those dawn-tinted deluges of fire
Before their waves expire,
When heaven and earth are light, and only light
  In the thunder-night!
  Voice without.
Victory! Victory! Austria, Russia, England,
And that tame serpent, that poor shadow, France,
Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.
Ho, there! bring torches, sharpen those red stakes,
These chains are light, fitter for slaves and poisoners
Than Greeks. Kill! plunder! burn! let none remain.
Semichorus I.
   Alas! for Liberty!
If numbers, wealth, or unfulfilling years,
Or fate, can quell the free!
   Alas! for Virtue, when
Torments, or contumely, or the sneers
   Of erring judging men
  Can break the heart where it abides.
Alas! if Love, whose smile makes this obscure world splendid,
  Can change with its false times and tides,
   Like hope and terror,
    Alas for Love!
And Truth, who wanderest lone and unbefriended,
If thou canst veil thy lie-consuming mirror
Before the dazzled eyes of Error,
Alas for thee! Image of the Above.
Semichorus II.
  Repulse, with plumes from conquest torn,
Led the ten thousand from the limits of the morn
  Through many an hostile Anarchy!
At length they wept aloud, and cried, 'The Sea! the Sea!'
  Through exile, persecution, and despair,
   Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become
   The wonder, or the terror, or the tomb
Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair:
But Greece was as a hermit-child,
  Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built
To woman's growth, by dreams so mild,
  She knew not pain or guilt;
And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble
   When ye desert the free
   If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
   In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime,
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
Semichorus I.
Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made;
Let the free possess the Paradise they claim;
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed
With our ruin, our resistance, and our name!
Semichorus II.
Our dead shall be the seed of their decay,
Our survivors be the shadow of their pride,
Our adversity a dream to pass away
Their dishonour a remembrance to abide!
Voice without.
Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of ocean to the Islamite.
Now shall the blazon of the cross be veiled,
And British skill directing Othman might,
Thunder-strike rebel victory. Oh, keep holy
This jubilee of unrevengd blood!
Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape!
Semichorus I.
Darkness has dawned in the East
On the noon of time:
The death-birds descend to their feast
From the hungry clime.
Let Freedom and Peace flee far
To a sunnier strand,
And follow Love's folding-star
To the Evening land!
Semichorus II.
    The young moon has fed
     Her exhausted horn
      With the sunset's fire:
    The weak day is dead,
     But the night is not born;
And, like loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright.
Thou beacon of love! thou lamp of the free!
   Guide us far, far away,
To climes where now veiled by the ardour of day
    Thou art hidden
  From waves on which weary Noon
  Faints in her summer swoon,
  Between kingless continents sinless as Eden,
  Around mountains and islands inviolably
    Pranked on the sapphire sea.
    Semichorus I.
Through the sunset of hope,
Like the shapes of a dream,
What Paradise islands of glory gleam!
  Beneath Heaven's cope,
Their shadows more clear float by
The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,
The music and fragrance their solitudes breathe
Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,
  Through the walls of our prison;
And Greece, which was dead, is arisen!
Chorus[7].
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death's scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose
Shall burst[8], more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose,
Than many unsubdued:
Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers,
But votive tears and symbol flowers.
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
Hellas was composed at Pisa in the autumn of 1821, and dispatched to London, November 11. It was published, with the author's name, by C. & J. Ollier in the spring of 1822. A transcript of the poem by Edward Williams is in the Rowfant Library.

Note by Mrs. Shelley: 'Hellas was among the last of his compositions, and is among the most beautiful. The choruses are singularly imaginative, and melodious in their versification. There are some stanzas that beautifully exemplify Shelley's peculiar style; as, for instance, the assertion of the intellectual empire which must be for ever the inheritance of the country of Homer, Sophocles, and Plato:--
''But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.'''
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas - A Lyrical Drama
,

IN CHAPTERS [40/40]



   8 Integral Yoga
   6 Sufism
   4 Psychology
   4 Poetry
   4 Occultism
   2 Yoga
   1 Philosophy
   1 Mythology
   1 Hinduism
   1 Fiction


   5 Al-Ghazali
   4 Carl Jung
   3 The Mother
   3 Sri Aurobindo
   2 Walt Whitman
   2 Swami Vivekananda
   2 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   2 Jorge Luis Borges
   2 James George Frazer
   2 A B Purani


   5 Words Of Long Ago
   5 The Alchemy of Happiness
   2 Whitman - Poems
   2 The Golden Bough
   2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   2 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   2 Aion


0 1971-11-24, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Again, you say that you ask only for the Truth and yet you speak like a narrow and ignorant fanatic who refuses to believe in anything but the religion in which he was born. All fanaticism is false, because it is a contradiction of the very nature of God and of Truth. Truth cannot be shut up in a single book, Bible or Veda or Koran, or in a single religion. The Divine Being is eternal and universal and infinite and cannot be the sole property of the Mussulmans or of the Semitic religions only,those that happened to be in a line from the Bible and to have Jewish or Arabian prophets for their founders. Hindus and Confucians and Taoists and all others have as much right to enter into relation with God and find the Truth in their own way. All religions have some truth in them, but none has the whole truth; all are created in time and finally decline and perish. Mahomed himself never pretended that the Koran was the last message of God and there would be no other. God and Truth outlast these religions and manifest themselves anew in whatever way or form the Divine Wisdom chooses. You cannot shut up God in the limitations of your own narrow brain or dictate to the Divine Power and Consciousness how or where or through whom it shall manifest; you cannot put up your puny barriers against the divine Omnipotence. These again are simple truths which are now being recognised all over the world; only the childish in mind or those who vegetate in some formula of the past deny them.
   You have insisted on my writing and asked for the Truth and I have answered. But if you want to be a Mussulman, no one prevents you. If the Truth I bring is too great for you to understand or to bear, you are free to go and live in a half-truth or in your own ignorance. I am not here to convert anyone; I do not preach to the world to come to me and I call no one. I am here to establish the divine life and the divine consciousness in those who of themselves feel the call to come to me and cleave to it and in no others. I am not asking you and the Mother is not asking you to accept us. You can go any day and live either the worldly life or a religious life according to your own preference. But as you are free, so also are others free to stay here and follow their own way.

