Islamic History Quotes

“It's true. I doubt. I doubt because I seek the truth. Doubt has served me well.”
― Bradley Steffens, The Prisoner of Al Hakim

“بل وصل الحال فى عهد معاوية أن دخل عليه أحدهم وهو فى مجلس الخلافة فحياه قائلا : السلام عليك أيها الأجير.وعندما اعترض عليه نفر من الجالسين أصر على مقولته متسائلا: ألم يستأجرك الله لرعاية هذه الأمه؟.وهو ذاته الذى هب فى وجه معاوية عندما حبس بعض الهبات المالية عن المسلمين وقال له أمام الجميع: كيف تمنع العطاء وأنه ليس من كدك ولا من كد أبيك ولا من كد أمك؟!”
― فهمي هويدي, التدين المنقوص

“Saints, unknown to early Islam, became numerous in Sufism. One of the earliest was a woman, Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra (717-801). Sold as a slave in youth, she was freed because her master saw a radiance above her head while she prayed. Refusing marriage, she lived a life of self-denial and charity. Asked if she hated Satan, she answered, "My love for God.1eaves me no room for hating Satan." Tradition ascribes to her a famous Sufi saying: "0 God! Give to Thine enemies whatever Thou hast assigned to me of this world's goods, and to Thy friends whatever Thou hast assigned to me in the life to come; for Thou Thyself art sufficient for me.”
― Will Durant, The Age of Faith

“Muslims are assured in the Qur’ân, ‘You have become the best community ever raised up for mankind, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong, and having faith in God’ (III, 110). Earnest men have taken this prophecy seriously to the point of trying to mould the history of the whole world in accordance with it. Soon after the founding of the faith, Muslims succeeded in building a new form of society, which in time carried with it its own distinctive institutions, its art and literature, its science and scholarship, its political and social forms, as well as its cult and creed, all bearing an unmistakable Islamic impress. In the course of centuries, this new society spread over widely diverse climes, throughout most of the Old World. It came closer than any had ever come to uniting all mankind under its ideals.”
― Marshall Hodgson

“Mutiara dan marjan adalah kata sebutan untuk baginda Hasan dan Husein, cucu baginda Rasulullah SAW. Demikian disebutkan dalam puisi-puisi.”
― Sibel Eraslan, Fatimah az-Zahra: Kerinduan dari Karbala

“Tidak ada orang di dunia ini yang paling mirip dengan Rasulullah SAW selain Fatimah dan Hasan.”
― Sibel Eraslan, Fatimah az-Zahra: Kerinduan dari Karbala

“Ya, aku sangat mencintai Ali karena ketika setiap nabi memiliki generasi penerus dari keturunannya, sedangkan diriku akan memiliki generasi penerus dari Ali.”
― Sibel Eraslan, Fatimah az-Zahra: Kerinduan dari Karbala

“God says there are two kinds of people in this world, those who repent and those who don't.”
― Jon Lessor, The Big Story: According To The Bible

“Jewish self-image and its historiographic reflection were transformed by the destruction of the state and temple and the exile of the Jewish people. But continuity was preserved in language and scripture, memory and commemoration. The rabbis were not only the supplanters but also the heirs and custodians of the old tradition from which they claimed to derive their own legitimacy. The situation in Persia and in other Middle Eastern countries was radically different. Here the conquest and conversion of these peoples to Islam brought radical change and, above all, discontinuity. Muslim conquest brought a new religion and the consequent changes were far greater than, for example, in Christendom. Christianity triumphed in the Roman Empire, but it did so by conversion, not by conquest, and it preserved the Roman state and the Roman law and learned to live with the Latin and Greek heritage. Islam created its own state, the Caliphate, and brought its own language, Arabic, and its own scripture, the Qur’an. The old states were destroyed. The old languages and even the old scripts were forgotten. The rupture was not as complete as was once thought, or as Muslims claimed, and much pre-Islamic custom survived under an Islamic veneer. [...] There was no usable past from a Muslim point of view—hence the Muslim neglect both of history and of epic, with only minor exceptions. There was thus complete discontinuity in the self-image, the corporate sense of identity, and the collective memory of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East.”
― Bernard Lewis, Historians of the Middle East

“At the beginning of the 19th century, all that the world knew of the history of the ancient Middle East was what preserved in Greek and Hebrew, that is to say by the only two peoples active in the ancient Middle East who had preserved continuity of identity into modern times, and who had retained and could still read their ancient writings. This history was part of their collective memory and was passed by them, with their scriptures and classics, to Christendom—but not to Islam, for Muslims read neither the Bible nor the classics. The name of Cyrus was well known in medieval Europe and appears even in the sagas of faraway Iceland. It does not appear in Islam, not even in Persia, where the pre-Islamic past was rejected and literally buried. The recovery was for long the work of European, later also of Russian and American, scholars, and was only gradually accepted by the Muslims of the Middle East.”
― Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented

“George continued without skipping a beat, “Modern civilisation can be traced to the Middle East and particularly the area now known as Iraq and the ongoing discoveries in and around Türkiye near Gobekli Tempe takes the possible origins of civilisations much further back to around 12000 BCE and probably even further back.

When you look at ancient and modern maps, it dawns on you that the region, with what is now called Syria and Lebanon right in the centre, shaped our modern world in fundamental ways, from the food we eat to how we mastered words and numbers. Like it or not, civilisation as we know and practise today arose squarely in the Middle East. It resonates with life, learning, culture, science, war, death, and conflict. Not boring.
In fact, the rest of the world cannot seem to get enough of this region, or more precisely, its black gold riches. It has dominated world affairs since possibly around 12000BCE and today still captures news media every single day.
It is here where we humans learned to farm and domesticate animals. Where we learnt to count and work with metals, build houses and create staggering architectural marvel.

It is at once an exotic and alluring destination with aromatic and delicious foods, but also bristling with tensions, conspiracies, and centuries old feuds that don’t end. It is inescapably a fascinating region and rightly has a claim to be the centre of the world.”
― Lee Malick, Chastised: The United States of Israel