Misquoting Muhammad Quotes

“Many Americans and Western Europeans proudly trumpet the diversity of cosmopolises like London and New York without realizing that cosmopolitanism does not mean people of different skin colors all sitting around over wine at a bistro table complaining about organized religion. It means people who hold profoundly different, even mutually exclusive, beliefs and cultural norms functioning in a shared space based on toleration of disagreement.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

“It is simplistic and naive to explain jihadism merely as an inevitable growth from Islam’s ‘violent’ scripture, or as no more than a miscarried interpretation triggered solely by some tragic misreading. It cannot be separated from economic discontent, the enveloping context of US global power, America’s influence and military actions in the Muslim world and, most of all, the gaping sore of the Israel–Palestine conflict.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

“When a work becomes canonical its internal order and logic are guaranteed by the collective will of the canonical community. Its consonance with the known truths and reality outside the text is similarly committed to. What Frank Kermode referred to as the Principle of Complementarity is the willed assumption of the community that has invested value and meaning in a text that the text must make sense within itself and against its extratextual surroundings.9 It cannot suffer from senseless internal contradictions. It cannot clash with what is known to be true outside the text. What the biblical scholar Moshe Halbertal termed the Principle of Charity is the willingness of a canonical community to read its texts in the best possible light and in a way that defuses or elides contradictions with truth or order.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

“The metaphysical reality that creation was an emanation, an overflow, of God’s perfection, growing darker and less real the further it extended from Him; that human souls were caught too far out in this tide and yearned for the divine shore, traced its roots to Plato and a later mystical interpreter of his philosophy in Rome, the influential third-century philosopher Plotinus.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

“The main route for introducing change to a conservative interpretive tradition is to employ veteran tools from its repository to advance unprecedented ideas. But one must do so without seeming to break the coherence of that system or pandering too obviously to external agendas. Overloaded or pushed too far, even the most indigenous interpretive scheme will run aground.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy

“Not lightly should you transport aluminum trays of oily Pakistani food in the back of your mother’s car. This is one of many lessons I learned as part of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) in university. Through tragically not reflected in catering, a glorious diversity has generally characterized attendance at MSA events across the varied campuses of North America’s colleges and universities: the second-generation children of Hyderabadi physicians suffering toward medical school themselves, well-heeled scions of Syrian engineers from the Midwest on break from serial brunching, African-American Muslims bemused by immigrant angst, occasional pompously coiffed upper-crust Pakistanis expiating sins incurred while clubbing and the odd Saudi exchange student committed to bringing order to this religious soup.”
― Jonathan A.C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy