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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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Feisal Abdul Rauf
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 23
Imam
🇰🇼
Knowledge
Scholarship
Church
Islamic
Makes
Complicated
Littles
Field
Little
Rules
Thing
Tradition
Much
Fields
Ordained
Like
Situation
Priesthood

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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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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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.
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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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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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
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The battleground has been moderates of all faith traditions in all the countries of the world against the radicals of all faith traditions in all parts of the world.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-'70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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
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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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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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Islamic law is clearly against terrorism, against any kind of deliberate killing of civilians or similar 'collateral damage.'
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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My life has been devoted to peacemaking.
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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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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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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'Jihad' can mean holy war to extremists, but it means struggle to the average Muslim.
Feisal Abdul Rauf
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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