WHAT THEY'VE
SAID REGARDING ISLAM
"Arabia was idolatrous when, six centuries after Jesus, Muhammad
introduced the worship of the God of Abraham, of Ishmael, of Moses, and
Jesus.... Muhammad declared that there was none but one God who had no father,
no son and that the trinity imported the idea of idolatry...
"I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all
the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime
based on the principles of Qur'an which alone are true and which alone can
lead men to happiness."
[Note: Some Muslim historians have
suggested that Asad bin Al Furat, the commander of Muslim forces in Sicily
[see
Napolean Bonaparte as
Quoted in Christian Cherfils, 'Bonaparte et Islam,' Pedone Ed., Paris, France,
1914, pp. 105, 125.
Original References: "Correspondance de
Napoléon Ier Tome V pièce n° 4287 du 17/07/1799; profession de foi, voir
aussi pièce n° 3148. Also, Journal inédit de Ste Hélène, de 1815 à
1818" du Gal Baron Gourgaud -2 tomes- Ed. Flammarion.
827
CE in Muslim History], is the progenitor of Napoleon Bonaparte
(1769-1821). Asad's descendants were known as 'Banu Furat'; for other such
names see 1031 CE.
One of Napoleon's brother-in-law was Joachim Murat.]
"Moses has revealed the existence of God to his nation. Jesus Christ to
the Roman world, Muhammad to the old continent...
Sir George Bernard Shaw in
'The Genuine Islam,' Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936.
"I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation
because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me
to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which
can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him - the wonderful man
and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Savior
of Humanity."
"I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of
the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would
bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the
faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it
is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today."
"If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within
the next hundred years, it could be Islam."
Bertrand Russel in
‘History of Western Philosophy,’ London, 1948, p. 419.
"From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished.
What was lost to christendom at this time was not lost to civilization, but
quite the contrary...
"To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but
this is a narrow view."
"Our use of phrase 'The Dark ages' to cover the period from 699 to 1,000
marks our undue concentration on Western Europe...
H.G. Wells
"The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and
gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance.
These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time
practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which
hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as
compared with all other societies preceding it....Islam is replete with
gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity."
Edward Montet, 'La
Propagande Chretienne et ses Adversaries Musulmans,' Paris 1890. (Also in T.W.
Arnold in 'The Preaching of Islam,' London 1913.)
"Islam is a religion that is essentially rationalistic in the widest
sense of this term considered etymologically and historically....the teachings
of the Prophet, the Qur'an has invariably kept its place as the fundamental
starting point, and the dogma of unity of God has always been proclaimed
therein with a grandeur a majesty, an invariable purity and with a note of
sure conviction, which it is hard to find surpassed outside the pale of
Islam....A creed so precise, so stripped of all theological complexities and
consequently so accessible to the ordinary understanding might be expected to
possess and does indeed possess a marvelous power of winning its way into the
consciences of men."
Thomas Carlyle in
‘Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History,’ Lecture 2, Friday, 8th
May 1840.
"When Pococke inquired of Grotius, where the proof was of that
story of the pigeon, trained to pick peas from Mahomet's (Muhammad's) ear, and
pass for an angel dictating to him? Grotius answered that there was no
proof!...
"A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men
toil for. Not a bad man, I should say; Something better in him than hunger of
any sort, -- or these wild arab men, fighting and jostling three-and-twenty
years at his hand, in close contact with him always, would not revered him
so!... They called him prophet you say? Why he stood there face to face with
them; bare, not enshrined in any mystry; visibly clouting his own cloak,
cobbling his own shoes; fighting, counselling, ordering in the midst of them:
they must have seen what kind of man he was, let him be called what you like!
No emperor with his tiaras was obeyed as this man in a cloak of his own
clouting. During three-and-twenty years of rough actual trial. I find
something of a veritable Hero necessary for that, of itself...
"These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as
if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder,
blazes heaven-high from
"As there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans (i.e.
Muslim), I mean to say all the good of him I justly can...
Delhi
to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the
rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame..."
Simon Ockley in 'History
of the Saracens'.
“A rugged, strife-torn and mountaineering people...were suddenly turned into
an indomitable Arab force, which achieved a series of splendid victories
unparalleled in the history of nations, for in the short space of ninety years
that mighty range of Saracenic conquest embraced a wider extent of territory
than Rome had mastered in the course of eight hundred.”
Phillip Hitti in 'Short
History of the Arabs.'
"During all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as
important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this
term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those
living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of
learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized
world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century
there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical
and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue."
Carra de Vaux in 'The
Philosophers of Islam,' Paris, 1921.
"Finally how can one forget that at the same time the Mogul Empire of
India (1526-1857 C.E.) was giving the world the
Taj
Mahal (completed in 1648 C.E.) the architectural beauty of which has
never been surpassed, and the ‘Akbar Nameh’ of Abul Fazl: "That
extraordinary work full of life ideas and learning where every aspect of life is
examined listed and classified, and where progress continually dazzles the eye,
is a document of which Oriental civilization may justly be proud.... Those poets
those philosophers knew how to deal with the world or matter. They observe,
classify, calculate and experiment. All the ideas that occur to them are tested
against facts. They express them with eloquence but they also support them with
statistics."...the principles of tolerance, justice and humanity which
prevailed during the long reign of Akbar."
