Asad Quotes

#1. 30:21 (Asad) And among His wonders is this: He creates for you mates out of your own kind so that you might incline towards them, and He engenders love and tenderness between you: in this, behold, there are messages indeed for people who think.

Anonymous

#2. It was not the philosophers and the prophets who taught us to believe in life after death; all they did was give form and spiritual content to an instinctive perception as old as man himself.

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#7. Modern sovereignty, whether expressed through killing in battle or the torture of suspects, brings together the desire to build up and the desire to destroy, to let Aid Agencies offer charity (in its original meaning of "love") while the military offers death. The two are intrinsically connected.

Talal Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#9. Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.

Talal Asad

#10. Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure.

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#12. Why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing in the name of the secular nation, or of democracy, does not?

Talal Asad

#13. All the answers are but waiting for us while we, poor fools, ask questions and wait for the secrets of God to open themselves up to us: when they, all the while, are waiting for us to open ourselves up to them ...

Muhammad Asad

#14. It seems to me perfectly possible to act humanely towards other beings, whether humans or animals or plants. One simply has to learn how to behave. To behave "humanely" it is perfectly possible to do without the notion of "humanity."

Talal Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#18. The propensity to intellectualize is itself both essential and dangerous. I think in our modern world we are much more aware of its essential character than of its dangers, and that is why I think of it as being an expression of transcendence.

Talal Asad

#19. Language has multiple uses, and is embedded in different forms of life. It is not necessary to have this grand concept of "humanity" in order to behave decently.

Talal Asad

#20. Tradition is an aspiration to connect the Self with the Other. One "internalizes" the Other as one acquires a sense of what one's own tradition is, what one belongs to and what gives valid shape to one's life.

Talal Asad

#21. I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of "religion" - as I said in Genealogies.

Talal Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#23. You should never employ your intellect but only that it is not essential to exercise it in order to live a humane life. Language permeates all of life, of course, and one's mind is essential to it, but that does not mean intellectuality should transcend all of life.

Talal Asad

#24. If one has not been able to experience God by himself, one should allow himself to be guided by the experiences of others who have experienced Him

Muhammad Asad

#25. I think we need to think about Islamic tradition as a way of asking questions that cut across (and transgress) the assumptions of a purely secular world in which we already know how things stand for individual subjects as well as for societies.

Talal Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#27. I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two.

Talal Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

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

Muhammad Asad

#30. ...to imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.

Muhammad Asad

#31. cemetery had long ago ceased to be used; its dead had been dead for a very long time.

Muhammad Asad