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Quote by Christopher Hitchens

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Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

This book is a compilation of essays that delve into the complexities of love, poverty, and war. The author uses personal experiences and observations to offer insights into these profound and often conflicting aspects of human life. more

Author

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an English-American author, journalist, and social critic. He was known for his sharp wit and controversial views, particularly on religion and politics. Hitchens was a prominent figure in the public discourse of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. more

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“I'm a spiritual person, she said. "I believe in Allah, you know, though I don't always call It 'Allah' and I pray the way I want to pray. Sometimes I just look out at the stars and this love-fear thing comes over me, you know? And sometimes I might sit in a Christian church listening to them talk about Isa with a book of Hafiz in my hands instead of the hymnal. And you know what, Yusef? Sometimes, every once in a while, I get out my old rug and I pray like Muhammad prayed. I never learned the shit in Arabic and my knees are uncovered, but if Allah has a problem with that then what kind of Allah do we believe in?”

“My teachers revealed to me how traditional Islamic scholarship rests upon unbroken chains of transmission called Isnad (Literally, “to lean back on for support”—an unbroken transmission of religious authority similar to the Rabbinic concept of Semikhah) that link each student back in time through the generations to Muhammad himself. To bring my own Isnad to life, my teachers would occasionally gift me books written by ancestors in my chain, like Imam Ad-Dani who lived in eleventh-century Spain.”

“The coming of the Prophet would sweep away this fragmented and pluralistic pattern of trade in the ancient world. Within a few centuries of Muhammad's death, one culture, one religion, and one law would unify the commerce of the Old World's three continents nearly a millennium before the arrival of the first European ships in the East.”

“পরিস্থিতির স্বার্থে হযরত মোহাম্মদ [সা.] মক্কা ছেড়ে মদিনায় যাবার পর হিংসুটে বোকারা ভেবেছিল তাদের জয় হয়েছে! ইতিহাসে তাদের স্থান শুধুই ষড়যন্ত্রকারী শয়তান হিসেবে কিন্তু হযরত মোহাম্মদ [সা.] সর্বশেষ নবী ও সর্বশ্রেষ্ঠ মহামানব!”

“Allah has no partners, Allah has no equal, Allah the All-Seeing, the All-Hearing, the All-Powerful. Allah the Everlasting, who has no beginning and no end, Beyond our imagination, we cannot even begin to comprehend, Praise Allah and upon Muhammad ﷺ our blessings we send.”

“This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that anyone is entirely destitute of virtue, nor that human nature is equal in itself, nor that man’s spirit in inactive, and much less does it mean that the body is dead. What is does mean is that since the fall, man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God, or to do anything meriting salvation. His corruption is extensive, but not necessarily intensive. It is in this sense that man, since the fall, is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, wholly inclined to all evil. He possesses a fixed bias of the will against God, and instinctively and willingly and turns to evil. He is an alien by birth, and a sinner by choice. The inability under which he labors is not an inability to exercise volition, but an inability to be willing to exercise holy volitions. And it is this phase of it which led Luther to declare that ‘free will’ is an empty term, whose reality is lost; and a lost liberty, according to my grammar, is no liberty at all.”