This unlettered Arab was the first person who set on foot for the first time practically the whole framework of international relations, and regulated the laws of war and peace. For no one had previously even the remotest idea that there could be an ethical code of war or that relations between different nations could be regulated on the grounds of common humanity.
There was no option but for me to leave the school and go to a normal high school. All the time that I remained at home, I was made to attend Church with the rest of my family, but my heart was no longer in it. At that time, I became an Agnostic… not sure of my beliefs, but knowing that the one religion I did know anything about was not correct
If you were being interrogated by the Taleban as a suspected US spy, it might be hard to imagine a happy ending. But for journalist Yvonne Ridley, the ordeal in Afghanistan led her to convert to a religion she says is “the biggest and best family in the world”.
His thesis was disarmingly simple: Most people assume that God exists, and therefore that the atheist must prove otherwise. Flew reversed the onus. He claimed that there is no evidence that God exists. Therefore, the religious believer must prove that there is a God.
These were the terms my early life provided. The more I thought about it now, the more I returned to my experiences in Muslim Africa. After two return trips to Morocco, in 1981 and 1985, I came to feel that Africa, the continent, had little to do with the balanced life I found there. It was not, that is, a continent I was after, nor an institution, either.
I once knew an atheist who claimed he had never believed in God's existence. In his view, believers were supposed to be people of weak character who felt the necessity to find a crutch for their inability and laziness, so they attended church.
Very early on, I learned that behind the glorious works of the Spanish Catholic mystics there was the history of Islam in Spain, and that a beautiful Islamic inspiration had survived in that tradition. I eventually travelled to Spain repeatedly, searching out the traces of the long Islamic residence in the Iberian Peninsula.
Ibn Taimiyyah (May Allah have mercy upon him), had a difficult life full of continuous trials, calamities, and tests. No sooner did one calamity end than a new one emerged. As soon as he is released from one prison, he is again locked up in another.
This is exactly what befalls the ignorant as a result of their own preferences. However, no matter what befalls them, they do not realize what is happening to their lives. Most of them only realize it after spending a whole life devoted to worldly pleasures, at the very time when they feel death is close. To their sorrow, however, it is too late. Even then, the grief does not stop there.
Fasting the month of Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam. These are the foundation upon which the entire structure of Islam is built. These consist of the declaration of faith, prayer, fasting Ramadan, paying of Zakah [the annual charity payment], and performing the pilgrimage to Makkah, known as hajj.
