Ideas Inspired by the Qur'an

What This Book is About

• Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an is my way of overcoming the spiritual, intellectual, and emotional fissures between faith and thought, between a declining Western civilization and an Islamic world-view seen as ever more obsolete, and between the Qur’an and the human heart.

• This book is, in many ways, the outcome of more than forty years of pondering, wondering, and wandering through three very different cultures — Western, Islamic, and Southeast Asian.

• In the Prologue, I explain my purpose in writing: “This particular path of mine may not be right for you, but if it helps even one person on his or her own way (and perhaps just me), then this encounter of ours will have been a happy one.

• The Qur’an is a dhikr — a reminder of our own true Mind and Minder. GOD is telling us, in a voice that we can almost remember from our primal past, that He loved us before He made us, that we belong to Him as surely as our thoughts belong to us, and that we know GOD better than we know ourselves.