Muslim Quotes

"There is not a single Muslim leader today who has the courage and commitment to defend Islam and Muslims, they are all in awe of the United States and other Western powers, and are indebted to them"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"Muslims must believe that all power, success and victory comes from God alone"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"But the weakness comes from these Westernised co-opted Muslim leaders who just want to look good in the eyes of the West and Western media"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"The Muslim leaders swallow the advice of the Western powers and bodies like the IMF and World Bank, even when it is bad for their countries and they know this"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"Islam is fixed, stable, ordered and disciplined, and so are Muslims"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"The majority of the world's Muslims do not believe that terrorism is a legitimate strategy or that Islam is incompatible with democracy"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Terrorists have failed to trigger mass conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe. We should draw strength from that fact"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"This is why I have always said that it would be better if Muslims were poor"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"They are scared that the BBC or CNN may call them radicals, so they remain soft instead. The problem lies there, with the Muslim leaders, not the Muslim masses"

Abu Bakar Bashir, Activist

"Muslim organisations tend to have a low level of organisation. The communities in Europe are quite diverse"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"The international community is pushing things forward in Bosnia... but it is doing it at expense of the Muslim people. I feel it as an injustice, these are the things that I cannot live with"

Alija Izetbegovic, Activist

"People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities"

Amartya Sen, Philosopher

"The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue"

Arnold J. Toynbee, Historian

"I was raised in a Baptist household, went to a Catholic church, lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and had the biggest crush on the Muslim girls from one neighborhood over"

Will Smith, Actor

"For one, the Qur'an is considered by Muslims to consist entirely of words spoken by Allah himself"

Paul Weyrich, Critic

"Many Muslims honor people of other faiths and do not kill"

Paul Weyrich, Critic

"The Muslims have, as everyone else says, the right to practice their religion and they have the right to construct a mosque at ground zero if they wish. What I am saying, though, is that they should listen to public opinion, they should listen to the deep wounds and anguish that this is causing to so many good people"

Peter King, Politician

"But 85 percent of the mosques have extremist leadership in this country. Most Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Muslims, are loyal Americans"

Peter King, Politician

"If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

"Islam expect every Muslim to do this duty, and if we realise our responsibility time will come soon when we shall justify ourselves worthy of a glorious past"

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Politician

"The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight"

Karen Armstrong, Writer

"Well if done a lot of hard work to try and get people to act rationally, the fact that weve had 15 deviant Muslims, plus 5 or 8 others that got away does not mean that all Muslims are deviant or extremists"

Lee Kuan Yew, Statesman

"For as long as the power of America's diversity is diminished by acts of discrimination and violence against people just because they are black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or gay, we still must overcome"

Ron Kind, Politician

"US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan"

Daniel Barenboim, Musician

"Not just Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and the followers of many other religions believe in values like peace, respect, tolerance and dignity. These are values that bring people together and enable us to build responsible and solid communities"

Alcee Hastings, Politician

"This fanaticism is what feeds terrorism. And this is precisely why Muslims must play an active role in opposing hate sermons and incitement to terrorism and extremism in their mosques"

Otto Schily, Public Servant

"The terrorists who committed the 2003 Istanbul attacks were locals, that is, Turks. And when filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the Netherlands last year, the murderer and his supporters were also part of the Muslim community"

Otto Schily, Public Servant

"The attacks on the Paris Metro in the 1990s were committed by members of the local Muslim community, immigrants from the Maghreb region of North Africa"

Otto Schily, Public Servant

"At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France"

Karen Armstrong, Writer

"A foreign ideology cannot be introduced into Chechnya - were it through an Arab or al-Qaeda. Our experience is rich and long enough for us to be Muslims and know what jihad is"

Aslan Maskhadov, Politician

"At times one feels that what is being said in the West is that the fact that you are a Muslim predisposes you to this blind, stupid terrorism"

Lakhdar Brahimi, Public Servant

"The hatred Muslim extremists feel against the West feeds on certain conflicts in the world"

Otto Schily, Public Servant

"The vast majority of Muslims living here are peaceful citizens. Unfortunately, however, we also see religious and political fanaticism among Muslim groups in Germany"

Otto Schily, Public Servant

"I lived in the Muslim world for 10 years"

Juan Cole, Educator

"Britons seem to have given up on assimilating their Muslim population, with many British elites patting themselves on the back for their tolerance and multiculturalism"

Linda Chavez, Author

"We want to be, I think, an example for the rest of the Arab world, because there are a lot of people who say that the only democracy you can have in the Middle East is the Muslim Brotherhood"

King Abdullah II, Statesman

"Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us"

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Politician

"I think there has been a lack of full cooperation from too many people in the Muslim community"

Peter King, Politician

"And if the imam and the Muslim leadership in that community is so intent on building bridges, then they should voluntarily move the mosque away from ground zero and move it whether it's uptown or somewhere else, but move it away from that area, the same as the pope directed the Carmelite nuns to move a convent away from Auschwitz"

Peter King, Politician

"One of the misperceptions that exists in the Muslim world, which needs to be fixed, is the perception that Muslims in America are - are - are living in - in very, very, very bad circumstances. They cannot practice religion freely. It is not the truth at all. The fact is, we are practicing. We fast, we pray, we do our prayers"

Feisal Abdul Rauf, Theologian

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