Quotes from and about Islam

Quotes from the Koran (Dawood trans., Penguin)

Quotes from Islam's Most Famous Spokesman

It is better for a girl to marry in such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband's house rather than her father's home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a permanent place in heaven.

Ayatollah Khomeini

(Quote taken from Khomeini's book, Tahrirolvasyleh, vol. 4, Darol Elm, Gom, Iran, 1990, Source: Homa For more sensational and outrageous quotes regarding "taboo" issues, please see the Homa website.)

If one commits the act of sodomy with a cow, an ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed and as quickly as possible and burned.

Ayatollah Khomeini

(From The Little Green Book: Sayings of Ayatollah Khomeini, Political, Phylosophica, Social and Religious, with a special introduction by Clive Irving, ISBN number0-553-14032-9, page 47 Source: Homa)

Eleven things are impure: urine, excrement, sperm...non-Moslem men and women...and the sweat of an excrement-eating camel.

Ayatollah Khomeini

(From The Little Green Book, Source: Harwood's Mythology's Last Gods, 175)

Commentary on the Koran and Islam

Mohammed promised his followers seven heavens in which:

They are to cohabit with demure virgins...as beauteous as corals and rubies...full-breasted maidens for playmates...in the gardens of delight.... They're to lie face to face on jewelled couches, and be serviced by immortal youths...young boys, their personal property, as comely as virgin pearls.... We created the houris [dancing girls] and made them virgins, carnal playmates for those on the right hand.... We are going to wed them to dark-eyed houris. [The Koran 55:56; 55:58; 78:33; 56:12; 52:16-17, 24; 56:35-38; 52:20]

Each Muslim man, in exchange for a lifetime of mindless obedience, was to be rewarded after death with an unspecified number of pretty boys to bugger, plus eight heavenly houris, each more phallus-raising than the others and each endowed with the capacity to grow a new hymen after each bout of sexual recreation. The male chauvinist Muslim could thus satisfy his virginity fetish by deflowering them over and over again, for eternity. When one compares Mohammed's gardens of delight with the Christian heaven of harps and celibacy, it becomes apparent why significant numbers of Christian men turn Muslim while conversions the other way are almost non-existent.

William Harwood, Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus, 248

The thought of an old man becoming aroused by a child is one of the most disturbing thoughts that makes us cringe as it reminds us of pedophilia and the most despicable people. It is difficult to accept that the Holy Prophet [Mohammed] married Aisha when she was 6-years-old and consummated his marriage with her when she was 9. He was then, 54 years old.

Ali Sina

In 1992, Islamic assassins had gunned down my good and brave friend Farag Foda, a professor and columnist, a human-rights activist, and an outspoken critic of the Islamic militants. The murder had shocked Cairo and terrified intellectuals... Egypt's most popular preacher, Abdel Hamid Kishk, a blind sheikh who constantly attacked both the government and its official religious establishment. Kishk had been telling his audience that Muslims who entered paradise would enjoy eternal erections and the company of young boys draped in earrings and necklaces. Some of the ulema, the religious scholars at al-Azhar University, the governments seat of Islamic learning, had disagreed. Yes, they said, men in paradise would have erections, but merely protracted, not perpetual. Other experts disputed the possibility of pederasty in paradise. "Is this what concerns Muslims at the end of the 20th century?" [Farag] Foda asked in a column in October magazine. "The world around us is busy with the conquest of space, genetic engineering and the wonders of the computer, while Muslim scholars," he wrote in sadness and pain, "were worried about sex in paradise."... he was killed.

Judith Miller

Sharia Law practically means: stoning of women for "honor" offences including for the "crime" of having been raped; beheadings for apostasy or blasphemy hand/foot amputations for "lesser" offences; public hanging of homosexuals and outspoken women; incessant war against infidels and especially Jews; black slavery; female sexual slavery; FGM [female genital mutiliation]; no democracy; no human rights; everyone down on their knees; Mullahs as Gods; non-Muslims as dhimmis; no music except for drums (ask "Cat Stevens"); no dancing; public floggings for "sexual crimes" such as flirting or speaking with an unrelated person of the opposite sex; all women under the veil; prison rape-brothels run by the Mullahs; and so forth. It is perhaps the most cruel and violent system of human life and social organization which has so far been invented, and it came to the world from those populations once only living in the desert "dead heart of Arabia", but now lording over gigantic sums of oil-wealth, and spreading their vile doctrines all around the world.

James DeMeo, PhD

William Muir

Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam’s first two centuries – they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What’s more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the stand Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.... What the Yemeni Korans seems to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.

Toby Lester

So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana’a fragments will help us do that.

Gerd-R. Puin

The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt. Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic texts is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed.

Andrew Rippin

To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community. The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally though obviously not always in reality Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless.

R. Stephen Humphreys

There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century.

Michael Cook

My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants.

Gerd-R. Puin

...until the Crusades Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and... only then did it receive its independent character, while Muhammad and the first Caliphs are mythical figures.

N.A. Morozov

...the history of early-medieval Arabia is nearly all legend. Like Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and other founders of patriarchal religions, Mohammed lacks real verification. There is no reliable information about his life or teachings. Most stories about him are as apocryphal as the story that his coffin hangs forever in mid-air "between heaven and earth," like the bodies of ancient sacred kings.

Barbara Walker

The only real source of historical information about pre-Islamic Mecca and the circumstances of the Koran's revelation is the classical Islamic story about the religions foundation...

Toby Lester

The Koran claims for itself that it is "mubeen," or clear. But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesnt make sense. Many Muslims and Orientalists will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.

Gerd-R. Puin

[The canonization of the Koran involved the] attribution of several, partially overlapping, collections of logia [sayings] (exhibiting a distinctly Mosaic imprint) to the image of a Biblical prophet (modified by the material of the Muhammadan evangelium into an Arabian man of God) with a traditional message of salvation (modified by the influence of Rabbinic Judaism into the unmediated and finally immutable word of God).

John Wansbrough

. . . the prominent Egyptian government minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein...devoted himself to the study of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and ended up concluding that much of that body of work had been fabricated well after the establishment of Islam in order to lend outside support to Koranic mythology.... [T]he Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti...repeatedly took his fellow Muslims to task for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad's life, much of which he called myth-making and miracle-mongering.

Toby Lester

...it is time [for Islam] to assume, along with all of the great cultural traditions, the modern risks of scientific knowledge.

Mohammed Arkoun

For a long time scholars have considered Islamic origins as basically unproblematic. It seemed fairly straightforward: the founder was a figure of relatively recent history, amply documented, and many of his own writings and sayings survived. True, there had been a frenzy of fabrication, but early Muslim scholars themselves had seen this early on and moved to weed out spurious hadith (traditions of the founder's sayings and deeds). What was left seemed ample enough, as did the text of the Koran, the revelation of Allah to Muhammad. Even if one could not confess with Muslims a belief in the divine inspiration (actually, dictation) of the Koran, one still agreed the text preserved the preachments of Muhammad. The most recent generation of students of Islam, however, have broken with this consensus. Gunter Luling is joined by many in his opinion that Western scholars of Islam and the Koran had simply accepted the official party line of Muslim jurists and theologians regarding the sources for Muhammad and early Islamic history.... In fact, Western Islamicists had done everything but accept the Koran as the revealed Word of God. In retrospect one wonders why they balked at this last step!...

The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own....

[T]his means that all we thought we knew of the Prophet Muhammad is really a mass of fictive legal precedents meant to anchor this or that Islamic practice once Muhammad had been recast as an Arab Moses. And the question of the origin of the Koran is no longer "from Allah?" or "from Muhammad?" but rather "from Muhammad?" or "from countless unnamed Hagarene jurists?"... And it becomes equally evident that the line between the Koran and the hadith must be erased, for both alike are now seen to be repositories of sayings fictively attributed to the Prophet and transmitted by word of mouth before being codified in canonical written form.

Robert M. Price