If Allah wants well for a slave, He strips away from his heart the ability to see his own good deeds and speaking about them with his tongue, and preoccupies him with seeing his own sin, and it continues to remain in front of his eyes until he enters Jannah. --- Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah
“Beneath his bare feet, like mother-of-pearl, is the pale marble of this amphitheatre at the centre of the world, and although he is commanded to lower his eyes when praying elsewhere, he is now permitted to raise them and look upon the Ka'bah, which is the earthly shadow of the Pole or Pivot around which circle the starry heavens. Although Paradise may still seem far distant, he has already come home.” --- Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man
"For, indeed, it was Islam that has carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God's creation and, thus, of His will. No demand has been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet's message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared 'Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim': and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. when they pondered the Prophet's saying, 'God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well', they realized that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute a fulfilment of God's will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, 'We create every living thing out of water' - and in their endeavour to penetrate to the meaning of these words, they begun to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology... And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that 'Whoever treads a path in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the path to Paradise'; that 'The student of knowledge walks in the way of God'..." --- Leopold Weiss (Muhammad Asad), The Road to Mecca, pp190-193. Quotations from the Qur'an and sayings of the Prophet reworded based on the originals.
A man came to the Prophet [Muhammad] and said, ‘O Messenger of God! Who among the people is the most worthy of my good companionship? The Prophet said: Your mother. The man said, ‘Then who?’ The Prophet said: Then your mother. The man further asked, ‘Then who?’ The Prophet said: Then your mother. The man asked again, ‘Then who?’ The Prophet said: Then your father. (Hadith Bukhari, Muslim)
"Sins are like chains and locks preventing their perpetrator from roaming the vast garden of tawheed and reaping the fruits of righteous actions." --- Ibn Taymiyyah [d. 728H/1328CE]
"Tūbā (glad-tidings; specifically refers to a tree in Paradise) is for every servant who knows the people yet they do not know him, whom Allah Knows and is well-pleased with. These are the niches of guidance and they emerge unscathed from every dark, blinding tribulation." --- ’Alī b. Abī Ṭālib [d.40AH/661CE] (ra) (Ibn Abi Shaybah, vol. 8, pg. 155 / Abu Nu'aym, vol. 1, pg. 77 - from Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali and Abu Bakr al-Ajurri, The Journey of the Strangers. Daar as-Sunnah Publishers. Birmingham: 2009.)
“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.” --- Adolf Hitler (?)
Ibn Hazm
