Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It — Islam

"Islam is often seen as a monolith, when it is as diverse as any other tradition, with followers running the gamut from modernizers to traditionalists. Some commentators talk as if the world of Islam was more or less identical with the Arab world -- whereas in fact a majority of Muslims are not native Arabic speakers. The most populous Muslim countries are to be found in non-Arab Asia -- from Indonesia through South-East and South Asia to Central Asia, Iran, and Turkey, which of course is both in Asia and Europe. There are many predominantly Muslim countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and large minorities of Muslims are to be found on every continent."

"Islam does not command narrowmindedness and racial and religious prejudice. It does not make the recognition of merit and virtue, of human benevolence, mercy and love dependent upon and subject to distinctions of religion and race. It teaches us to respect every man who is good, whatever his religion."

"Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the West at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death… Muhammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength."

"Islam, from among all religions, best suits the science discoveries and is the most ready to edify souls and force them to abide by justice, kindness and toleration."

"Neither the sword nor the work of an ecclesiastical order can account for Islams continuous gains in new following. The phenomenon of growth, therefore, must be attributed in the last analysis to its powers of appeal and ability to meet the spiritual and material needs of peoples adhering to cultures totally alien to the founders, the desert Arabians, but at a level of religious and sociopolitical development familiar to them at the time of their conversion. Continued growth can be explained also in terms of Islams willingness to tolerate views and practices stemming from alien cultural norms brought into Islam by the converts which a more rigid system of religion would not countenance. Flexibility at this, the crucial stage, of conversion is an important factor contributing to Islams success. What would ordinarily be deemed heretical at the instance of conversion inevitably drifts or is lured towards orthodoxy. The spread of Islam into Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa presents a vivid example of its dynamism while its ability to survive in areas once dominated by communism is a testimony to its remarkable resilience."

"Purer than the system of Zoroaster, more liberal than the law of Moses, the religion of Muhammad might seem less inconsistent with reason than the creed of mystery and superstition which, in the seventh century, disgraced the simplicity of the gospels."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"