02.01 - The World War, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Modern thinkers do not speak of the Asura the Demon or the Titanalthough the religiously minded sometimes refer to the Anti-Christ; but the real, the inner significance of the terms, is lost to a mind nurtured in science and empiricism; they are considered as more or less imaginative symbols for certain undesirable qualities of nature and character. Yet some have perceived and expressed the external manifestation and activities of the Asura in a way sufficient to open men's eyes to the realities involved. Thus they have declared that the present war is a conflict between two ideals, to be sure, but also that the two ideals are so different that they do not belong to the same plane or order; they belong to different planes and different orders. On one side the whole endeavour is to bring man down from the level to which he has arisen in the course of evolution to something like his previous level and to keep him imprisoned there. That this is really their aim, the protagonists and partisans themselves have declared frankly and freely and loudly enough, without any hesitation or reservation. Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' has become the Scripture of the New Order; it has come with a more categorical imperative, a more supernal authority than the Veda, the Bible or the Koran.
   When man was a dweller of the forest,a jungle man,akin to his forbear the ape, his character was wild and savage, his motives and impulsions crude, violent, egoistic, almost wholly imbedded in, what we call, the lower vital level; the light of the higher intellect and intelligence had not entered into them. Today there is an uprush of similar forces to possess and throw man back to a similar condition. This new order asks only one thing of man, namely, to be strong and powerful, that is to say, fierce, ruthless, cruel and regimented. Regimentation can be said to be the very characteristic of the order, the regimentation of a pack of wild dogs or wolves. A particular country, nation or raceit is Germany in Europe and, in her wake, Japan in Asiais to be the sovereign nation or master race (Herrenvolk); the rest of mankindo ther countries and peoplesshould be pushed back to the status of servants and slaves, mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. What the helots were in ancient times, what the serfs were in the mediaeval ages, and what the subject peoples were under the worst forms of modern imperialism, even so will be the entire mankind under the new overlordship, or something still worse. For whatever might have been the external conditions in those ages and systems, the upward aspirations of man were never doubted or questioned they were fully respected and honoured. The New Order has pulled all that down and cast them to the winds. Furthermore in the new regime, it is not merely the slaves that suffer in a degraded condition, the masters also, as individuals, fare no better. The individual here has no respect, no freedom or personal value. This society or community of the masters even will be like a bee-hive or an ant-hill; the individuals are merely functional units, they are but screws and bolts and nuts and wheels in a huge relentless machinery. The higher and inner realities, the spontaneous inspirations and self-creations of a free soulart, poetry, literaturesweetness and light the good and the beautifulare to be banished for ever; they are to be regarded as things of luxury which enervate the heart, diminish the life-force, distort Nature's own virility. Man perhaps would be the worshipper of Science, but of that Science which brings a tyrannical mastery over material Nature, which serves to pile up tools and instruments, arms and armaments, in order to ensure a dire efficiency and a grim order in practical life.

1.00 - Introduction to Alchemy of Happiness, #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  It has been reserved to our own times to obtain a more intimate acquaintance with Ghazzali, and this chiefly by means of a translation by M. Pallia, into French, of his Confessions, wherein he announces very clearly his philosophical views; and from an essay on his writings by M. Smolders. In consequence, Mr. Lewes, who in his first edition of the Biographical History of Philosophy, found no place for Ghazzali, is induced in his last edition, from the evidenee which that treatise contains that he was one of the controlling minds of his age, to devote an entire section to an exhibition of his opinions in the same series with Abclard and Bruno, and to make him the typical figure to represent Arabian philosophy. For a full account of Ghazzali's [7] school of philosophy, we refer to his history and to the two essays, just mentioned. We would observe, very briefly however, that like most of the learned Mohammedans of his age, he was a student of Aristotle. While they regarded all the Greek philosophers as infidels, they availed themselves of their logic and their principles of philosophy to maintain, as far possible, the dogmas of the Koran. Ghazzali's mind possessed however Platonizing tendencies, and he affiliated himself to the Soofies or Mystics in his later years. He was in antagonism with men who to him appeared, like Avicenna, to exalt reason above the Koran, yet he himself went to the extreme limits of reasoning in his endeavors to find an intelligible basis for the doctrines of the Koran, and a philosophical basis for a holy rule of life. His character, and moral and intellectual rank are vividly depicted in the following extract from the writings of Tholuck, a prominent leader of the modern Evangelical school of Germany.
  "Ghazzali," says Tholuck, "if ever any man have deserved the name, was truly a divine, and he may justly he placed on a level with Origen, so remarkable was he for learning and ingenuity, and gifted with such a rare faculty for the skillful and worthy exposition of doctrine. All that is good, noble and sublime, which his great soul had compassed, he bestowed upon Mohammedanism; and he adorned the doctrines of the Koran with so much piety and learning, that, in the form given them by him, they seem in my opinion worthy the assent of Christians. Whatsoever was most excellent in the philosophy of Aristotle or in the Soofi mysticism, he discreetly adapted to the Mohammedan theology. From every school, he sought the [8] means of shedding light and honor upon religion; while his sincere piety and lofty conscientiousness imparted to all his writings a sacred majesty. He was the first of Mohammedan divines." (Bibliotheca Sacra, vi, 233).
  Sale, in the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Koran, shows that he had discovered the peculiar traits of Ghazzali's mind; for wherever he gives an explanation of the Mussulman creed, peculiarly consonant to universal reason and opposed to superstition, it will be found that he quotes from him.1
  This treatise on the Alchemy of Happiness, or Kimiai Saadet, seems well adapted to extend our knowledge of the writings of Ghazzali and of the opinions current then and now in the Oriental world. Although it throws no light on any questions of geography, philology or political history, objects most frequently in view in translations from the Oriental languages, yet a book which exhibits with such plainness the opinions of so large a portion of the human race as the Mohammedans, on questions of philosophy, practical morality and religion, will always be as interesting to the general reader and to a numerous class of students, as the facts that may be elicited to complete a series of kings in a dynasty or to establish the site of an ancient city can be to the historian or the geographer. I translate it from an edition published in Turkish in 1845 (A. H., 1260), at the imperial printing press in Constantinople. [9] As no books are allowed to be printed there which have not passed under the eyes of the censor, the doctrines presented in the book indicate, not only the opinions of eight hundred years since, but also what views are regarded as orthodox, or tolerated among the orthodox at the present day. It has been printed also in Persian at Calcutta.
  --
  The translation I have endeavored to make a close transcript of the meaning of the Turkish; having especially sought to find appropriate equivalents for native idioms. I have designated the chapter and verse of nearly every passage quoted from the Koran. The omissions in the text, which are made apparent by signs, are limited to digressions of the author, to repetitions and to some of the illustrations; so that there is no interruption of the continuity of thought in the themes discussed. The Turkish edition itself was but a portion of the original work. Two or three notes are added, either explanatory of the text or illustrative of the author, from Oriental sources.

