Lesley Hazleton Quotes & Sayings

How did the infant sent away from his family grow up to redefine the whole concept of family and tribe into something far larger: the umma, the people or the community of Islam? — Lesley Hazleton

In more metaphysical terms, it becomes a safe place in which one sleeps, dreams, and grows before emerging back into the world. Either way, it's a place not merely of shelter, but of incubation. — Lesley Hazleton

Where belief tries to expel doubt, faith walks with it, offering no easy answers. Belief insists, while faith hopes and trusts. The one is demanded, the other freely given, and this freedom means that real faith is both difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand-in-hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it. And sometimes even in conscious defiance of it. — Lesley Hazleton

Muhammad's is one of those rare lives that is more dramatic in reality than in legend. In fact the less one invokes the miraculous, the more extraordinary his life becomes. What emerges is something grander precisely because it is human, to the extent that his actual life reveals itself worthy of the word 'legendary'. — Lesley Hazleton

Caves have carried strong symbolic resonance for as long as there has been sacred legend. It might be tempting to say that it began with Plato's "allegory of the cave" in The Republic, which explores the interplay between shadows and reality (or in contemporary terms, perhaps, between virtual and actual reality). — Lesley Hazleton

The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. — Lesley Hazleton

I'm always asking questions - not to find 'answers,' but to see where the questions lead. Dead ends sometimes? That's fine. New directions? Interesting. Great insights? Over-ambitious. A glimpse here and there? Perfect. — Lesley Hazleton

There is no perfect solution to depression, nor should there be. And odd as this may sound we should be glad of that. It keeps us human. — Lesley Hazleton

Whether you think the words he heard came from inside himself or from outside, it is clear that Muhammad experienced them, and with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world. — Lesley Hazleton

Yet the greater the turmoil inside him, the more the revelations responded to it. It was as though the Quranic voice was able to see deep inside him and address questions he was barely aware he was asking. — Lesley Hazleton

Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten. — Lesley Hazleton

Everything is paradox. The danger is one-dimensional thinking. — Lesley Hazleton

We need many more intrepid women who set out to expand both their and our concepts of the world. We need them in writing just as we need them in politics. We need that sense of adventure, of reaching wider, delving deeper, pushing further afield, whether that field be geographical, intellectual, political, personal, or all of these and more. Enough with decorousness. Let us risk preconceptions and treasured philosophies, bodies and souls. Let us be big and bawdy and full of courage. Let's go. — Lesley Hazleton

Female infanticide was as high in Mecca as in Constantinople, Athens, and Rome - a practice the Quran was to address directly and condemn repeatedly. — Lesley Hazleton

Treated by his own people as one of them yet not one of them, he couldn't help but be aware of the contradictions inherent in a society that was supposed to be his, but seemed to have no place for him. — Lesley Hazleton

All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith. — Lesley Hazleton

Suffering, once accepted, loses its edge, for the terror of it lessens, and what remains is generally far more manageable than we had imagined. — Lesley Hazleton

Machiavelli himself famously put it: "All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief."9 — Lesley Hazleton

Spiritual but not religious" is an expression of a very human yearning for an opening of mind and heart - a sense of soul and spirit that enhances day-to-day experience instead of tamping it down and channeling it into the narrow confines of stick-and-carrot orthodoxy. It's a rejection of traditional tenets and pieties, of doctrine and dogma and judgment. It resists the usual attempts to pigeonhole, saying, "Spare me your labels." It is, at heart, agnostic. - — Lesley Hazleton

She soars with eagles and navigates by rainbows. — Lesley Hazleton

All ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others. — Lesley Hazleton

Because prophetic it definitely was, placing itself explicitly in the tradition of previous prophets from Moses down through the ages to Jesus. "Say: 'We believe in God and in that which has been revealed to us; in what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes of Israel; to Moses and Jesus and the other prophets. — Lesley Hazleton