Those who know in their hearts that they are not really necessary — and are entirely replaceable — must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nat… - Gai Eaton

The independence movements in the colonies and protectorates came into being, not through return to indigenous values on the part of those concerned, but through the absorption of occidental ideas and ideologies, liberal or revolutionary as the case might be. The process of modernization - a euphemism for Westernization - far from being halted by this withdrawal, was in fact accelerated. The enthusiasm of the new rulers for everything 'modern' was not restrained, as had been the enthusiasm of their former masters, by any element of self-doubt. The irony implicit in this whole situation was tragically apparent in the Vietnam war, when the people of that country fought, not to preserve their own traditions or to gain the right to be truly themselves, but under the banner of a shoddy occidental ideology and for the privilege of imitating their former masters in terms of nationalism and socialism. The west was at war with its own mirror image in a vicious dance of death.

The Qur'an, set on a shelf with other books, has a function entirely different to theirs and exists in a different dimension. It moves an illiterate shepherd to tears when recited to him, and it has shaped the lives of millions of simple people over the course of almost fourteen centuries; it has nourished some of the most powerful intellects known to the human record; it has stopped sophisticates in their tracks and made saints of them, and it has been the source of the most subtle philosophy and of an art which expresses its deepest meaning in visual terms; it has brought the wandering tribes of mankind together in communities and civilizations upon which its imprint is apparent even to the most casual observer.

...the angels, for all their splendour, are ‘peripheral’ beings, in the sense that each represents a particular aspect of the divine Plenitude; no single one among one them reflects in his nature the totality of God’s attributes. The Perfect Man, on the other hand, though far distant from the Light of heaven, stands, as it were, directly between the divine axis and mirrors Totality. This is why man, when his nature is fully developed and perfectly balanced, is described as a ‘central’ being, and this is why it is possible for him to be the ‘Khalifah of Allah on earth’, the Viceregent.