1.01 - On knowledge of the soul, and how knowledge of the soul is the key to the knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  O seeker after the divine mysteries! know thou that the door to the knowledge of God will be opened to a man first of all, when he knows his own soul, and understands the truth about his own spirit, according as it has been revealed, "he who knows himself knows his Lord also." And God proclaims in his holy book: "We will display our miracles in the different countries of the world, till it shall be demonstrated to them that the Koran is the truth,"1 that is, let us show men in the visible world, and in their own souls, the wonderfulness of our works and the perfection of our power, that they may learn to know that the Lord God is Almighty and true, and that everything else besides is vanity.
  O seeker of the mysteries! since there is nothing nearer to thee than thyself, and that still with thy soul alone, thou canst not discriminate anything, and art impotent to find out and know thyself, in what way canst thou become acquainted with anything else, and with that which is even separate from thyself? And how should'st thou be able to comprehend God, who in his nature cannot be comprehended, [14] and of whose absolute essence it is not possible to give thee any explanation. If thou should'st say, "I perfectly know myself," we reply, that we have no doubt that what you are acquainted with is your own hand and foot, with your eye and mouth, and animals even have this kind of knowledge. You know also that if you are hungry, your stomach craves food, and that if you are cold, you desire clothing; but other animals also understand these things.

1.01 - The Ideal of the Karmayogin, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Bible or the Koran; but its real, most authoritative scripture is in the heart in which the Eternal has His dwelling. It is in our inner spiritual experiences that we shall find the proof and source of the world's Scriptures, the law of knowledge, love and conduct, the basis and inspiration of Karmayoga.
  Our aim will therefore be to help in building up India for the sake of humanity - this is the spirit of the Nationalism which we profess and follow. We say to humanity, "The time has come when you must take the great step and rise out of a material existence into the higher, deeper and wider life towards which humanity moves. The problems which have troubled mankind

1.02 - In the Beginning, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  If, restoring to the Hebrew characters their numerical value and hidden sense, we analyse the text, then we must thus read the first word of Genesis, The primary duality was in the beginning. For the sign B which corresponds to the second figure in our numerical system, represents a double original principle which the succeeding letter Resh characterises as the very head and supreme Cause of formation. And by a remarkable, though fortuitous coincidence, we find that the sacred book of Islam, like the sacred book of Judaism commences, in the initial of its first word, with the sign of duality. The first word B-Sem-Lillah (Bismillah) placed at the head of the Koran can, when its elements are decomposed, be interpreted, Two is the name of Allah.
  And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter Alif, the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter He, the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,by the two pronouns He and She.

1.02 - On the Knowledge of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  Still the miserable naturalist, who ascribes effects to the influences of nature, speaks correctly. For, if natural causes had no operation, the art of medicine would have been useless, and the holy law would not have allowed to have recourse to medical treatment. The mistake which the naturalist makes, is that he contracts his sphere of vision, and is like the lame ass, that left his load at the first stopping place. He does not know that nature also is subjected to the hand of the power of God, and is a kind of humble servant, such as a shoe is to the ass. The astrologer also says, that the sun is a star, which causes heat and light upon the earth. If there had been no sun, the distinction between day and night would not have existed, and vegetables and grain could not have been produced. The moon also is a star, and if there bad been no moon, how many things connected with the requirements of the Law of the Koran, would have been impracticable, such as fasting, alms and pilgrimage, since there would have been no distinction of weeks, months and years. The colors and perfumes of herbs and fruits exist also from its influence. The sun is warm and dry; the moon is cold and moist. Saturn [52] is cold and dry, Venus is warm and moist. And the school of astrologers is to be credited in these representations; but when they ascribe all events to influences proceeding from the heavenly bodies, they are liars. They do not perceive that they all alike are subject to the almighty power of God as God says in his word: "And the sun, moon and stars are subject to his command." 1 There is also an influence exercised by the stars, which resembles the control, exercised by the nerve that comes from the brain over the finger in writing; while the force of nature is like the control exerted upon the pen by the finger....
  When the health of a person undergoes a change, and he becomes the prey of melancholy and suspicion, and the pleasures of the world become distasteful, so that from disgust with it, he withdraws from all society, his physician says, "this person is diseased with melancholy; he must take an infusion of dodder, of thyme and bark of endive as a medicine." The naturalist says: "As this person's malady is of a dry nature, it arises from a predominance of dryness, which has settled on the brain. The occasion of his having a dry temperament is the season of winter. Until spring comes, and dry weather predominates, there is no possibility of a cure." The astrologer says, "this person being under the influence of melancholy, which arises from a hurtful conjunction between Mars and Jupiter, there will be no favorable change in his health until the conjunction of Jupiter with Venus shall have reached the Trine." Now know, beloved, that the language of all these persons is correct, for they all speak and believe according to the degree and reach of their reason and understanding. However, the real and essential cause of the malady may be stated thus. When fortune is favorable to any person, and the Deity desires to guide him into the [53] possession of it, he deputes two powerful ministers to that effect, Jupiter and Mars. These in turn, control the light footed ministers, the elements, and command dryness, for example, to fasten its bridle to the neck of the person, and cause dryness to attack his head and brain. He is thus made to become weary of the world by means of the scourge of melancholy and suspicion, and so with the bridle of the will may be impelled towards the Deity. These circumstances can never be understood in this sense, either by medicine, or by nature, or by the stars. One may, however, learn to understand them by knowledge and the prophetic power combined. For they embrace the whole kingdom of the universe with its deputies and servants, and possess the knowledge of the end for which everything was created: they know to whose command all things are subjected, to what men are invited and what they are forbidden to do.
  --
  The seventh form of error, beloved, is that of the class whose mistakes arise from ignorance and carelessness, while they have never heard any thing of these doubts of which we have been speaking. They merely wear the garments, cap and quilted robes of the mystics (soofees), and after learning some of their words and phrases, they pretend to have attained saintship and supernatural powers. And although apparently they have no evil intentions, yet because they do not properly respect the holy law, but practice their devotions in a lax way, their course leads them to corrupt doctrines and errors. They are always inclined to do whatsoever their corrupt disposition would lead them to do, such as yielding to the love of frivolous practices, or to sensual indulgences, or assenting to transgression and sin. In the presence of the multitude, they put on a holy mien and do not approve of error and sin, but they do not withdraw their hearts from the pleasure of wine, nor from adulterous and licentious society, nor withdraw their hands from the business of gaining the world. Although in [65] these associations there may be no overt sin, yet they do not consider that such thoughts are but satanic suggestions and sensual importunities. They are not capable of distinguishing actions and circumstances, or right and wrong. Beloved, to this class belong those of whom God declares in his holy word, "We have covered their hearts with more than one envelop, that they may not understand the Koran and we have put deafness upon their ears. Even if thou shouldst call them to the right way, they would never follow it." 1It is better to talk with a sword, than to talk with this class of people, for they are not open to conviction....

1.02 - The Refusal of the Call, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology
  The reply to this question would remain the same throughout the mythologies of the world. For, as is written so frequently in the sacred pages of the Koran: "Well able is Allah to save." The sole problem is what the machinery of the miracle is to be. And that is a secret to be opened only in the following stages of this
  Arabian Nights' entertainment.

1.04 - On Knowledge of the Future World., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  It is plain, then, that a knowledge of the future world cannot be acquired, until we have learned the true nature of the two spirits. We cannot obtain, for example, a knowledge of God, unless we previously possess a knowledge of the soul. But as Islamism consists essentially in believing and confessing the Lord God and the future world, it becomes our duty to acquire a knowledge of the future world as far as the thing is possible. There is, however, a mystery regarding the future world, which the holy law has not authorized to be explained or to be mentioned, because it could not possibly be understood. Seeing then that the knowledge of the future world cannot possibly be acquired, until that mystery is revealed, strive that it may be revealed in your own soul by pious endeavor, self-denial and divine guidance. You cannot learn it by any possible efforts from any other person by the hearing of the ear. Many persons have heard this mystery, which represents one of the attributes of God, but they did not acknowledge it as true, and said that it was impossible, not because it was in its nature exempt from being known, but because it was an unemployed mystery. It is not named either in the Koran or in the Traditions. God commanded the prophets not to inform the people of the essence of his attributes, saying "for they will not understand them, will accuse you of falsehood, and will do injury to themselves."
  [79]
  --
  In saying that in the second period, the control of the spirit is easy, it is said in respect to our contracted understandings, and in comparison with our operations, and to make the matter intelligible to others. When God says in the powerful Koran, "It is easier," and "For me it is easy," he uses the phraseology only for the sake of being understood by man. On the contrary in the first period, there was nothing difficult for God : it would have been nothing to him to have created without matter, in a moment, a thousand worlds like this which we inhabit.
  It follows from what has been said, that it is not a necessary condition of the resurrection and restoration that the spirit should possess exactly the original mould. For that which we seek is not the vehicle of the spirit, but the spirit itself. This mould undergoes change even in this world. Thus, for example, the materials derived from the condensation of the exhalations and the inspissation of the blood in the stomach of the mother are changed by food, and new flesh is produced. Many questions may be asked of those who say that the identical mould must return and rise in the resurrection, and that its absence can in no wise be tolerated, and they will find much difficulty in answering them. One may ask for example, if one man eat another man, and the man eaten become a portion [80] of the man who ate him, will that portion rise with the eater or with the man who was eaten ? ...
  --
  It is well known that spirits are divided into two classes, in one of which all blessed spirits are embraced and in the other all miserable spirits. With respect to the blessed spirits God says, "Think not that those who have been slain on [81] the divine road are dead : they are alive near their Lord and are sustained by him."1 In regard to the miserable spirits, the apostle of God came to the infidels who had been slain in the battle of Bader,2and called upon each by name, and said, "O ! such a one, son of such a one, I have found the victory and triumph which my Lord promised. And you, have you found that latter end and torment of which the Lord assured you, or have you not found it ?" His honored companions having remarked to him, "they are dead and how can they hear and how can they speak ?", the glory of the world replied, "By the truth of God who has commissioned me to be a true prophet, they are better able to hear than yourselves : there is only this difference, that they are not able to answer." And the prophet of God declared that the spirits of martyrs are in lanterns under the empyrean : and according to another account that they are suspended to the fruits of the trees of Paradise in the craws of green birds. In brief, whoever will study carefully the verses of the Koran, the Traditions and recollections that have reached us respecting death, and will consider the well substantiated accounts of the movements of the dead in grave yards, he will know, in a manner that should remove all doubt, that the dead clearly do not become non-existent....
  Hence it happens, that when a person becomes breathless and is entranced, as sometimes happens in the first exercises among the Soofees, he has a delightful vision of the state after death, notwithstanding the animal spirit continues in the enjoyment of health. Yet if, while in that state, fear and terror should happen to predominate and deprive him of feeling and motion, and if he become so far like the dead that he perceives no external object, the same [82] things may be revealed to him which are revealed to others after death. It is sometimes permitted, after he returns from that state to the sensible world, that all he has seen should remain in his memory, or that if he does not remember it, traces of it should remain in his mind. If he saw hell, he will retain traces of despondency, sadness, heaviness of spirit, suspicion and melancholy. If in the treasury of his imagination he has preserved these traces, it is lawful for him to communicate them to others....
  --
  Every one bears away from this world within himself the essence of his torment, but men are not aware of it. God says in his eternal word, "Ah ! if you knew by infallible knowledge, you would see hell, you would see it with the eyes of certainty,"1and again He says in another place in the glorious Koran, "Truly hell encompasseth the infidels."2He does not say, it shall encompass, but rather that it already surrounds them....
  If you say, O student of the mysteries, that "the torments of the grave are occasioned by the relations arising from this present world, from which no one can be exempt, [85] since every one has either children, a house, horses or servants, and that it results, without doubt, in causing a feeling of dependence upon them: and hence, no person will be able to escape the torments of the grave," we observe, in reply, that what yon say is correct, but then there are persons who have relations of dependence upon the world, and who always desire death from the Lord God. The prophets themselves did not puss away from the world until they longed for death. You should know also, that the rich who are attached to this world are of two classes. One class includes those, who although they have a love for the world, yet they love the blessed God more. Au illustration of the character of men of this class, may be found in the man who owns a house in each of two cities; while living in one of them he has no longing to remove to the other. But it happens that an office is conferred upon him in that other city, and immediately he is overjoyed, and is eager to go there, and makes every preparation to remove thither and to forsake his first house. His longing for an office, leads him to move, and takes away all desire of remaining where he was previously. Now although men of this class have an inclination to the world, yet as on the other side the love of God preponderates, they prefer to go to the future world, and would not indeed, if it were possible to do otherwise, remain here a day. When persons of this class die, whose affections preponderate towards the other world, they do not experience the torments of the grave.
  --
  Now come and be candid with yourself; you give credit to a false physician, to a false writer of charms and to a false astrologer, for the sake of being delivered from a day or two of illness in this world, and you even undergo suffering for the sake of it. But the learned in religion, for the sake of saving you from the malady of stupidity and rebellion and bringing you to everlasting health and felicity, have exerted themselves to make the verses of the Koran and the holy traditions to serve as a medicine to deliver you from bitter torment. Still you attach no credit to their words. You treat the Koran and the traditions with entire disregard, neither clinging to the commandments of God, nor avoiding forbidden things. You follow the bent of your own inclinations, instead of following the example and law of the prophet of God, and you indulge in many acts of transgression. Nor do you call to mind what will be your condition in the end of it all, nor how long a time you have yet to live in the world, nor what eternity is compared with this world. Do you not know that by choosing a very little pain in the business of religion during this short life and in this worthless world, you may gain eternal felicity, and riches that cannot be taken from you ? The pain which we may suffer in this world, however severe, yet does not weigh the amount of an atom in comparison with the pains and torment of the other world. This world is a fading shadow, but the future world is abiding and eternal.
  The following is an illustration of the duration of eternity, so far as the human mind can comprehend it. If the space from between the empyreal heaven to the regions below the earth, embracing the whole universe, should be filled up with grains of mustard seed, and if a crow should [103] make use of them as food and come but once in a thousand years and take but a single grain away, so that with the lapse of time there should not remain a single grain, still at the end of that time not the amount of a grain of mustard seed would have been diminished from the duration of eternity.

1.05 - On the Love of God., #The Alchemy of Happiness, #Al-Ghazali, #Sufism
  [1. Koran.]
  {p. 119}
  --
  [1. Koran.]
  {p. 125}
  --
  [1. Koran.]
  {p. 126}
  --
  This may be illustrated by the following anecdote: A certain scavenger went into the perfume-sellers' bazaar, and, smelling the sweet scents, fell down unconscious. People came round him and sprinkled rose-water upon him and held musk to his nose, but he only became worse. At last one came who had been a scavenger himself; he held a little filth under the man's nose and he revived instantly, exclaiming, with a sigh of satisfaction, "Ah! this is perfume indeed!" Thus in the next life a worldling will no longer find the filthy lucre and the filthy pleasures of the world; the spiritual joys of that world will be altogether alien to him and but increase his wretchedness. For the next world is a world of Spirit and of the manifestation of the Beauty of God; happy is that man who has aimed at and acquired affinity with it. All austerities, devotions, studies have the acquirement of that affinity for their aim, and that affinity is love. This is the meaning of that saying of the Koran, "He who has purified his soul is happy." Sins and lusts directly oppose the attainment of this affinity; therefore the Koran goes on to say, "And he
  {p. 132}
  --
  [1. Koran, chap. 91.]
  {p. 133}
  --
  The fourth test is that he will love the Koran, which is the Word of God, and
  {p. 134}
  --
  The seventh test is that lovers of God will love those who obey Him and hate the infidels and the disobedient, as the Koran says: "They are strenuous against the unbelievers and merciful to each other." The Prophet once asked God and said, "O Lord! who are Thy lovers?" and the answer came, "Those who cleave to Me
  {p. 136}

1.05 - Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
  In regard to the teacher, we must see that he knows the spirit of the scriptures. The whole world reads Bibles, Vedas, and Korans; but they are all only words, syntax, etymology, philology, the dry bones of religion. The teacher who deals too much in words and allows the mind to be carried away by the force of words loses the spirit. It is the knowledge of the spirit of the scriptures alone that constitutes the true religious teacher. The network of the words of the scriptures is like a huge forest in which the human mind often loses itself and finds no way out.
   "The network of words is a big forest; it is the cause of a curious wandering of the mind." "The various methods of joining words, the various methods of speaking in beautiful language, the various methods of explaining the diction of the scriptures are only for the disputations and enjoyment of the learned, they do not conduce to the development of spiritual perception"

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  who was the sister of Moses and the Joseph who led the family of Israel into Egypt. The third Sura of the Koran
  appears to be identifying Miriam and Mary; Christian commentators on the Koran naturally say this is ridiculous,
  but from the purely typological point of view from which the Koran is speaking, the identification makes good
  sense.

