Islamic Culture Quotes
This quotation illustrated the extreme polarization between the current fundamentalist Muslims, and the Muslim modernists and the West. Kamal Ataturk, the great leader and stateman who is the father of modern Turkey, is castigated by the author for leading the new Turkish parliament to depose the Caliph – the civil and religious autocrat, one of whom reigned from after the death of Muhammad till his abolishment in 1924. Most of the rest of the world credits Ataturk with being one of the great leaders of all time—one who led a democratic revolution which transformed Turkey into the only Muslim secular democracy, requiring pubic secular European type education for all children, giving women the right to vote (before the U. S. even), adopting a European alphabet and dress, and outlook on life—creating most remarkably a total cultural revolution with virtually no loss of life. No revolutionary leader, before or since has led so extensive a political and cultural revolution, and it was a bloodless revolution. Turkey, into the 21st century, was by far the most powerful, industrialized, scientific and modern nation of Muslims in the world and others were far behind. Yet many Islamic theologian still castigate Atatork for his great achievements as being against the will of God.
Ataturk wrote this manual personally. Religious Turks took violent offense to Ataturk’s proclamation that Turks were great without Islam.
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.
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.
