This creeping Sharia is the biggest threat to western freedom. Mark Steyn, author America Alone
Jihad is a foreign policy to expand the Islamic authority all over the world. Omar Bakri Muhammad
A perverse man [Muhammad]; a tyrant. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Essentially, your life on Earth is a test. Ayaan Hirsi, Ali, lecture Toronto 2010, ‘From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilisations’; viz also tome Nomad
Sharia: forbidding wrong and commanding right. ibid.
It’s a philosophy of death. ibid.
A God that you had to summit to fully. ibid.
Culture does matter. Islamic theology introduces a culture and a set of beliefs that is essentially Arab, that is patriarchal. ibid.
Tasteless, I find it insensitive ... It doesn’t really display a great deal of sensitivity and understanding to build a mosque there [9/11 site] of all places. ibid.
I’m not saying reform Islam – get out as soon as you can. ibid.
I think the media is biased in its reporting ... of all sorts of atrocities in the name of Islam. ibid.
There is a clash of civilisations. ibid.
To call Islam a religion of peace ... is completely delusional. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
There is a lot of violence in the Koran. Muhammad was a very violent man when he wanted to. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hardtalk: Cultural Bin Ladenism, BBC 2012
The Islamic faith has not been through a reformation, has not been though an enlightenment. ibid.
Is every word in the Koran the true word of God and infallible and so on? Is the prophet Muhammad infallible? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, with Richard Dawkins & Dan Dennett & Sam Harris, GAC Melbourne 2012
Why do middle-class, highly educated liberal women convert to Islam? ibid.
It’s a form of madness to me. ibid.
It’s this huge collective and the individual has to submit completely. ibid.
The idea of developing a competing narrative that is made available to Muslims and that creates a cognitive dissonance and doing it over and over again – that for me is the way to compete with the Islamists. ibid.
Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that 'Islam is peace and tolerance'. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
When you call out for the silencing of cartoonists or for the press then you are touching on freedoms that we all believe in. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, American Enterprise Institute
This clearly indicates the nature of this war: this war is fundamentally religious. Osama bin Laden, November 2001
The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all. It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language. It is the religion whose book – the Quran – will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it. Osama bin Laden, letter to America
I want to unearth this buried history: to discover its great figures and to assess exactly where their contribution to science really was. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Science & Islam 1/3: The Language of Science, BBC 2009
What is the relationship between Science and Islam? ibid.
The language of modern science still has many references to its Arabic roots. ibid.
From the twelfth to the seventeenth century European scholars regularly referred to earlier Islamic texts. ibid.
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi showed Europeans that there’s a better way of doing arithmetic. In his book entitled The Hindu Art of Reckoning he describes a revolutionary idea: you can represent any number you like with just ten simple symbols. ibid.
They invented the decimal point. ibid.
A language that was specially developed to be precise and unambiguous which made it ideal for scientific and technical terms. ibid.
The Translation Movement ... Bringing a book to the Khalif for him to add to his library could be extremely lucrative ... He repaid him its weight in gold. ibid.
Fresh in the memory of many in the empire was the story of the destruction of the original library of Alexandria. ibid.
Islamic medicine built extensively on the foundations laid by the ancient Greeks. ibid.
In the backstreets of Tunisia this knowledge is still being used. But medieval Islamic doctors were also aware of other traditional medicines from China and India. ibid.
A religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans. ibid.
Perhaps the most ghoulish aspect of Islamic medicine – surgery. ibid.
Eye surgery was one of Islamic medicine’s great successes. ibid.
Arabic scholars actually cracked hieroglyphics. ibid.
Algebra ... That sort of knowledge wins wars. ibid.
Algebra has helped create the modern world. ibid.
Modern medicine owes a considerable debt to the work of Islamic physicians. ibid.
It’s a body of knowledge that benefits all humans. ibid.
The legacy of the medieval Islamic empire is scattered across a vast region. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Science & Islam 2/3: The Empire of Reason
In the second decade of the 9th century A.D. Al-Mamoon commissioned a new map of the world. And his scientists did a pretty impressive job. ibid.
Alchemy ... I believe it took Islamic scholars to turn this quasi-religion into something much more scientific: chemistry. ibid.
Coin-making is one of the many examples of how the practical needs of the booming economy began to turn the magical practice of alchemy into modern chemistry. ibid.
Islamic chemists discovered they could change the colour of glass. ibid.
Chemistry was also driven by the booming market in perfumes. ibid.
Abu al-Haytham combined the two Greek ideas and defined our modern understanding of light and vision ... his Book of Optics. ibid.
The scientific method is I believe the single most important idea the human race has ever come up with. ibid.
They did teach us how to ask the right questions. ibid.
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coalestium Published in 1543 by the Polish Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus ... All the planets including the Earth go around the sun ... Copernicus’s book is full of clues that hint at other past sources. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Science & Islam 3/3: The Power of Doubt
What’s astonishing about the accuracy of Al-Battani’s measurements is that he had no telescope. ibid.
What’s absolutely striking about the writings of Islamic scholars by the 9th century is the increasing use of the word ... which in English means doubts. ibid.
Abu al-Haytham hated this nonsensical contradiction. In the early 11th century he wrote Doubts on Ptolemy. ibid.
With Arabic trade came Arabic books. ibid.