“[Islam's] greatest theologian, the Augustine and the Kant of Islam, Al-Ghazali... returned through mysticism to all orthodox views... even Christian theologians were glad to find such a defense of religion. After him, philosophy hid itself in the remote corners of the Moslem world; the pursuit of science waned; and the mind of Islam more and more buried itself... the victorious mysticism of al-Ghazali put a cloture on speculative thought”

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“Abélard—not merely a philosopher nor as a flame that set the mind of Latin Europe afire in the twelfth-century; but as, with Héloïse, part and personification of the morals and literature and highest fascination of their time.”

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“Avicenna achieved as well as any man the ever-sought reconciliation between the faith of the people and the reasoning of the philosophers marking the apex of medieval thought and constituting one of of the major syntheses in the history of the mind.”

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“Civilization is polygenetic – as generations are moments in a family line, civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history.”

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“Europe knows Persian poetry chiefly through Omar Khayyam, an advanced freethinker, constrained by prudence to bridle his tongue. He rejected theology with patient scorn, boasted of stealing prayer rugs from a mosque, and raised intoxication almost to a world philosophy. Picture him as an old savant quietly content with cubic equations, a few constellations, astronomic charts, and sharing an occasional cup with fellow scholars.”

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“For five centuries, from 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, order, and extent of government, in refinement of manners, in standards of living, in humane legislation and religious toleration, in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy.”

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“In a society where government, law, and morality are bound up with a religious creed, any attack upon that creed is viewed as menacing the foundation of social order itself.”

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“In every generation, civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority.”

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“In spite of earthquakes, epidemics, famines, eruptive migrations and catastrophic wars; the continuity of history reasserts itself and the essential processes of civilization are not lost – snatching them from the conflagration, some younger culture takes them up”

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“Mohammedanism, like Christianity, was a developing and adjustable religion which would have startled a reborn Mohammed or Christ... Sufi devotees abandoned family life, lived in religious fraternities under a master, and called themselves dervish (mendicants). Some by prayer and meditation, some by ascetic self-denial, others in the exhaustion that followed wild dancing, sought to transcend the self and rise to a wonder-working unity with God.”

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“Muhammad was an unscrupulous warrior, and a just judge... He perfumed his body, painted his eyes, dyed his hair. His senses were painfully keen; he could not bear evil odors, jangling bells, or loud talk. He was nervous and restless, subject to melancholy, then suddenly talkative and gay. If we judge greatness by influence, he was one of the giants of history. Seldom has any man so fully realized his dream. When he began, Arabia was a desert flotsam of idolatrous tribes; when he died it was a nation.”

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“No one who studies history (the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths) can be a bigot of race or creed and so naturally feels themself to be a Citizen of the World, a member of that Mind Country that knows no frontiers, no political prejudices, racial discriminations, or religious animosities.”

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“Procleus approached philosophy through mathematics… gave it a superficially scientific form but he felt the mystic mood of Neoplatonism too; by fasting and purification, he thought, one might enter into into communion with supernatural beings.”

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“Religious sectarianism... turned Western Asia from world leadership to destitution... into the poverty, disease, and stagnation of modern times.”

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“The Inquisition left its evil mark on European society, made torture a recognized part of legal procedure, and drove men back from the adventure of reason into a fearful and stagnant conformity.”

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“Upon Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and his native creed, Muhammad built a religion simple and clear and strong, and a morality of ruthless courage and racial price, which in a generation marched to 100 victories, in a century to empire, and remains to this day a virile force throughout half the world.”

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“What Dante achieves at last is sublimity. And because he loved order as well as liberty, and bound his passion and vision into form, he achieved a poem of such sculptured power that no man since has equaled it. The secret of his character was a flaming intensity and all Europe was inspired by his battle and his art, by his story of a proud exile who had gone to hell, and had returned, and had never smiled again.”

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