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benevolently  QUOTES

3 " Verily, Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving
like kindred; and forbids indecency, and manifest evil, and wrongful
transgression. (The Holy Quran, an-Nahl 16:91)

This verse sets forth three gradations of doing good.
The first is the doing of good in return for good.
This is the lowest gradation and even an average person
can easily acquire this gradation that he should do good
to those who do good to him.
The second gradation is a little more difficult than
the first, and that is to take the initiative in doing
good out of pure benevolence. This is the middle
grade. Most people act benevolently towards the
poor, but there is a hidden deficiency in benevolence,
that the person exercising benevolence is conscious
of it and desires gratitude or prayer in return for his
benevolence. If on any occasion the other person
should turn against him, he considers him ungrateful.
On occasion he reminds him of his benevolence or
puts some heavy burden upon him.

The third grade of doing good is graciousness as
between kindred. God Almighty directs that in this
grade there should be no idea of benevolence or any
desire for gratitude, but good should be done out of
such eager sympathy as, for instance, a mother does
good to her child. This is the highest grade of doing
good which cannot be exceeded. But God Almighty
has conditioned all these grades of doing good with
their appropriate time and place. The verse cited
above clearly indicates that if these virtues are not
exercised in their proper places they would become
vices. "

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad

4 " Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and being (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, and so on. The result of such stances is what one should expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. [T]his constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. What this implies is that terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, are not really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term--what they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. The passionate intensity of a fundamentalist mob bears witness to the lack of true conviction; deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction--their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim would be if he felt threatened by, say, a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper? Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identify from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feed their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite: the fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. "

Slavoj Žižek