...all cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small...

If the Muslims keep their heads cool and accept progress as a means and not an end in itself, they may pass on to Western man the lost secret of life's sweetness...

But who, except God, can say whether a man is right or foolish if he follows the call of his conscience?

~ Sayyid Ahmad al-Sanusi, Quoted by Muhammad Asad in The Road To Mecca

...all the answers are but waiting for us while we, poor fools, ask questions and wait for the secrets of God to open themselves up to us: when they, all the while, are waiting for us to open ourselves up to them...

...the Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ...nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love...'

They are like those sacred cows in India which, I am told, eat up all the printed paper they can find in the streets... Yes, they gobble up all the printed pages from books that have been written centuries ago, but they do not digest them. They no longer think for themselves; they read and repeat, read and repeat - and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation. ...on the whole, Al-Azhar has lapsed into the sterility from which the whole Muslim world is suffering... If there is to be any change for the better, thinking must be encouraged instead of the present thought-imitation...

~ Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, Quoted by Muhammad Asad in The Road To Mecca