Marcel Clerget in 'La
Turquie, Passe et Present,' Paris, 1938.
"Many proofs of high cultural level of the Ottoman Empire during the
reign of Suleiman the Magnificent are to be found in the development of
science and law; in the flowering of literary works in Arabic, Persian and
Turkish; in the contemporary monuments in Istanbul, Bursa, and Edirne; in the
boom in luxury industries; in the sumptuous life of the court and high
dignitaries, and last but not least in its religious tolerance. All the
various influences - notably Turkish, Byzantine and Italian mingle together
and help to make this the most brilliant epoch of the Ottomans."
Thomas Arnold in 'The Call
to Islam.'
"We have never heard about any attempt to compel Non-Muslim parties to
adopt Islam or about any organized persecution aiming at exterminating
Christianity. If the Caliphs had chosen one of these plans, they would have
wiped out Christianity as easily as what happened to Islam during the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; by the same method which Louis XIV followed
to make Protestantism a creed whose followers were to be sentenced to death;
or with the same ease of keeping the Jews away from Britain for a period of
three hundred fifty years."
Michael the Elder (Great)
as Quoted in 'Michael the Elder, Chronique de Michael Syrien, Patriarche
Jacobite d’ Antioche,' J.B. Chabot, Editor, Vol. II, Paris, 1901.
"This is why the God of vengeance, who alone is all-powerful, and changes
the empire of mortals as He will, giving it to whomsoever He will, and
uplifting the humble beholding the wickedness of the Romans who throughout
their dominions, cruelly plundered our churches and our monasteries and
condemned us without pity, brought from the region of the south the sons of
Ishmael, to deliver us through them from the hands of the Romans. And if in
truth we have suffered some loss, because the Catholic churches, that had been
taken away from us and given to the Chalcedonians, remained in their
possession; ...nevertheless it was no slight advantage for us to be delivered
from the cruelty of the Romans, their wickedness, their wrath and cruel zeal
against us, and to find ourselves at people. (Michael the Elder, Jacobite
Patriarch of Antioch wrote this text in the latter part of the twelfth
century, after five centuries of Muslim rule in that region.
Click
here for a relevant document sent to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt.
Sinai, 628 C.E.)
James Addison in 'The
Christian Approach to the Moslem,' p. 35.
"Despite the growth of antagonism, Moslem (Muslim) rulers seldom made
their Christian subjects suffer for the Crusades. When the Saracens [Muslims]
finally resumed the full control of Palestine the Christians were given their
former status as dhimmis. The Coptic Church, too had little cause for
complaint under Saladin's (Salahuddin) strong government, and during the time
of the earlier Mameluke sultans who succeeded him the Copts experienced more
enlightened justice than they had hitherto known. The only effect of
the Crusaders upon Egyptian Christians was to keep them for a while from
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for as long as the Frank were in charge heretics were
forbidden access to the shrines. Not until the Moslem victories could they
enjoy their rights as Christians."
Muhammad Marmaduke
Pickthall in his 1927 Lecture on 'Tolerance in Islam,' Madras, India.
"If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims knew of Christendom,
in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally chivalrous and heroic, but
utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades could not have taken place,
for they were based on a complete misapprehension...
"Innumerable monasteries, with a wealth of treasure of which the worth
has been calculated at not less than a hundred millions sterling, enjoyed the
benefit of the
"In the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of
culture in a people....It was not until the Western nations broke away from
their religious law that they became more tolerant, and it was only when the
Muslims fell away from their religious law that they declined in tolerance and
other evidences of the highest culture. Before the coming of Islam it
(tolerance) had never been preached as an essential part of religion...
Holy
Prophet's (Muhammad’s) Charter to the monks of Sinai and were
religiously respected by the Muslims. The various sects of Christians were
represented in the Council of the Empire by their patriarchs, on the
provincial and district council by their bishops, in the village council by
their priests, whose word was always taken without question on things which
were the sole concern of their community...
"The tolerance within the body of Islam was, and is, something without parallel in history; class and race and color ceasing altogether to be barriers."
Sir John Bagot Glubb
“By Mamun's time medical schools were extremely active in Baghdad. The first
free public hospital was opened in Baghdad during the Caliphate of
Haroon-ar-Rashid. As the system developed, physicians and surgeons were
appointed who gave lectures to medical students and issued diplomas to those
who were considered qualified to practice. The first hospital in Egypt was
opened in 872 AD and thereafter public hospitals sprang up all over the empire
from Spain and the Maghrib to Persia.”
On the Holocaust of Baghdad (1258 C.E.)
Perpetrated by Hulagu:
“The city was systematically looted, destroyed and burnt. Eight hundred
thousand persons are said to have been killed. The Khalif Mustasim was sewn up
in a sack and trampled to death under the feet of Mongol horses.
“For five hundred years, Baghdad had been a city of palaces, mosques,
libraries and colleges. Its universities and hospitals were the most
up-to-date in the world. Nothing now remained but heaps of rubble and a stench
of decaying human flesh.”
“Khalif (Caliph) Al-Ma'mun's period of rule (813 - 833 C.E.) may be
considered the 'golden age' of science and learning. He had always been
devoted to books and to learned pursuits.”