Quote

'Jihad' can mean holy war to extremists, but it means struggle to the average Muslim.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Feisal Abdul Rauf
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 23
Imam
🇰🇼
Struggle
War
Means
Extremists
Mean
Jihad
Extremist
Muslim
Average
Holy

More quotes by Feisal Abdul Rauf

Image
I was completely surrounded by religion from a young time. I was taught by my father. I engaged in discussions with him and many of these scholars who visited and came around the dining table, the lunch table, and attended many lectures with my dad. And so I learned the apprentice way.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
What's brilliant about the United States system of government is separation of power. Not only the executive, legislative, judicial branches, but also the independence of the military from civilians, an independent media and press, an independent central bank.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
Religion is defined by the relationship between God and man. And Islam is the submission and the acknowledgment of the human being to the creator.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
Koran says whoever believes in God in the last day shall be saved. It is a religion whose very name, Islam, comes from the word Shalom, which means peace. It's about establishing peace. We greet each other with peace be upon you, which the Jews do in greeting each other.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
God says in the Quran that there is only one true religion, God's religion. It's the same theme that God revealed to all of the prophets, even before Muhammad.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
My life has been devoted to peacemaking.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
There are always people who will - who will do peculiar things and think that they are doing things in the name of their religion.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
Yusuf Qaradawi is probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, ‘I.’
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
I am an American citizen born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents. I grew up in Great Britain, Malaysia, and Egypt and have lived in the United States since 1965, when I was seventeen.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
Islamic law is clearly against terrorism, against any kind of deliberate killing of civilians or similar 'collateral damage.'
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
Staying chaste until marriage, a commandment of my faith, was one of the most difficult challenges of my young life. I had a powerful sense that if I did not get a grip on my identity, my ethics, and my religion, I would go off the rails.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
Our enemy is not Islam. Islam is not the enemy of America Americans are not the enemy of Islam. Our real enemy is extremism and radicalism.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
The truth is that killing innocent people is always wrong - and no argument or excuse, no matter how deeply believed, can ever make it right. No religion on earth condones the killing of innocent people no faith tradition tolerates the random killing of our brothers and sisters on this earth.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
There are moderates in Israel. There are moderates in Iran, there are moderates in the Republican Party, moderates in the Democratic Party. What we need to do is we need link all of these moderates together and to figure out a way by which this particular coalition can speak to important issues to marginalize the voice of the extremists.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
In spite of the polls, the fact is that American Muslims are very happy and they thrive in this country.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Image
The thing about the Islamic situation is we don't have a church. We don't have an ordained priesthood, which makes it a little complicated. But we do have a tradition of scholarship, and rules of scholarship. It's very much like any field of knowledge.
Feisal Abdul Rauf