Kurt Gödel quote: “I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded.”

“No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs — and certainly not Islam.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

On report of Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil who was sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and Hosni Mubarak, in [http://www.stallman.org/archives/2007-jan-apr.html "Illegal to insult" (1 March 2007) http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1593050,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
2000s

“A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Discours d'ouverture, congrès de la paix http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Congr%C3%A8s_de_la_Paix_1849, [Opening address, Peace Congress], Paris (21 August 1849); published in Actes et paroles - Avant l'exil (1875)
Context: A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France.
A day will come when a cannon will be a museum-piece, as instruments of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed!
A day will come when we shall see those two immense groups, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, facing one another, stretching out their hands across the sea, exchanging their products, their arts, their works of genius, clearing up the globe, making deserts fruitful, ameliorating creation under the eyes of the Creator, and joining together, to reap the well-being of all, these two infinite forces, the fraternity of men and the power of God.

“And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that?”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

“Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting.”

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (1971–2019) leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

As quoted in "Islamic State releases 'al-Baghdadi message'", BBC (14 May 2015)
2014, 2015
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32744070

“I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion.”

Maajid Nawaz (1977) British activist

Comments in The Story of God with Morgan Freeman (2016), Episode 2 : Apocalypse
Context: I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion. What I mean by Islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society. Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of Islam and that's what I adopted. I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the UK. I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs. On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old. I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter. I joined a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on. … It's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that ISIS has laid claim to. But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term. I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause. … I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal. Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the Who's Who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood. When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth." Of course, when ISIS eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now.

“The religion of thousands consists in clinging to an idea; they are happy in their sloth.... many would observe silence from fear of fanatics.”

Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak (1551–1602) vizier

Ain-i-Akbari. Quoted in Lal, K. S. (2001). Historical essays. New Delhi: Radha.(II.203)

“Islam, like the other two religions of the Judaic family, is exclusive-minded and intolerant by comparison with the religions and philosophies of Indian origin. Yet the influence of India on Akbar went so deep that he was characteristically Indian in (his) large-hearted catholicity.”

Akbar (1542–1605) 3rd Mughal Emperor

A. J. Toynbee, One World and India, p. 19. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

“The defensiveness of Islam is its crucial feature today. It's what, by the way, is in such contrast to the most interesting period of Islamic history, when Islam was an open, absorbing religion, constantly taking in outside influences, as opposed to its current hedgehog-like posture, prickly to the outside … always looking backward. This is not how it was in the creative moment, in the first four, six, eight centuries of Islam, where it was constantly seeking out and absorbing.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

“Almost all Muslims, including the most enlightened, feel offended by Rushdie's novel or, rather, by reports they have read or heard about it. Very few people have actually read the dense and tortuous book, but they do not have to. The very idea of using the prophet Muhammad as a character in a novel is painful to many Muslims. The entire Islamic system consists of the so-called Hodud, or limits beyond which one should simply not venture. Islam does not recognize unlimited freedom of expression. Call them taboos, if you like, but Islam considers a wide variety of topics as permanently closed. Most Muslims are prepared to be broad-minded about most things but never anything that even remotely touches their faith… To Muslims religion is not just a part of life. It is, in fact, life that is a part of religion. Muslims cannot understand a concept that has no rules, no limits. The Western belief in human rights, which seems to lack limits, is alien to Islamic traditions… The fact that Rushdie propagated his heresy in a book is of especial significance to Muslims. Islam is the religion of the book par excellence.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Few cultures hold the written and printed word in so much awe as Muslims, even though the vast majority are illiterate. When a Muslim wants to clinch an argument he says, 'It is written.'
"Khomeini's Scapegoat", Times, London, (February 13, 1989).

“I believe in the religion of Islam. I believe in Allah and peace.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

"Presidential Candidates Proposing to Ban Muslim Immigration to the United States" http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/muhammad-ali-hits-trump-misguided-murderers-sabotaging-islam-n477351 (9 December 2015).
Context: I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world... True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion... We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda... They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.

“I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded.”

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