At all costs we should avoid considering our love of God to be superior to the love of the other for GodLet us love God and leave it for Him to decide on the intensity and sincerity of our loves, as well as of our differing views of Him

300 years after the rise of Islam there were Zoroastrians in Iran. The Muslim armies never forced people to accept Islam. It was only within Arabia that God ordered the idolaters to have a choice of either embracing Islam or fight against Muslims, because He wanted to remove this terrible idolatry that exited there. But outside Arabia where Islam met Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus, they were given a choice by and large. That's why many Christians and Jewish communities survived in the Muslim world, but gradually many of them embraced Islam for different reasons.

Militarily, the great movements of resistance against colonial powers in the 18th and 19th century were almost all from Sufis: Imam Shamil in Caucasia, Amir Abd al Qadir in Algeria, The Barelvi family in the modern province of India, today which is Pakistan, and you can go down the line.

Islam, in contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, does not have monasticism; spiritual life, social life, they are all integrated and related together in one way or another. And the Prophet represents that in his life.

In the field of medicine, if you're sick you need a doctor. A doctor has already studied how to deal with your ailments, and human beings are imperfect. There any many ailments of the psyche and the soul that need to be treated, and the serious murshid, or spiritual master, is also really a doctor of the soul: a person who can heal the wounds of the soul in the same way as a medical doctor takes care of our physical problems.

At all costs we should avoid considering our love of God to be superior to the love of the other for GodLet us love God and leave it for Him to decide on the intensity and sincerity of our loves, as well as of our differing views of Him

When one talks about being like a dead corpse in the hands of a spiritual teacher it means being able to surrender one's will, specially one's nafs al ammarah, that is a part of our soul which is again a Quranic term, which commands us to evil - we must surrender that. That's what it means. It doesn't make you become part of a cog of a machine.