Joshua Zeidner

“It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it—the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west—the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.”
― Bernard Lewis

“There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.”
― André Malraux

“People are weakened by the slack life they lead, by their boundless individualism, by the dreams promoted via television and advertising, and by their virtual experiences. This is what the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen has termed ‘second-hand experiences’ – socio-economic opium.”
― Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age

“In relation to Monotheism considered as such, Judaism stabilized but “confiscated” the Message; Christianity universalized but “altered” it; Islam in turn restored it by stabilizing and universalizing it.”
― Frithjof Schuon