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Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

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Feisal Abdul Rauf
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 23
Imam
🇰🇼
Learn
Gains
Helping
Battle
Sufis
Others
Higher
Sufi
Firsts
Control
Selves
Self
Teach
Lower
First
Within
Gain
Must
Upon
Destroy
Good
Evil
Shining

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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.
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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.
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Yusuf Qaradawi is probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.
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It is part of my responsibility as a bridge builder to speak the truth about what's great about America, what we've done right, and what our less glorious moments. And many people feel that the Iraq adventure, for example, has been one of our less glorious moments.
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There are individuals who are working very hard to promote fear and antagonism towards Islam and Muslims in this country. It's fueled, in part, by the first African-American president that we have. Obama's father was a Muslim and people have used this to arouse hostility against him.
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The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, ‘I.’
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I'm not an agent from any government, even if some of you may not believe it. I'm not. I'm a peacemaker.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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
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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
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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.
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In spite of the polls, the fact is that American Muslims are very happy and they thrive in this country.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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My life has been devoted to peacemaking.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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
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'Jihad' can mean holy war to extremists, but it means struggle to the average Muslim.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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
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The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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
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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
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The fundamental idea which defines a human being as a Muslim is the declaration of faith: that there is a creator, whom we call God - or Allah, in Arabic - and that the creator is one and single. And we declare this faith by the declaration of faith, where we... bear witness that there is no God but God.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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