Aga Khan IV Quotes

The things and ways the West took to the rest have become the ways of the world.

Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization.

While modern changes were intrinsic to Western historical development, they were largely seen by Muslims as alien and enforced.

We have appropriated too many Moslem countries for them to have any real trust in our disinterestedness.

To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years.

The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.

As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.

We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world.

After WWII .... the West exchanged the old racist coinage for new currency. "Uncivilized" became "underdeveloped". "Savage people" became the "third world". There was a genuine change of heart away from racism and toward respect for equality, but a paternalistic and coercive strain survived.

The idea of progress has a couple of contradictions … it leads to Eurocenterism….

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

Our brother (many of the Jews of the Middle East) has gone to Europe and to the West [and] come back a Russified Jew, a Polish Jew, a German Jew, an English Jew. He has come back with a totally different conception of things. Western and not Eastern…, coming back with imperialistic ideas, with reactionary or revolutionary ideas… he is not the old cousin, and we do not extend to him a very good welcome

O Muslims! When a Muslim blindly imitates the West, he turns into a loyal supporter of their beliefs and customs; he is like one who tries to reform something but spoils it while he is unaware. He is just like a defeated follower, like a baby who bites and severs his mother's breast while it is in his mouth. Such a person does not know that blind copying of the West involves hidden hazards and that our rights, honor and dignity are violated by such imitation and imbecilic pride.

America sponsors a revolution that destroys morals, curricula, religion, values, and everything related to Islam and to the values of manliness.

We don’t like to call ourselves an empire but in the process of becoming the richest country the world has ever known we have dominated many other people.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The main reason western culture has been dominant is because Europeans have controlled political, economic and social power including educational policy for the last several centuries.

The US became arrogant because of what it owns of weapons and technology. For that, it handles the world as it pleases, and changes the ideologies of people, their habits and ethics in order to spread Western culture at the expense of Islam.

The agents of imperialism are busy in every corner of the Islamic world drawing our youth away from us with their evil propaganda…. centers of evil propaganda are run by the Christian churches, the Zionists, and the Baha’is in order to lead our people astray and make them abandon the ordinances and teaching of Islam ...

We cannot sit in the West and prescribe for peoples in the East, whose societies and ways of life are being destabilized by Western and imperialistic religious, economic and technological initiatives -- without having walked in their shoes

Don't fall into the trap of imagining that the West can remake societies

What takes place in America today was caused by the flagrant interference on the part of successive American governments into others’ business. These governments imposed regimes that contradict the faith, values, and lifestyle of the people.