Author Topic: Alexis de Tocqueville on Islam  (Read 405 times)

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rangerrebew

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Alexis de Tocqueville on Islam
« on: February 23, 2014, 04:14:58 pm »
Famous personalities' quotes about Islam: Alexis de Tocqueville


Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859) was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he analyzed the rising living standards and social conditions of individuals and their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after his travels in the United States, and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.


Alexis de Tocqueville:


I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam... it is, I think, best described in a Marxian way as the uniting and justifying ideology of Arab imperialism. Between the New Testament and the Qur'an there is (as it is customary to say when making such comparisons) no comparison. Whereas markets can be found for books on reading the Bible as literature, to read the Qur'an is a penance rather than a pleasure. There is no order or development in its subject matter.... The Prophet, though gifted in the arts of persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both doubtfully literate and certainly ill-informed about the contents of the Old Testament and about several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the Prophet’s contemporaries, must have been cognizant... one thing I’ll say in this comparison is that, for goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not. [1]


I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself. [2]



[1] Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville  - Quoteland.com

[2] Quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville - Quoteland.com


http://europenews.dk/en/node/76910
« Last Edit: February 23, 2014, 04:16:24 pm by rangerrebew »

Offline Slide Rule

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Re: Alexis de Tocqueville on Islam
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2014, 12:43:52 am »
links don't follow.

The first goes to
http://www.epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=33&ap=1
on the topic, My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism

The second leads to 2 pages of Tocquerville, and on page 2 is the second.
http://www.quoteland.com/author/Alexis-de-Tocqueville-Quotes/1951/?pg=2



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