Muhammad Asad quotes

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)
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. View quote
Muhammad Asad
The duty and the right to express one's opinion freely may be meaningless-and on occasion even injurious to the best interests of the society-if those opinions are not based on sound thought, which, in its turn, presupposes the possession of sound knowledge. View quote
Muhammad Asad
They (the British Rulers) devised for us an educational system in which all independence of thought would be stifled from the very first stages of one's school life-for, according to Macaulay, such a system was the best means of obtaining suit­able clerks for the offices of the East India Company and, besides, of training obedient subjects. View quote
Muhammad Asad
Their [Conservative Muslims'] insistence that a modem Islamic state would have to be an exact replica of the "historic precedents" of our past is apt to bring the very idea of the Islamic state into discredit and ridicule. View quote
Muhammad Asad
No nation can prosper unless the men and women of whom it is composed apply to their own behaviour the same high standards of social morality as they demand of the officers of their government; for it is your fathers, your sons and your brothers-in a word, it is yourselves-who are responsible for the country's administration. View quote
Muhammad Asad
Jew or Arab. Both here are brimming over with an intolerant hatred that leads them nowhere. Each side says to the other: You do not belong here. View quote
Muhammad Asad
There can be not the least doubt that an Islamic constitution to be evolved thirteen centuries after the Right-Guided Caliphs may legitimately differ from that which was valid in and for their time. View quote
Muhammad Asad
Human ingenuity has not evolved a better method for corporate decisions than the majority principle. View quote
Muhammad Asad
We are neither a racial nor a national entity in the conventional meaning of this term; we have become a nation only on the strength of an ideology, a common belief in a particular way of life: and that ideology, that way of life is expressed in one single word: Islam. View quote
Muhammad Asad
There is not only one form of the Islamic state, but many; and it is for the Muslims of every period to discover the form most suitable to their needs-on the condition, of course, that the form and the institutions they choose are in full agreement with the explicit, unequivocal shariah laws relating to communal life. (Muhammad Asad)
Although science is well qualified to make us progressively comprehend something of the world around us and of the life within us, it is neither able nor called upon to pronounce a judgment regarding the spiritual goal of human life and thus to provide us with ethical guidance. View quote
Muhammad Asad
The Law-Giver meant us Muslims to provide for the necessary, additional legislation through the exercise of our Ijtihad (Independent Reasoning) in consonance with the spirit of Islam. View quote
Muhammad Asad
A state, in order to be truly Islamic, must arrange the affairs of the community in such a way that every individual, man and woman, shall enjoy that minimum of material well-being without which there can be no human dignity, no real freedom and, in the last resort, no spiritual progress. View quote
Muhammad Asad
Within the Islamic concept of society there is no room for the concept of a "secular" state for the simple reason that Islam does not admit of any separation between "religious" and "mundane" life-concerns. View quote
Muhammad Asad
Islam is a complete, self-contained ideology which regards all aspects of our existence-moral and physical, spiritual and intellectual, personal and communal-as parts of the indivisible whole which we call "human life." View quote
Muhammad Asad
Our reason tells us that a community based on ideas held in common is a far more advanced manifestation of human life than a community resulting from race or language or geographical location. View quote
Muhammad Asad
Instead of being given a true, simple-and therefore easily understandable-picture of Islamic Law, the Muslims are presented with a gigantic, many-sided edifice of fiqhi deductions and interpretations (a secondhand Islam, as it were) arrived at by individual scholars and schools of thought a thousand years ago. View quote
Muhammad Asad
It is not quite reasonable to expect of our Govern­ment that it should lead us in the direction of Islamic integrity and solidarity-while that integrity and solidarity are absent in our own behavior. View quote
Muhammad Asad
The cause of the intellec­tual and spiritual decadence of the entire Muslim world is not to be found in a supposedly overwhelming "worldli­ness" of the Muslim people but, on the contrary, in the insufficient worldliness on the part of their religious leadership: a failure which resulted in the gradual alienation of the Muslim faith from the Muslim reality. View quote
Muhammad Asad
A state inhabited predominantly or even entirely by Muslims is not necessarily synonymous with an "Islamic state": it can become truly Islamic only by virtue of a conscious application of the sociopolitical tenets of Islam to the life of the nation, and by an incorporation of those tenets in the basic constitution of the country. (Muhammad Asad)
Some Muslim scholars argue that the concept of Democracy is not compatible with the concept of an Islamic state. But of course it is and the Quran outlines the essence of Democracy. View quote
Muhammad Asad
A "Presidential" system of government, somewhat akin to that practiced in the United States, would correspond more closely to the requirements of an Islamic polity than a "Parliamentary" government in which the executive powers are shared by a cabinet jointly and severally responsible to the legislature. View quote
Muhammad Asad
The poet-philosopher put greater stress on the spiritual aspect of our struggle, while the Quaid-e-Azam was mainly concerned with outlining its political aspect: but both were one in their intense desire to assure to the Muslims of India a future on Islamic lines. View quote
Muhammad Asad
True progress is not possible without a variety of opinions, for it is only through the friction of variously constituted intellects and through the stimulating effect they have on one another that social problems are gradually clarified and thus brought within the range of solution. View quote
Muhammad Asad