Moustapha Akkad Quotes
Beside all this I think there was something personal, being Muslim myself who lived in the west I felt that it was my obligation my duty to tell the truth about Islam. It is a religion that has a 700 million following, yet it's so little known about it which surprised me.
Akkad, Moustapha. Interview. The Making of an Epic: Mohammad, Messenger of God, directed by Craig B. Hankin, Film and Television Communications, 1976.
English Muslim terrorist organization. This quotation illustrates what is perhaps the greatest difference between Muslims and most members of other religions. Most others think of their personal identity in national terms and then occupational, religious and racial. A Christian might say ‘I am a French Attorney who is a Christian’; a Buddhist , ‘I am a Cambodian Buddhist. But most Muslims would say, ’I am a Muslim from France’ or a ‘Follower of Islam residing in Lebanon.
In early Islam, scholarship and science was encouraged in all fields and in most areas the Muslims state of knowledge was greater than that of Christian Europe. However, over time the fundamentalists restricted the concept of knowledge to the Koran under the theory that anything worth knowing was in the Koran and that which was not should not be studied. In modern times Islamic nations, holding this very narrow view of education and learning, have intellectually stagnated—especially in modern science, technology, politics and philosophy. Most Islamic universities and madrasses teach only theological subjects and Koranic prescriptions of life and law and the few exceptions tend to be in strongly secular countries like Turkey.
This phrase has been used by fundamentalists to justify forced conversion and the imposition of religious law—Sharia—on believers and unbelievers alike. The logic is that if God says believing orthodox Mosems are the best, that is what he wants for all. And therefore by forcing others to be orthodox and of the faith, one is doing God’s bidding. See Husain Haqqani, “Islam’s Medeval Outposts,” Foreign Policy November/December, 2002.
This is another of De Tocqueville’s prescient statements that in retrospect seem so amazing given the time. This quotation could serve as an op ed in a newspaper of any of the industrial democracies of the early 21st century. However, he did not have the information of the details we have today that showed Islam as the pinnacle of scientific, philosophical, literary and medical achievement at the beginning of the second millennium, while the Christian nations of Europe were mired in the Dark Ages. It was the same Koran but a very different interpretation and framework that led to the decadence while it was the Protestant Reformation that triggered a Christianity that was hospitable to modernity and enlightenment.
Moustapha Al Akkad was a Syrian–American film producer and director, best known for producing the original series of Halloween films and directing The Message and Lion of the Desert. He was killed along with his daughter Rima Al Akkad Monla in the 2005 Amman bombings.