1.06 - Dhyana and Samadhi, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
  The Yogi says there is a great danger in stumbling upon this state. In a good many cases there is the danger of the brain being deranged, and, as a rule, you will find that all those men, however great they were, who had stumbled upon this superconscious state without understanding it, groped in the dark, and generally had, along with their knowledge, some quaint superstition. They opened themselves to hallucinations. Mohammed claimed that the Angel Gabriel came to him in a cave one day and took him on the heavenly horse, Harak, and he visited the heavens. But with all that, Mohammed spoke some wonderful truths. If you read the Koran, you find the most wonderful truths mixed with superstitions. How will you explain it? That man was inspired, no doubt, but that inspiration was, as it were, stumbled upon. He was not a trained Yogi, and did not know the reason of what he was doing. Think of the good Mohammed did to the world, and think of the great evil that has been done through his fanaticism! Think of the millions massacred through his teachings, mothers bereft of their children, children made orphans, whole countries destroyed, millions upon millions of people killed!
  So we see this danger by studying the lives of great teachers like Mohammed and others. Yet we find, at the same time, that they were all inspired. Whenever a prophet got into the superconscious state by heightening his emotional nature, he brought away from it not only some truths, but some fanaticism also, some superstition which injured the world as much as the greatness of the teaching helped. To get any reason out of the mass of incongruity we call human life, we have to transcend our reason, but we must do it scientifically, slowly, by regular practice, and we must cast off all superstition. We must take up the study of the superconscious state just as any other science. On reason we must have to lay our foundation, we must follow reason as far as it leads, and when reason fails, reason itself will show us the way to the highest plane. When you hear a man say, "I am inspired," and then talk irrationally, reject it. Why? Because these three states instinct, reason, and superconsciousness, or the unconscious, conscious, and superconscious states belong to one and the same mind. There are not three minds in one man, but one state of it develops into the others. Instinct develops into reason, and reason into the transcendental consciousness; therefore, not one of the states contradicts the others. Real inspiration never contradicts reason, but fulfils it. Just as you find the great prophets saying, "I come not to destroy but to fulfil," so inspiration always comes to fulfil reason, and is in harmony with it.

1.08 - The Historical Significance of the Fish, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  Tabari, the commentator on the Koran, mentions that the Anti-
  christ will be a king of the Jews, 21 and in Abarbanel's Mashmi'a
  --
  34 Koran, Sura 18. Cf. "Concerning Rebirth," pars. 244^, and Vollers, "Chidher,"
  p. 241.

1.1.2 - Commentary, #Kena and Other Upanishads, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  language of the Koran, that the Lord did not create heaven
  and earth in a jest, that Brahman did not begin dreaming this

1.12 - The Sacred Marriage, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  was rescued by a pious Berber, who by reciting the Koran succeeded
  in driving the jinnee back into the sea.

1.14 - Bibliography, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  [ Koran.] The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. An Explanatory
  Translation. By Marmaduke Pickthall. London, 1930.

1.21 - Tabooed Things, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
  sorcerer has bound up the life of his enemy. In the Koran there is
  an allusion to the mischief of "those who puff into the knots," and

1953-04-29, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   What is to be done?Become still more conscious. It is very bad to learn just a little. One must learn more until one comes to the point where one sees that one knows nothing. I spoke to you about the novice who wants to pass on to others what he has learntuntil the day he sees he has not much to pass on. Usually all religious teaching is based on that. A very little knowledge, with precise formulas which are well written (often quite well written) and crystallise in the brain, and assert: That is indeed the truth. You have only to study what is there in the book. How easy it is! In every religion there is a bookwhe ther it be the Catechism, the Hindu texts, the Koran, in short, all the sacred booksyou learn it by heart. You are told that this-is-the-truth, and you are sure it is the truth and remain comfortable. It is very convenient, you dont need to try to understand. Those who dont know the same thing as you, are in the falsehood, and you even pray for those who are outside the Truth! This is a common fact in all religions. But in all religions there are people who know better and dont believe in these things. I had met one of these particularly, one belonging to the Catholic faith. He was a big man. I spoke to him about what I knew and asked him: Why do you use this method? Why do you perpetuate ignorance? He answered: It is a policy of peace of mind. If we didnt do that, people wouldnt listen to us. This, indeed, is the secret of religions. He told me: There are in our religion, as in the ancient initiations, people who know. There are schools where the old tradition is taught. But we are forbidden to speak about it. All these religious images are symbols representing something other than what is taught. But that is not taught outside.
   The reason for this is very generous and kind (according to them): People who have a tiny brain and there are plentyif we tell them something thats too high, too great, it troubles them, disturbs them, and they become unhappy. They will never be able to understand. Why worry them uselessly? They dont have the capacity to find the truth. Whilst, if you tell them: If you have faith in this, you will go to heaven, they are quite happy. There, you see. It is very convenient. That is why it is perpetuated, otherwise there would be no religions.

1.ia - My Heart Has Become Able, #Arabi - Poems, #Ibn Arabi, #Sufism
  And also the leaves of the Koran.
  I believe in the religion

1.pbs - Hellas - A Lyrical Drama, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
  A Dervise, learnd in the Koran, preaches
  That it is written how the sins of Islam

1.whitman - Song of Myself, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
  Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,
  Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,

1.whitman - Song Of Myself- XLIII, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Integral Yoga
  Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran,
  Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum,

2.07 - On Congress and Politics, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes, I read it. There is the same mixture of which I have already spoken, only by his reading of books, I am afraid, he has made it worse. There was a mixture of Tolstoy, Christianity and Jainism. Now he has added the Veda, Koran and Gita to it.
   Disciple: Did he not see that Ahimsa applied that way would not succeed?

2.08 - On Non-Violence, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
   In that way everyone has established idol-worship. He has criticised the Arya Samaj but why not criticise Mahomedanism? His statement is adulatory of the Koran and of Christianity which is idolatry of the Bible, Christ and the Cross. Man is hardly able to do without externals and only a few will go to the kernel.
   About conversion also you "do not merely change compartments", as he says, but you change the environment. All are not going to practise the central core of spirituality. Very few can do that, but from the externals some can come to the internal.

3.01 - Forms of Rebirth, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  to reproduce my analysis of the Eighteenth Sura of the Koran as an
  example of a rebirth mystery. I have added some references to source
  --
  from the Koran.
  200 !. Metempsychosis. The first of the five aspects of rebirth

3.02 - The Psychology of Rebirth, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
  1^ Koran, 18th Sura.
  13 1 have discussed one such case of a widening of the personality in my inaugural
  --
  pears in the Eighteenth Sura of the Koran, entitled "The Cave." x
  This entire Sura is taken up with a rebirth mystery. The cave
  --
  in order to be incubated and renewed. The Koran says of it:
  "You might have seen the rising sun decline to the right of their
  --
  1 [The Dawood trans, of the Koran is quoted, sometimes with modifications. The
  18th Sura is at pp. 89-98. Editors.]
  --
  eight disciples. According to the account given in the Koran, the eighth is a dog.
  The 18th Sura mentions still other versions: "Some will say: 'The sleepers were
  --
  time proclaiming freedom from the law. So, too, in the Koran text, the legend
  appeals to the pneumatikos and promises rebirth to him that has ears to hear. But
  --
  ulating all liquids. The Koran commentaries state that, on the
  spot where the fish disappeared, the sea was turned to solid
  --
  Book,' meaning the Koran. He had gathered from our talks
  that I knew the Koran better than he did himself (which was,
  by the way, not saying a great deal). For this reason he regarded
  --
  is not uncommon in the Koran. How are we to account for this
  apparently abrupt transition to Dhulqarnein, the Two-horned
  --
  him to attain rebirth. 22 The Koran, it is true, makes no distinc-
  tion in this narrative between Allah, who is speaking in the

