The Mantle of the Prophet Quotes

“Please excuse this slow-witted talabeh, who will have to read the text and the margins several times to make sure he gets today's lesson right.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“I decided that we should understand Islam in its root meaning. as the innate submission of the human spirit to God, as in the Koranic verse: 'Do they seek something other than the Religion of God while all creatures in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, have accepted Islam from Him, and to Him shall they all return?'
So my second reason for going to Tehran and then going abroad was that I counted all mankind as in some sense Muslims, and in that mood I decided there were other 'muslim' systems of thought waiting to be discovered which I couldn't find in Qom.

[A scene from Ahmad's conversation with Ali: 364.]”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Combined with this indecision was Ahmad's sense of being intellectually incomplete; he felt he had never really read enough and never studied enough to offer a firm opinion on anything. Privately he would assure his friends that they had no idea, they could not possibly imagine, how ignorant he was. In the semipublic arena of the dowreh on Islamic philosophy that he and Ali attended, when Ahmad entered the conversation he would talk brilliantly about a subject for a few minutes, then think up objections to what he had said, then think of things he should have read before he had spoken on the subject. Then, after adding several times, "What can I say? I don't really know," he would tumble into silence and, in his good-natured way, look even more deeply oppressed than he had before he talked.
It was no surprise that Ahmad published so little.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Ali, who had seen scores of his students go out to become mullahs of neighborhoods and villages, now thanked God he had the talent to remain in a life of learning, since he clearly lacked the courage - he was tempted to say the audacity - to tell other people how to live their lives.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Al-e Ahmad was fundamentally different from all the appropriators of his rhetoric. Even Shariati, who resembled him in many ways, never outwardly showed - and perhaps never felt - the doubts that Al-e Ahmad continually had and expressed. Ultimately these doubts prevented Al-e Ahmad from pushing any single solution as the salvation of Iran; he was the master of social and cultural critique but not of social and cultural construction. This failure was a mark of his extreme loyalty to and honesty about his own feelings.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Yet even for al-Ghazzali the law is the indispensable beginning; and when completely internalized, the law also becomes an integral part of the end toward which the spiritual quest is directed. Ghazzali writes: "Know that the beginning of guidance is outward piety and the end of guidance is inward piety.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Nowhere is the case for external obedience put more eloquently than in the writings of al-Ghazzali, the lawyer, theologian, and Sufi who is, perhaps, the greatest moral thinker of the Islamic tradition. [...] [Al-Ghazzali] entered a crisis of doubt that led him to question not only the possibility of certain knowledge of any kind, even certain knowledge of the soundness of one's own senses: "The disease was baffling, and lasted almost two months, during which I was a skeptic in fact though not in theory or outward expression.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Willingness to conform to Islamic law, even in the face of doubt, spiritual aridity, and dark nights of the soul, is the mark of a serious Muslim.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“For twelve hundred years Mullahs have been writing proofs of the existence of God. Believe me, I've taught theology for a long time - none of them is real proof. The only real proof can come through illumination.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Here he found that European learning, like Oriental bookkeeping, had its useless intricacies designed to keep outsiders where they belonged.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“The Shiah student of law, in attempting to reconstruct the subtext of premises and methods of reasoning that underlie these earlier books, is really attempting to reconstruct the mental process of their authors and ultimately, to read the minds of their inspirer, the true Legislator, God.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Sohravardi also found fault with Avicenna for not going far enough in another area, the master’s critique of the non-mystical theologians of the Islamic world. In Avicenna’s time these nonmystical theologians lived to the west of Iran, and therefore Avicenna called them “Westerners” to indicate not only their geographical location (from Baghdad to Spain) but also their unfortunate lack of interest in “Illumination” offered by the eastern rising of the mystical sun.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“The really significant way in which Sufism survived, however, was in the individualistic and highly philosophical form called erfan, mystical “knowledge.” The domestication of mysticism among the Shiah mullahs was largely the achievement of Mullah Sadra, although when he died in 1640 he probably had more mullah detractors than mullah admirers. He was a man who, after a formal madreseh education and informal study with the leading Shiah divines of his time, withdrew to a village near Qom to spend fifteen years of ascetic devotion and self-purification until he achieved the “direct” vision of the intelligible world. To see directly the reality of the world that philosophy revealed indirectly was to see through “illumination.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“introduced school songs, patriotic holidays, and nationalistic themes in textbooks, all of which made an ancient love of Iran into a modern nationalism.”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

“Iranian high school students learned how to draw microscopes and how to write letter-perfect descriptions of the way in which microscopes worked, but the microscopes in Iranian schools usually remained locked up as property too valuable to be put in students’ hands. The”
― Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran