Explore Quotes by Feisal Abdul Rauf

I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.

The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, ‘I.’

We are Americans. We - we - we are - we are doctors. We are investment bankers. We are taxi drivers. We are store keepers. We are lawyers. We are - we are part of the fabric of America. And the way that America today treats its Muslims is being watched by over a billion Muslims worldwide.

In Malaysia, where Western culture was extremely influential, I'd grown up listening to Elvis and the Beatles and watching American movies. People wanted to be like Americans. In contrast, when I got here, I saw prosperous middle-class American college students wanting to somehow join the Third World.

Yusuf Qaradawi is probably the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.

We tend to forget in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.

We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony.

The world wants to like America. The guiding values that Thomas Jefferson articulated so eloquently - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - resonate strongly around the world, transcending countless superficial and cultural differences, not because these are American values, but because they are universal values, embedded in the human heart.

Religion is defined by the relationship between God and man. And Islam is the submission and the acknowledgment of the human being to the creator.

There are always people who will - who will do peculiar things and think that they are doing things in the name of their religion.

Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.

I am a supporter of the state of Israel.

I'm not an agent from any government, even if some of you may not believe it. I'm not. I'm a peacemaker.

'Jihad' can mean holy war to extremists, but it means struggle to the average Muslim.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

In spite of the polls, the fact is that American Muslims are very happy and they thrive in this country.

Any organization or any individual that targets civilians and kills them for political agenda is a terrorist organization.

God says in the Quran that there is only one true religion, God's religion. It's the same theme that God revealed to all of the prophets, even before Muhammad.

Bigotry toward any faith community cannot have any place in civilized society anywhere in the world.

The fundamental idea which defines a human being as a Muslim is the declaration of faith: that there is a creator, whom we call God - or Allah, in Arabic - and that the creator is one and single. And we declare this faith by the declaration of faith, where we... bear witness that there is no God but God.

Our enemy is not Islam. Islam is not the enemy of America; Americans are not the enemy of Islam. Our real enemy is extremism and radicalism.