Mustafa Akyol Quotes

#1. What made al Qaeda retrieve the doctrine of militant jihad, and Breivik the ideas of crusade and reconquest, is a sense of siege. So, we should help both Westerners and Muslims get rid of that sense by easing their political tensions and by fostering dialogue between them.

Mustafa Akyol

#2. Of all the elements in the periodic table, not a single one is indestructible.

Marty Rubin

#3. The Arab Spring has heightened the ideological tension between Ankara and Tehran, and Turkey's model seems to be winning.

Mustafa Akyol

#4. Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Mustafa Akyol

#5. God's ultimate goal for your life on earth is not comfort, but character development. He wants you to grow up spiritually and become like Christ.

Rick Warren

#6. There are strengths in Islamic tradition. Islam actually, as a monotheistic religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea of the individual in the Middle East and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe.

Mustafa Akyol

#7. Even touching Erdogan is a form of worship,

Mustafa Akyol

#8. Those who hope to nurture genuine religiosity should first establish liberty.

Mustafa Akyol

#9. I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it.

Mustafa Akyol

#10. Disapproving and boycotting is the Quranic thing to do, whereas violence and threats are not.

Mustafa Akyol

#11. It is beneficial for Turkish democracy that not all religious conservatives are united under one banner.

Mustafa Akyol

#12. Foreign journalists writing about Turkey like to focus on the most fundamental divide in Turkish society: the rift between religious conservatives and secularists.

Mustafa Akyol

#13. Rage is a sign of nothing but immaturity. The power of any faith comes not from its coercion of critics and dissenters. It comes from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers.

Mustafa Akyol

#14. If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

Van Morrison

#15. The third person allows characters to really attack themselves. We all do this - attack ourselves - every hour of our lives.

Chuck Palahniuk

#16. What if democracy does not serve liberty? This question is seldom asked in the West, where democracy is often seen as synonymous with liberalism.

Mustafa Akyol

#17. It is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called 'Islamic regimes' such as Saudi Arabia, Iran - and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan - they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that.

Mustafa Akyol

#18. The Qur'an not only lacks any earthly punishment for someone who abandons Islam, it even includes verses that imply that such a change of heart should be a matter of free choice.

Mustafa Akyol

#19. The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?

Mustafa Akyol

#20. True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.

Michael Singer

#21. I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting

Vladimir Nabokov

#22. I guess God can be whatever God wants to be. Maybe God's so great that even our little rules about material reality and our tiny little universe don't mean anything to God. You ever think of that?

Donna Leon

#23. There is a heated debate in Turkey these days over whether the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is furthering democracy or rolling it back.

Mustafa Akyol