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The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad QUOTES

The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad QUOTES

1 " In a sense Muhammad was less the messenger than the translator, struggling to give human form -- words -- to the ineffable. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

2 " Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. They are the insiders, and for them, how things are is how they should be. The status quo is so much a given that it goes not just unquestioned but unseen, and the blind eye is always turned. It is those whose place is uncertain, and who are thus uneasy in their existence, who need to ask why. And who often come up with radically new answers. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

3 " Those who are comfortably established in life tend to have no need to ask what it means. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

4 " To idealize someone is also, in a way, to dehumanize them, "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

5 " Khadija loved him for himself, not for who he would become, and he would never forget her in those later years, turning pale with grief at the sound of any voice that reminded "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

6 " A boy who had learned to survive by silencing his voice had suddenly been given one, but was it his own voice he had been given, or the voice of God? Or was the voice of God within him, part of him? Had divine words really been planted inside him, or had his own words been an expression of the divine? Where did man end and God begin? What was this boundary so powerfully and briefly broken? "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

7 " Muhammad’s is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

8 " At last it came. It would be known as the Sura of the Morning, eleven tantalizingly brief verses which read in full: “By the morning light and the dark of night, your Lord has not forsaken you, Muhammad, nor does he abhor you. The end shall be better than the beginning, and you will be satisfied. Did he not find you an orphan and give you shelter? Did he not find you in error and guide you? Did he not find you poor and enrich you? Do not wrong the orphan, then, nor chide the beggar, but proclaim the goodness of your Lord. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

9 " The word, 'cube', comes directly from the Arabic, Kaaba. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

10 " As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

11 " This is the basic insight of the Gnostics, the one known to the great mystical thinkers of all traditions: the divine spark is within each human being. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

12 " Why would a happily married man isolate himself this way, standing in meditation through the night? "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

13 " How did the infant sent away from his family grow up to redefine the whole concept of family and tribe into something far larger: the umma, the people or the community of Islam? "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

14 " With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we are protected from real awe. Few people even know any longer what it’s like to stand alone in a thunderstorm on the open plains, or to feel the shore vibrate beneath you as a gale sends millions of tons of water pounding in across thousands of miles of ocean. We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we are in control, or at least hoping for control, and lose touch with what it is to be overwhelmed by a force much greater than ourselves. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

15 " Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome - a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

16 " He did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting “Hallelujah” and “Bless the Lord.” He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no music of the heavens. No elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him. No sense of his absolute, foreordained, unquestionable role as the messenger of God. Not even the whole of the Quran fully revealed, but only a few brief verses. In short, Muhammad did none of the things that might seem essential to the legend of a man who had just done the impossible and crossed the border between this world and another—none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to denigrate the whole story as an invention, a cover for something as mundane as delusion or personal ambition. On the contrary: he was convinced that what he had encountered could not be real. At best it must be a hallucination: a trick of the eye or the ear, or his own mind working against him. At worst, possession, and he had been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. In fact he was so sure that he could only be majnun, literally possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first instinct had been to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he had experienced by putting an end to all experience. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

17 " The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

18 " Muhammad now translated this concept into political terms. Blending idealism and pragmatism - a master politician's skill if ever there was one - he drew up arbitration agreement that used the tribal principle to reach beyond tribe. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

19 " If Muhammad weren't standing lonely vigil on the mountain, you might say that there was no sign of anything unusual about him. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad

20 " The boy who had survived by blending into the background had to accept that he would now be thrust into the foreground, into the unrelenting eye of the world. "

― Lesley Hazleton , The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad