For Centuries, The Muslims Were Able To

The Awful Atrocities Of Religion Happened When People Assume That God Shares Your Likes And Dislikes. The Crusaders When Into Battle To Kill Muslims And Jews And Cried, "god Will's It." That Was Their Battle Cry. Obviously God Willed No Such Thing. The Crusaders Were Simply Projecting Onto A Deity They'd Created On Their Own Image And Likeness, All Their Hatred And Loathing Of These Faiths And Made It Endorse Some Of Their Most Awful Prejudices And Lethal Prejudices.

If We Try To Hold On To Our Partial Glimpses Of The Divine, We Cut It Down To Our Own Size And Close Our Minds. Like It Or Nor, Our Human Experience Of Anything Or Anybody Is Always Incomplete: There Is Usually Something That Eludes Us, Some Portion Of Experience That Evades Our Grasp.

Islam Is A Religion Of Success. Unlike Christianity, Which Has As Its Main Image, In The West At Least, A Man Dying In A Devastating, Disgraceful, Helpless Death.

Compassion Has To Become A Discipline. It's Something That You Do. It's No Good Thinking That You Agree With Compassion Or Not, You've Just Got To Do It. Just Like It's No Good Agreeing That It's Possible To Float, You Just Have To Get Into The Pool And Then You Learn That It's Possible.

From The Muslims I Learned From The Extraordinary Pluralism Of The Koran, The Fact That The Koran Endorses Every Single One Of The Major World Faiths, But I Was Particularly Enthralled By The Sufi Tradition, The Mystical Tradition Of Islam, Which Is So Open To Other Religious Faiths.