Book project

In 2008 I received a book-writing grant from the prestigious Freedom of Expression Foundation, Oslo, Norway. The resulting book was launched in Oslo on 6 May 2010.

Quotes

Those of us who want reform [of Islam] are muted by [Muslim] extremists, as well as the liberals who betray us in the name of multiculturalism. ISIS paints a horrific picture, so I understand the knee-jerk reaction to deny any link. Most Muslims choose to interpret scripture in a peaceful way, but that doesn’t mean the raw material isn’t there for those who choose the path of violence. That material must be addressed.

Eiynah (a Pakistani-Canadian blogger/illustrator who writes about sexuality in Pakistan), An open letter to Ben Affleck, Pakistan Today, 25.10.2014

We can’t go forward without looking backwards.

President Obama, commenting on past human rights abuses in Indonesia, When presidential sermons collide, Salon, 25.03.2010

I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards.

President Obama, commenting on past human rights abuses in the USA, When presidential sermons collide, Salon, 25.03.2010

There are two fundamentally different conceptions of science – one that is scientific and one that is not. In the first, science properly deals with reality, mostly in its physical manifestations. It tries to understand the things that are - what they are, how they work and why, in terms of efficient causes. Science is not metaphysics, but, in order to work, it must assume that things have ends. Otherwise, what would be the point of investigating them, and how would one go about doing it? It is not science that gives to things their ends; those exist already as part of themselves. Science works with the already existing ends in Nature to held bring them about, to fulfill them. Science is not so much the mastery of Nature as an alliance with it. To succeed, it must work with Nature, not against it. This is particularly true in practical sciences. You cannot heal people if you do not know what health is. As Dr. Leon Kass said, ‘The doctor is the cooperative ally of nature, not its master.’
The other notion of science – the unscientific one – is an endeavor not so much to understand what exists and how to bring it to fruition, but to gain power over and fundamentally transform it. Man becomes the ultimate master through the exercise of his will by the instrument of science; he makes all things new according to his desires. Man’s will ignores the end of things and assigns to them his purpose, and they have purposes only insofar as he assigns them. They are nothing in themselves. Nor is man something in himself but only what he makes himself to be. This is science as ideology, as the construction of a false reality.

Robert R. Reilly, quoted by SydneyTrads

We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. Let us use existing tools of exegesis, such as specificity, restriction, abrogation and metaphor. Vacuous literalism as an interpretive method must be abandoned. It is bankrupt. Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation and other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). This is a struggle within Islam. Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.

Maajid Nawaz, Facebook, 17.09.2014

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar. You're only telling the world you fear what he might say.

From Game of Thrones

I prefer religious collaboration, discovering common ground, and so forth, rather than outward competition. I think, essentially, that the real rival to each of us is not each other any longer, but is the spirit of nihilism, negation, global capitalism, all of that stuff. That's what we should really be debating.

Timothy Winter (a.k.a. Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad), being interviewed by Dale Tuggy about the former's chapter The Trinity is Incoherent in the 2013 collection edited by J.P. Moreland, Chad Meister, and Khaldoun A. Sweis, Debating Christian Theism

There is a lot of Islam in the West but very few Muslims, and there are a lot of Muslims in the East but very little Islam.

Muhammad Asad, quoted by Kristiane Backer in her book From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life

Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est.

Old Catholic hymn (where charity and love are, there is God)

Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

People often ask me by what standards they should measure the knowledge and qualifications of someone from whom they should accept counsel on matters of Islamic law. While this is a complex matter, at a minimum such a person should have received at least twenty years of formal training in Islamic law, should be intimately knowledgeable of the local culture, and should have a balanced, humanistic view.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 108)

For moderates [i.e., moderate Muslims, as opposed to puritans/extremists], this would be impossible. God is moral and ethical, in the sense that God shares with human beings an objective standard for goodness, morality, and beauty. Civilizing the earth does not mean constructing buildings or paving roads. It means striving to spread on the earth the Divine attributes such as justice, mercy, compassion, goodness, and beauty. In doing so, human beings spread Divinity itself upon the earth. [...] The more the earth is permeated with justice, mercy, compassion, and beauty, the nearer the earth is to the Divine ideal.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 129-130)

Muslims must set an example for the rest of humanity in their diligence and persistence in seeking the perfection of Divinity. If Muslims fail in setting an example for humanity in their fidelity to justice, mercy, compassion, and beauty, then Muslims have failed God. In moderate thought, God is too great to be embodied in a code of law. The [Shari'a] law helps Muslims in the quest for Godliness, but Godliness cannot be equated to the law. The ultimate objective of the law is to achieve goodness, which includes justice, mercy, and compassion, and the technicalities of the law cannot be allowed to subvert the objectives of the law. Therefore, if the application of the law produces injustice, suffering, and misery, this means that the law is not serving its purposes. In this situation, the law is corrupting the earth instead of civilizing it. In short, if the application of the law results in injustice, suffering, or misery, then the law must be reinterpreted, suspended, or reconstructed, depending on the law in question.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 131, italics in original)

I must say that in my opinion the truly sad reality is that the puritan ideology of the state will only lead to considerable bloodshed without the puritans ever finding their utopia with its just despot. As some of the classical jurists used to say, justice and despotism are two opposites, and the two will never meet without one killing the other. After much suffering, the puritans are bound to wake up and realize that while they dreamed in clouds of their utopia, on this earth they only managed to create a nightmare.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 199-200)

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life.

Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy - the moral limits of markets, page 203

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
—that is all
Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know.

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Edith Stein, Jewish philosopher who converted to the Roman Catholic Church and became a Discalced Carmelite nun

We have seen the future, and it has failed already.

James Kalb, Against Inclusiveness, page 154

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Winston Churchill

Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations.

Anonymous

Based on the evidence of the past four centuries and the state of contemporary philosophy, the rational conclusion is that reason alone has failed as a means by which to discover or devise the truth about the nature of reality, morality, what human beings should care about, and how they should live. Despite high hopes for its success since the seventeenth century, modern philosophy has foundered in its central ambition. It sought universal, rationally demonstrable truth, but has produced instead an open-ended welter of preferential, ultimately arbitrary truth claims.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, page 379

Modern reason in its two most influential expressions is therefore a schizophrenically mixed bag: philosophy has dramatically failed, but science has spectacularly succeeded. One consequence is that the ever-expanding technological capacities afforded by scientific advances are set within an increasingly rancorous culture of moral disagreement and political contestation. If not necessarily a failure of modernity per se, this fact certainly contributes to its volatility and potential for man-made catastrophes on scales inconceivable in the preindustrial world.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, page 380

And perhaps some religious truth claims really are true, and maybe their rejection helps to explain both why Western history has unfolded as it has in the past half millennium and why modernity is now failing.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, page 383

No one has the right to legislate the truth. It can only be discovered by free inquiry, and that includes investigations that may make people uncomfortable.

Steven Pinker, in a letter of 09.12.2009 (quoted e.g. here) to then Rector Laurits B. Holm-Nielsen at Aarhus University, commenting on the proceedings against Professor Helmuth Nyborg taking place in Denmark at that time

A people that forgets its ancestors will care little for its descendants.

G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Ricardo Duchesne in his book review Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest, March 2012

Multiculturalism is an effort to destroy the uniqueness of Western nations. My book hopes to encourage Westerners to recover and affirm their exceptional historical identity.

Ricardo Duchesne, concluding his Reply to Mark Elvin (a reply to Elvin's review of Duchesne's book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization)

In order to really be able to belong somewhere, others have to agree that you belong there.

Noor Jdid, interviewed by Asma Chaudhry, Northernchowk, 26.07.2013

God gives a reward for gentleness which He will never give for harshness.

The Prophet Muhammad, quoted by Charles Le Gai Eaton in The Concept of Justice in Islam

Devotion to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer.

Mohamad al-Arefe, on MEMRI-TV, quoted in The Spectator, 27.06.2013

The less they know, the less they know it.

Edward Feser, commenting on the intellectual state of adherents of secularism, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (Kindle Location 208)

They played the Bohemian Rap City.

Steven Pinker, quoting oronyms discovered by teachers reading their student's term papers and homework assignments, The Language Instinct, page 161

Human evolution did not halt in the distant past but has continued to the present day. The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago differed greatly from the anatomically modern humans of 100,000 years ago, and people today have had just as long to evolve away from the ancestral population. The human genome bears many marks of recent evolution, prompted by adaptations to events such as cultural changes or new diseases. More visible evidence of recent evolution is the existence of human races. After the dispersal of the ancestral population from Africa 50,000 years ago, human evolution continued independently in each continent. The populations of the world’s major geographical regions bred for many thousand years in substantial isolation from each other and started to develop distinctive features, a genetic differentiation which is the basis for today’s races.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 9

If a detectable degree of local genetic differentiation has developed in Iceland in a mere 1,000 years, much greater differences are likely to have arisen among populations in the rest of the world, much of which has been settled for 40 times longer and where there have been many social and geographic impediments to the free flow of genes.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 97

It is often assumed that evolution works too slowly for any significant change in human nature to have occurred within the last 10,000 or even 50,000 years. But this assumption is incorrect. The development of new brain gene alleles 37,000 and 6,000 years ago, and of lactose tolerance 5,000 years ago, have already been mentioned; several other instances of recent human evolution are cited in chapter 12. There is no reason to suppose that human nature ceased to evolve at some finishing post in the distant past or to assume, as do some evolutionary psychologists, that people are struggling to function in modern societies with Stone Age minds. Genomes adapt to current circumstances or perish; the human genome is unlikely to be an exception. Human societies have progressed through several major transitions in the last 15,000 years, and it may well be that these transformations were accompanied by evolutionary as well as cultural changes. It was only after people had become less violent that they were able to abandon the nomadic life of hunting and gathering that they had followed for the last 5 million years, and began to settle down. The first settled societies appeared in the Near East some 15,000 years ago.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 178