36.07 - An Introduction To The Vedas, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 08, #unset, #Integral Yoga
   Can we look upon the Vedas as the Christians look upon the Bible and the Mohammedans the Koran? All the epithets that we apply to the Vedas are equally applied by the Christians and the Mohammedans to their respective holy scriptures. And it is no wonder that every nation should extol its -own scripture to the skies. But it behoves us to ascertain the value of the Vedas impartially. We must discover whether it is true that they deserve to be called an infallible and supernatural creation.
   It is a need of the hour to investigate the contents of the Vedas. The Europeans are to be credited with having started this bold enquiry. Such enquiry has been termed 'Higher Criticism' in Europe. It applies not only to the Vedas, but to their own scriptures as well. It is the inherent characteristic of the Europeans not to accept anything without putting it to a severe test at every step. They are not prepared to accept anything on the ground that it has been handed down from generation to generation. Needless to say that the value of such a habit is incalculable. And to our misfortune we lost this habit long ago. In the present age we take pride in the mere mention of the Vedas without caring to know about their contents. We should remain beholden to the Europeans that a new wave from the West has awakened us to a true spirit of enquiry.
  --
   If this view was considered as giving the real nature of the Veda, the question would arise: how could the Veda be regarded as the foundation of the Aryan genius and the fount of the civilisation and culture of Hindu India? If the Veda were nothing save nursery rhymes and the like, then how could it exert a lasting influence on our minds and life through centuries? The Bible and the Koran contain some eternal truths beneficial to the life and conduct of men for all time. But according to the naturalistic interpretation of the Western scholars and the sacrificial explanation offered by our orthodox scholars, there is no such elevating or lasting truth in the Veda. Are we then to suppose that our reverence for the Veda owes its origin merely to a blind acceptance of a tradition down the sweep of centuries? Our present culture and civilisation differs widely from that of our forefa thers. How is it that we have still a profound admiration for the Veda? Is it precisely because the Veda serves as the root of our cultural tree adorned with a myriad branches, with foliage, flowers and fruits? No, the supreme authority of the Veda has not been recognised out of mere courtesy. The Shruti has been the sheet-anchor of our guidance at every step and in every activity of our day-to-day life.
   Here arises the second question. The Western and modern scholars are prone to make a difference between the Veda and the Shruti. According to them, the term Shruti is synonymous with the Upanishad and not with the Veda proper. But what is it that we actually find in the Upanishad that is considered by all scholars, oriental and occidental, as the repository of knowledge of the highest order? The Upanishad has been studied much more than the Veda in India and abroad. The reason is this that the ideas and language of the Upanishad are simpler than those of the Veda, and also more familiar to modern thought. The Upanishad is free from all the intricacies of sacrificial rites, ceremonies and obscure mantras, etc. It deals precisely with the clear realised truths that form the basis of the philosophical doctrines. That is why the Europeans hold that the Upanishad comes in as a reaction and protest against the Veda. Towards the end of the Vedic era the Aryan Hindus bade farewell to their cult of Nature-worship and sacrifices and turned towards the quest of God and metaphysical truths and thus a new era was ushered in. Now, on what ground do the European scholars make such an assertion as regards the historical development of Indian thought? As a matter of fact, we do notice that every teacher of Philosophy whenever he has cited anything from the Upanishad has also tried to corroborate it with a similar quotation from the Veda for its justification. There is no iota of proof that the Upanishad held any view contrary to that of the Veda or ever contradicted it. The Upanishad is the culmination of or a complement to the Veda. Since the advent of the dialectic philosopher Hegel it has become a fashion among Western scholars to find an antithesis in every field of historical truth. From their own history they come to learn that Christianity arose as a revolt against the idolatry of the Romans, again Martin Luther and Protestantism stood out against the Roman Catholic Church. Likewise they are, as it were, eager to discover a revolt in the religious history of India. It is not that such a spirit of antithesis is altogether absent in the history of Indian religions, but it is utterly meaningless to say that this antithesis exists as between the Veda and the Upanishad as well. In fact, the Upanishad has always approached the Veda most reverentially and hardly failed to mention: "This we heard from the ancient sages who had explained it to us."

3.7.1.05 - The Significance of Rebirth, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
    The magnificent and pregnant phrase of the Koran, "Thinkest thou that I have made the heavens and the earth and all that is between them in a jest?"
    "Beating about like the blind led by the blind."

5.01 - The Dakini, Salgye Du Dalma, #The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, #Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, #Buddhism
  recall an appropriate verse of the Koran:
  "Paradise is for those who bridle their anger," he said.

7.06 - The Simple Life, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  The Prophet Mohammed taught that there was sin in wine and gambling; and therefore all who respect the words of the Koran abstain from wine and gambling to their profit.
  But on the other hand there are many good people all over the world who find it right to take spirits. We respect their opinions. But these same people cannot assert that it is wrong not to take alcohol.

7.13 - The Conquest of Knowledge, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  We open the Koran and at the head of the chapters of this sacred book we read the word "News" and immediately we think of shipwrecks, murders... but wait!
  The Prophet Mohammed was neither a frivolous person who took pleasure in news of evil deeds nor a gossip who taught nothing noble. Let us read the beginning of the chapter on "News":

7.14 - Modesty, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Abdullah, not knowing that someone was with the Prophet, suddenly interrupted the conversation and asked to hear some verses from the Koran.
  Mohammed spoke to him very roughly and ordered him to be silent. But afterwards he felt sorry that he had been so harsh and very humbly apologised for it. And from that time he treated

7.15 - The Family, #Words Of Long Ago, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  So the angel waits a little. And just then the little boy's voice is heard at school, reading these words from the Koran:
  "I fly unto Allah for refuge from the evil one. In the name of Allah the All-Merciful, O thou soul who art at rest, return unto thy Lord well-pleased and well-pleasing, enter among my servants and enjoy my paradise."

Averroes Search, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
  be known; to interpret his works as the ulema interpret the Koran was
  Averroes' arduous purpose. Few things more beautiful and more pathetic are
  --
  would dine with him that evening in the home of the Koran scholar Farach.
  Abulcasim claimed to have reached the dominions of the empire of Sin
  --
  belong to one of the first chapters of the Koran; they were received with a
  reverent murmur. Swelled with vanity by this dialectical victory, Abulcasim
  --
  original of the Koranthe mother of the Bookis prior to Creation and is
  kept in heaven. Another spoke of Chahiz of Basra, who said that the Koran
  is a substance which may take the form of a man or animal, an opinion
  --
  sacred book. Farach expounded at length the orthodox doctrine. The Koran
  (he said) is one of the attributes of God, as is His piety; it is copied in a
  --
  the signs and the writing are the work of man, but the Koran is irrevocable
  and eternal. Averroes, who had written a commentary on the Republic, could
  --
  he said that in the ancients and in the Koran all poetry is contained and he
  condemned as illiterate and vain the desire for innovation. The others
  --
  abound in the pages of the Koran and in the mohalacas of the sanctuary."
  He felt sleepy, he felt somewhat cold. Having unwound his turban, he

BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
  Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the Koran, alludes to her as the Alm, the immaculate Virgin of
  the heavens. And -- the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous -- it is from this root Alm that we have
  --
  PRETENDING TO INSPIRATION, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in
  their strong and frequent recommendation of TRUTH (! !). . . ."

Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  Chapter XVII of the Koran consists of these words: Praise be
  unto him, who transported his servant by night, from the

Guru Granth Sahib first part, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  That time is not known to the Qazis, who study the Koran.
  The day and the date are not known to the Yogis, nor is the month or the season.
  --
  You may chant your prayers five times each day; you may read the Bible and the Koran.
  Says Nanak, the grave is calling you, and now your food and drink are finished. ||4||28||

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
  SRI AUROBINDO: Is music forbidden by the Koran?
  SATYENDRA: I don't know.
  PURANI: There is no injunction against it in the Koran, as in the case of art.
  SRI AUROBINDO: Art is different; it is idolatry. But there are so many
  things without injunctions in the Koran. Is there an injunction against killing
  brothers?
  --
  SRI AUROBINDO: Are Kafirs to be killed according to the Koran?
  PURANI: Don't know. They find so many things in the Koran. Even the idea
  of non-cooperation, they say, is found in it. That was during the Khilafat agitation. They say that Mohammed was threatened with his life and he fled

the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  3) Blessed is he whokeepeth himself pure. ~ Koran
  4) Happy is the man whose senses are purified and utterly under curb. ~ Udanavarga
  --
  14) All you have issued the one from the other. ~ Koran
  15) Are we then so insensate as to forget that we are members one of the other? ~ St. Clement to the Corinthians
  --
  16) There is no beast on the earth, no bird flying on its ~ Koran
  17) wings that do not form a community like us-When the incapacity to hurt and goodness are fully developed in him who has attained to the enlightened culture of the soul, there is a complete absence of enmity towards men, as also, towards the animals who are near to him ~ Patanjali
  --
  3) The most perfect man is the one who is most useful to others. ~ Koran
  4) The just holds his own suffering for a gain when it can increase the happiness of others. ~ Jatakamala
  --
  8) Aid each other in practising that which is good, but aid not each other in evil and injustice. ~ Koran
  9) Let us help each other as friends that we may put a term to suffering. ~ Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun koran

The noun koran has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
                    
1. Koran, Quran, al-Qur'an, Book ::: (the sacred writings of Islam revealed by God to the prophet Muhammad during his life at Mecca and Medina)


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun koran

1 sense of koran                            

Sense 1
Koran, Quran, al-Qur'an, Book
   INSTANCE OF=> sacred text, sacred writing, religious writing, religious text
     => writing, written material, piece of writing
       => written communication, written language, black and white
         => communication
           => abstraction, abstract entity
             => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun koran
                                    


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun koran

1 sense of koran                            

Sense 1
Koran, Quran, al-Qur'an, Book
   INSTANCE OF=> sacred text, sacred writing, religious writing, religious text




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun koran

1 sense of koran                            

Sense 1
Koran, Quran, al-Qur'an, Book
  -> sacred text, sacred writing, religious writing, religious text
   => scripture, sacred scripture
   HAS INSTANCE=> Adi Granth, Granth, Granth Sahib
   HAS INSTANCE=> Avesta, Zend-Avesta
   HAS INSTANCE=> Bhagavad-Gita, Bhagavadgita, Gita
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mahabharata, Mahabharatam, Mahabharatum
   => Bible, Christian Bible, Book, Good Book, Holy Scripture, Holy Writ, Scripture, Word of God, Word
   => Paralipomenon
   HAS INSTANCE=> Torah, Pentateuch, Laws
   HAS INSTANCE=> Torah
   HAS INSTANCE=> Tanakh, Tanach, Hebrew Scripture
   HAS INSTANCE=> Prophets, Nebiim
   HAS INSTANCE=> Hagiographa, Ketubim, Writings
   => Testament
   => Gospel, Gospels, evangel
   => Synoptic Gospels, Synoptics
   HAS INSTANCE=> Book of Mormon
   => prayer
   => service book
   => Apocrypha
   => sapiential book, wisdom book, wisdom literature
   => Pseudepigrapha
   HAS INSTANCE=> Koran, Quran, al-Qur'an, Book
   => Talmudic literature
   HAS INSTANCE=> Gemara
   HAS INSTANCE=> Mishna, Mishnah
   => Vedic literature, Veda
   HAS INSTANCE=> Upanishad
   => mantra
   => psalm
   HAS INSTANCE=> Psalm




--- Grep of noun koran
koran



IN WEBGEN [10000/5]

Wikipedia - Glory (religion) -- Manifestation of God's presence according to the Abrahamic religions
Wikipedia - Manifestation of God (BahaM-JM- -- Concept in the BahaM-JM-
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19350988-on-the-manifestation-of-god-in-the-birth-of-christ-oration-38-of-st-gr
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Manifestation_of_God



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