Kaygusuz Abdal Siirleri Quotes

In fact, it would be a worrying inditement of the legitimacy of the religion [Islam] if the modern world approved of us. We complain of negative stereotypes and hostility but in fact that's always been the way of the believers against the uncomprehending outside world. That's a sign of our legitimacy… Those religions that are approved of and patted on the head by secular, consumerist, capitalistic, modernity are by that very same token…a source of worry from the point of view of legitimate traditional perspective… So we should be proud that the modern world doesn't like us, it's a sign of authenticity. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

If the dominant ideology is to be liberalism - a doctrine of tolerance - then to what extent can liberalism tolerate anything other than itself?

Liberalism seems to be increasingly coercive. 'You must have such and such a curriculum...You must have certain views on alternative sexualities...You must have certain views about gender...etc etc' in an increasing set of boxes which one is expected to tick, which seems to sit ill with the basic premise of liberalism which is to open the horizon for people to think and behave as they will as long as they do not constitute a threat to public order. The current strange liberal inquisition in the schools: Thou Shalt Be A Liberal, is just an example of the paradox of this Late Liberal or Coercive Liberal Project. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The Sira is the interpretation of the Sura ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Do not divulge any fact that will help nobody. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

How many leaders in the Islamic world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The alpha male must not be a wife beta. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Hand the secular Arab a glass of urine, and tell him that it is wine. He will not only pretend to enjoy it, he will enjoy it. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The Islamic world is passing through a most devastating period of transition. A history of economic and scientific change which in Europe took five hundred years, is, in the Muslim world, being squeezed into a couple of generations. Such a transition period…makes human beings very insecure. They look around for something to hold onto, that will give them an identity. In our case, that something is usually Islam.
[Islamic Spirituality: The Forgotten Revolution] ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Gamal Abdal Nasser, the nationalist leader of Egypt, was described by British Prime Minister Anthony Eden as an Egyptian Hitler. Then it carried on like that. Saddam Hussein became Hitler when he was no longer a friend of the West. Then Milosevic became Hitler. ~ Tariq Ali

Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The traditional ijma' consensus is as objectionable to takfir-validating Wahhabis as it is to homosexualist or feminist exegetes. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Women are not difficult; but they are difficult to understand.
Men are not easy; but they are easy to understand. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Allah has names of Beauty: the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Gentle, and many others. But He also has Names of Rigour: the Overwhelming, the Just, the Avenger. The world in which we live exists as the interaction and the manifestation of all of the divine attributes. Hence it is a place of ease and of hardship, of joy and of sorrow. It has to be this way: a world in which there was only ease could not be a place in which we can discover ourselves to be true human beings. It is only by experiencing hardship, and loss, and bereavement, and disease, that we rise above our egos, and show that we can live for others, and for principles, rather than only for ourselves. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad