“Indifference to established religion is one thing, indifference to God another. The two are certainly not equivalent (except perhaps in the minds of a few Sunnis and Roman Catholics). While a man may have reasons, including good reasons, for being indifferent to the claims of various religious authorities, he can never have any reasons, let alone good ones, for being indifferent to God or God’s claims.”

A Faith for All Seasons: Islam and the Challenge of the Modern World.  (1960) Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.  

“If one wants to show atheists that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophies, it is generally an unsound policy to attempt to do so by altering the meaning of words like ‘God’ and ‘exist’.  By this colourable method, one could show many wonderful things. If belief in God merely amounts to, say, having a certain ungrounded optimistic assurance that the values we happen to prize most highly will be progressively realized, then we have won the optimists over to the cause of faith merely by linguistic legerdemain. Some attempts at re-interpreting the concept of God are in effect, if not in intention, tantamount to abandoning the concept altogether.”

“The point is elemental. The Christian thinker cannot have it both ways. If there are social dimensions to individual evil, then a right form of piety, in its confrontation with the evil of structures, must have the resources to deal with the social, not merely the personal, consequences of such evil. And this is particularly true given the fact that collective evil is very likely in practice to assume militant forms. To concede, as Christians do, that evil takes on a structural aspect, yet to deny the need for a corresponding form of reckoning that is alert precisely to this structural dimension is, in effect, to make for an unrealistic and immature model of piety.”

“Most contemporary philosophical views opposed to theism do not attempt to give any rational explanation of the world. The universe, the totality of all that exists, is, secularists claim, an inexplicably brute fact or datum neither susceptible of nor requiring explanation. How Olympian the serenity with which the modern scientist views the mysteries of nature! The religious apologist retorts that secularism lacks a metaphysic of ultimate realities. It is intellectually more satisfying, the defender of religious faith argues, to prefer some rational explanation (for the totality of things) to none. We obtain such a rational explanation if we discern the course of the world as being determined by value and purpose. Thus, if we adopt the heuristic principle, often used in science, of seeking to develop a coherent rational system, of accepting that hypothesis which makes the natural universe more of a rational totality, then theism emerges as a pre-eminently reasonable choice. The atheistic alternative claiming that there is no rational explanation for the world violates the deepest intuitions of both believers and sceptics alike in some moods. Should we not seek to do justice to the depth of our pre-rational hunches concerning such crucial matters?”

“No scripture is more dialectically presented than the Quran: protagonists engage in dialogue involving extreme, adversarial and existentially vital positions that require urgent resolution. Faith itself is a dialectical process involving certainty, self-critical introspection, doubt, self-inspection and repentance. Extreme and urgent confrontation is often didactic: it teaches us the true nature of our disputes and helps ascertain the correct limits of our ideological relationships, something easily overlooked or obscured by the false politeness of routine interaction. Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, three mediaeval saint-thinkers who defined the mediaeval millennium, upheld a concept of reason as dialectical. Plato, Berkeley and Hume, the West’s three philosopher–dramatists, did the same. As in rabbinic and Talmudic literature, reason was a method that was valued not for leading to the finality of resolved positions but rather for constantly refining views under the pressure of argument and the scrutiny of multiple intelligent challenges. This modest and progressive, tentative and probing, role for reason is also present in the Quran”. 

“In modern Arabic, a news correspondent is called a murāsil. In Arab Christian apologetics, the risāla is an apology for a doctrinal position, especially in the context of high-level public debate. We have some 60 extant letters from Timothy I, the Nestorian Patriarch of Baghdad who was in post from 780–832 CE. His The Apology of Timothy the Patriarch was delivered in the presence of the Caliph Mahdi, the third Abbasid caliph. It was intended to stimulate dialogue between Muslim religious scholars and the Christian subjects of the Islamic polity…The letter is more popular in Iranian and Indian sub-continental Islamic cultures than in Arab culture…The Iranian activist, Ali Shariati, the ideological architect of the Iranian revolution, wrote letters from prison, addressed to his daughter…while the famous Al-Risala of the Sunni jurist Al-Shafi‘i is really a legal compendium! While the ‘letter from prison’ or captivity epistle is rare, the idea of writing lengthy political tracts, even a commentary on scripture, is a staple of Muslim radicals who often languish in lonely cells, an environment that testifies to their piety…Muslims are bound to admire Paul’s courage and willingness to embrace the deprivations of prison and to learn to be contented and joyful under all circumstances.”  

“Rushdie revives the view that the Quran radically vetoes scholarship, for it already contains all of it. ‘Burn the books and trust the Book!’ Rushdie’s Imam, who has set his face against progress and knowledge, becomes the perfect Muslim. Yet the view is clearly laughable. For the scripture of Islam can claim the unique privilege of having directly inspired a major world civilisation based on a religiously sanctioned respect for literacy and learning. The early Muslims developed a great rational philosophical tradition which was itself part of the inspiration for both the Renaissance and the European Enlightenment. That Rushdie should choose to be a literary terrorist is itself a fitting tribute to the intelligent earnestness of Islam as a faith of the pen.”

Be Careful with Muhammad! Salman Rushdie and the Battle for Free Speech (2nd ed.). (2020) Jakarta: BIJAK publishing.