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The evidence is all around us. There are a thousand ways in which our existence may be terminated between one moment and the next; a simple drug will… - Gai Eaton
" "The evidence is all around us. There are a thousand ways in which our existence may be terminated between one moment and the next; a simple drug will transform the most intelligent among us into an idiot, or the bravest among us into a coward; and we know from our reading if not from experience that techniques of torture, more widely practised today than at any time in the past, can destroy every vestige of human dignity in a very short time. Such human dignity as we may have - and the Viceregent of God is indeed a figure of great dignity - is a robe loaned to us, just as a woman’s beauty is loaned to her, just as our skills, whether hereditary or acquired, are on loan, as are our strengths and our virtues. We can claim nothing as being truly ours except for our weaknesses and our vices, together with the ill we do in the world; for the Quran assures us that all good comes from God, all ill from man. We do not even control the breath of life within us, and: ‘No soul knoweth what it will earn tomorrow nor doth any soul know in what land it will die. Truly Allah is the Knower, the Aware!’ (Q.31.34).
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About Gai Eaton
Charles le Gai Eaton (also known as Hasan le Gai Eaton or Hassan Abdul Hakeem; 1 January 1921 – 2010) was a British diplomat, writer, historian, and an Islamic scholar.
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Charles le Gai Eaton
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Additional quotes by 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.
Man is either Viceroy or else he is an animal that claims special rights by virtue of its cunning and the devouring efficiency of teeth sharpened by technological instruments... But if he is Viceroy, then all decay and trouble in the created world that surrounds him is in some measure to be laid to his account
Modern Western art, particularly in the form of the novel, has become an instrument of self-exposure and, in most cases, what is exposed is inner sickness. The novelist works out his 'complexes' in writing. He exteriorises his despair and parades before the public all the elements of ugliness and disease present in his soul. Muslims can only find this unspeakably wicked if they recognise it for what it is, but for the most part they are unlikely to recognise something so totally alien to their faith and to their culture. The freedom of artistic expression appears, from the Islamic perspective, no more than a license to vomit in public.
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