Words I Admired

I greatly admired these words by various writers and thinkers:

• Islam left people free to think and act as they see fit, according to the good use of the reason God created in them and urged them to use, to perceive the greatness of the Creator and follow the movement of life. By imitation I do not mean copying surface appearances, but imitating nature in its hidden laws, which the artist can cast through his fine sensibility. Man can always move forward in time and space, unless the ungrateful or the imitators stand in his way.
• The Egyptian is like a tree, with roots reaching into the earth and branches and fruit rising into the air. One cannot rest on the roots alone without the rest, or one becomes half a person.
• Good work is stronger than work that relies on the eye alone: the first touches the heart, the second goes no further than the pupil.
• Rationalism is the method of reason as the modern mind has formed it, with all its achievements and ambitions, founded on freeing the mind to move with complete liberty.
• In the sincere architect the principles inherited from the revealed faiths are deeply and firmly rooted, and openness to others does not shake them: he takes what is necessary for progress and leaves aside what contradicts the identity of his society and its ancient foundations.
• Islamic art took its spiritual substance from the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, while its material substance was shaped in other places where it found strength and life, built on the arts that prevailed in the lands the Arabs entered.
• Architecture is a true face of culture, as the sum of how human intelligence, thought and feeling meet the demands of the age.
• Building and nature are both necessary for beauty and comfort, and the functionalism Sullivan meant includes emotion as well as fundamental intellectual principles.
• Mosque architecture should keep pace with time. We must find a language that expresses the spirit of worship in Islam and, at the same time, the age we live in, with its construction methods and technology, while renewing the mosque's role as a centre of life as well as of worship.
• What was written of Cairo in the Islamic era, between 437 and 444 AH: that most of its buildings rose five or six storeys; that there were orchards and trees between the palaces; that plants were grown on the roofs, which became gardens for the owners; and that the houses were so clean and splendid you would think they were built of something other than stone.
• What has been said about why many of us lost our sense of belonging: the decline of the values and morals that had long been the hallmark of Egyptian civilisation; the loss of the ideals that guided one generation after another; and the collapse of standards, so that knowledge and honest work no longer led to advancement, while new values grew up based on hypocrisy, unrelated to the true causes of progress.

Written in Arabic by Mostafa Shawky. English translation.