Our bones are more gracile than those of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, our personalities less aggressive, our societies more trusting and cohesive. An element of human choice, a preference for negotiation over annihilation, has perhaps been injected into the genome. And that might explain why there is an inescapable sense of progress about human evolution over the last 50,000 years: human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution’s random walk. In parallel with human social evolution, the human physical form continued to evolve. Because the human population was dispersed across different continents, between which distance and hostility allowed little gene flow, the people on each continent followed independent evolutionary paths. It was these independent trajectories that led over the generations to the emergence of a variety of human races.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 180

Genetics are likely to provide ever greater detail about how individuals vary, how men and women have different interests and abilities, and how races differ.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 266

The belief that human evolution is essentially complete rests on the conjecture that it moves too slowly for significant changes to have occurred recently, for instance within the last 50,000 years. But the human genome, just like those of all other species, can adapt quite quickly to changes in the environment. Without this capacity, humans would long ago have lapsed into extinction. At least four types of recent evolutionary change have already become evident and many more will doubtless come to light. The recent genetic changes already discovered include defenses against disease; increases in fertility; responses to cultural changes that affect the human environment; and changes in cognitive behavior.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 268

The other cognitive change is one that can be inferred from the striking recent rise to prominence of versions of two brain genes. As described in chapter 5, the genes first came to light because mutated versions cause microcephaly, a condition in which people are born with an unusually small head and brain. The new version of the microcephalin gene appeared around 37,000 years ago, rapidly became more common under intense selective pressure, and is now carried by most people in Europe and East Asia. The other gene, a new version of ASPM, emerged 6,000 years ago and is now carried by 44% of Caucasians. Both genes are thought to be involved in determining the number of neurons formed in the cerebral cortex in the early embryo. The rapid spread of these two alleles indicates that the human brain has been subject to intense evolutionary pressures in the recent past and may still be evolving. These instances of recent evolutionary change are probably just the first of many that remain to be discovered. Since all occurred after the dispersal from Africa, the alleles that cause them are present to a different extent in different populations. Human diversity therefore cannot be a purely cultural phenomenon, as many social scientists sometimes seem to believe. It has a genetic component too. The component remains to be defined and quantified, but it could prove to be substantial.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 271

No. That is a myth that some here want to create: that it's supposedly illegal or unacceptable in Norway to have different opinions on immigration.

Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, to Spiegel Online, 10.10.2011

Humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith. They see the realization of human potential as the goal of history, when rational inquiry shows history to have no goal. They exalt nature, while insisting that humankind—an accident of nature—can overcome the natural limits that shape the lives of other animals. Plainly absurd, this nonsense gives meaning to the lives of people who believe they have left all myths behind.

John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, quoted in book review by Robert W. Merry, The Fallacy of Human Freedom, The National Interest, July-August, 2013

Today, the dead end of western culture is no longer theoretical; it is contained as anxiety and absurdity in the everyday way of life.

Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology (page 164)

Like clothes, gender fits the preformed human body and mind, even though on occasion it is a bit of a squeeze.

Frank Salter, The War against Human Nature II - Gender Studies, Quadrant Magazine, July-August 2012

The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

Attritubet by some to George Orwell (disputed)

The European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.

Council Directive 2000/43/EC

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, four-term U.S. Senator, ambassador, administration official, and academic

Whether or not there are [intelligence] differences between ethnic groups, is a well-researched field. However, I will not here reference the results of others, let alone speak my mind. Otherwise, I fear I would be pelted with eggs during lectures. Unfortunately, it is not possible to discuss this issue in a rational way.

Professor Detlef H. Rost, Der Spiegel, 06.05.2013 (my translation)

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.

Peter Hitchens, 31.03.2013, The Daily Mail

Michel Foucault’s approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless ‘struggle’ between oppressed and oppressing groups. The shift of emphasis from the content of an utterance to the power that speaks through it leads to a new kind of scholarship, which by-passes entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions as themselves ideological. The pragmatism of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty is of similar effect. It expressly set itself against the idea of objective truth, giving a variety of arguments for thinking that truth is a negotiable thing, that what matters in the end is which side you are on. If a doctrine is useful in the struggle that liberates your group, then you are entitled to dismiss the alternatives.

Roger Scruton, The great swindle, Aeon Magazine, 17.12.2012

Do not believe the confessions of tortured texts.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions 11/92

This healthy instinct to poke fun at an unbalanced piety is the same instinct that makes us laugh at a one-armed man rowing a boat. He is not failing to make an effort, but he lacks balance. The unbalanced pietist, however, may not see the joke; and herein is a deadly threat.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions, (#86), page 151

Suicide bombing is an extreme way of shooting oneself in the foot.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions 4/49

Meanwhile, individuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright academic fraud in support of their ideological positions, do enormous damage to the credibility of their own camp.

Ron Unz, Race, IQ, and Wealth - What the facts tell us about a taboo subjec, The American Conservative, 18 July 2012

When the black Messiah (Nelson Mandela) dies, we'll teach the whites. We'll commit genocide against them: I hate whites.

South African police officer Juda Dagane, quoted by IOLnews

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