Non Fiction Authors From The United States

"A local oral tradition collected in 1844 further attributed to Pir Ma‘bari Khandayat the expulsion of a group of local Brahmins from their agrahar, or Brahmin village, at Bijapur.” Notwithstanding this portrayal of Pir Ma‘bari as a fierce wager of jihad wielding an iron bar, some recent works have interpreted the Sufi in a peaceful light. The Bombay Gazetteer for 1884 stated that around 1305 he came to the Deccan as a “missionary’ and converted to Islam a large number of Jains whose descendants are among the cultivating classes of Bijapur District... His name, Khandayat, literally means “blunted bar.’"

"(Pir Ma’bari) came here and waged Jihad against the rajas and rebels (of Bijapur). And with his iron bar, he broke the heads and necks of many rajas and drove them to the dust of defeat. Many idolaters, who by the will of God had guidance and blessings, repented from their unbelief and error, and by the hands of (Pir Ma’bari) came to Islam."

"‘During the period of Ala al-Din Khalaji (Alauddin Khilji, d. 1316), the Shah of Delhi, he (Pir Ma’bari) accompanied the camp of the army of Islam in the year A.H. 710 (A.D. 1310–11) when buried treasures of gold and silver came to the hands of Muslims and the victory of Islam was effected.’"

"Although we often hear the rather glib assertion that medieval Indian Sufis were primarily responsible for converting Hindus to Islam, the issue has not been at all closely examined. (...) In sum, the Warrior Sufi may be seen as one of the earliest products that arose from the contact between Arab Islamic and Indie civilizations. In their psychological appeal, philosophical underpinnings, and historical development, these two civilizations are diametrically opposed. Where the one is ardent, dogmatic, and austere, the other is reflective, syncretic, and sentimental. Where Arab Islam centers upon the submission to a single discipline and perceives society, the universe, and the divine principle in terms of unity, Indie Hinduism diffuses into an elusive aggregate of metaphysical systems, folk beliefs, customs, symbols, and traditions that collectively perceive society, the universe, and the divine principle in terms of plurality. By the early fourteenth century the Arab Islamic and Indie traditions had only just begun their long and tortuous process of fusing into what later was to become “Indian Islam.” Hence the Warrior Sufi did not represent a synthesis of the Islamic and Indie traditions, but only a transplant of the former into the world of the latter. (...) More than that, the phenomenon of Sufis using their prestige to lead, or as was more likely the case, to legitimize a jihad spelled the ultimate breakdown of relations between landed Sufis and non-Muslims. There is no record of any landed or orthodox Sufi in the kingdom at this time urging the policy of “peace with all” ( suhl-i kitll), a slogan that many writers have attributed to Indian Sufis generally. (...) Some of [the Sufis of Bijapur] wielded a sword, others a pen, others a royal land grant, and still others a begging bowl... Some were orthodox to the point of zealous puritanism, others unorthodox to the point of heresy. Indeed, this study demonstrates that the stereotyped conception of medieval Indian Sufis as pious and quietistic mystics patiently preaching Islam among Hindus is no longer valid. It is simply not possible to generalize about the Sufis of medieval Bijapur, much less of India as a whole, as any unitary group relating in any single or predictable way to the society in which they lived. They clearly played a variety of social roles."

"[T]he demonization of Mahmud and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842 the suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the (1839-42). Seeking to regain face among their Hindu subjects after this humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmud, after sacking the temple of Somnath, carried off a pair of the temple's gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By 'discovering' these fictitious gates in Mahmud's former capital of Ghazni, and by 'restoring' them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India's Hindus. Though intended to win the latters' gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain's catastrophic defeat just beyond the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus' ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since. From this point on, Mahmud's 1025 sacking of Somnath acquired a distinct notoriety, especially in the early twentieth century when nationalist leaders drew on history to identify clear-cut heroes and villains for the purpose of mobilizing political mass movements. By contrast, Rajendra Chola's raid on Bengal remained largely forgotten outside the Chola country."

"On the other hand, there is considerable evidence of colonial-era Muslim communities attributing to Sufi shaikhs – or in many cases, men who were retroactively given a Sufi identity -- the conversion of their ancestors. District gazetteers compiled in the 19th and 20th centuries are full of such narratives. However, such attributions are not supported by contemporary evidence."

"I have no doubt that more than 80 temples were desecrated by Muslims, just as there were probably more temples desecrated by Hindus than are in the record. Again, to quote myself, “Undoubtedly some temples were desecrated but the facts in the matter were never recorded, or the facts were recorded but the records themselves no longer survive. Conversely, later Indo-Muslim chroniclers, seeking to glorify the religious zeal of earlier Muslim rulers, sometimes attributed acts of temple desecration to such rulers even when no contemporary evidence supports the claims.”"

"Think of trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in which 30% to 50% of the pieces are missing, and you have no border pieces at all. The best you can do is to fit together the few pieces you have in order to construct a reasonable approximation of what the whole picture most likely looked like. An honest historian will admit that the evidence is almost always fragmentary, incomplete, or even contradictory. But what one cannot do is to try to fill in the blank spaces with pieces that don’t exist, or that you think “must have” existed."

"But as I mentioned in my published essay, the tables and maps I presented “by no means give the complete picture of temple desecration after the establishment of Turkish power in upper India.” And I concluded that “we shall never know the precise number of temples desecrated in Indian history.” All we can talk about are instances for which there is contemporary evidence, whether it appears in the archaeological record, in the epigraphic record, or in contemporary chronicles. And even those data must be closely interrogated."

"Ironically, one of the few things that Indian and Pakistani textbooks seem to agree on is in fact a falsehood: namely, that Islam grew in precolonial India through the agency of Sufi saints. There is little contemporary evidence for such a thing. Generally speaking, Sufis were not interested in converting Hindus."

"An inscription dated 1455, found over the doorway of a tomb-shrine in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh [mentions] the destruction of a Hindu temple by one Abdullah Shah Changal during the reign of Raja Bhoja, a renowned Paramara king who had ruled over the region from 1010 to 1053. ... Goel does, however, consider it more likely that the event took place during the reign of Raja Bhoja II in the late thirteenth century rather than during that of Raja Bhoja I in the eleventh century."

"One often hears that between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, Indo-Muslim states, driven by a Judeo-Islamic “theology of iconoclasm,” by fanaticism, or by sheer lust for plunder, wantonly and indiscriminately indulged in the desecration of Hindu temples. Such a picture, however, cannot be sustained by evidence from original sources for the period after 1192. Had instances of temple desecration been driven by a “theology of iconoclasm,” as some have claimed, such a theology would have committed Muslims in India to destroying all temples everywhere, including ordinary village temples, as opposed to the highly selective operation that seems actually to have taken place."

"Before marching to confront Shivaji himself, however, the Bijapur general [Afzal Khan] first proceeded to Tuljapur and desecrated a temple dedicated to the goddess Bhavani, to which Shivaji and his family had been personally devoted."

"When Firuz Tughluq invaded Orissa in 1359 and learned that the region's most important temple was that of Jagannath located inside the raja's fortress in Puri, he carried off the stone image of the god and installed it in Delhi 'in an ignominious position'."

"The notion that Babur’s officer destroyed a temple dedicated to Rama’s birthplace at Ayodhya and then got the emperor’s sanction to build a mosque on the site – the Babri Masjid – was elaborated in 1936 by S.K. Banerji. However, the author offered no evidence that there had ever been a temple at this site, much less that it had been destroyed by Mir Baqi. The mosque’s inscription records only that Babur had ordered the construction of the mosque, which was built by Mir Baqi and was described as “the place of descent of celestial beings” (mahbit-i qudsiyan). This commonplace rhetorical flourish can hardly be construed as referring to Rama, especially since it is the mosque itself that is so described, and not the site or any earlier structure on the site."

"Much of the contemporary evidence on temple desecration cited by Hindu nationalists is found in Persian materials translated and published during the British occupation of India. Especially influential has been the eight-volume History of India as Told by its Own Historians, first published in 1849 and edited by Sir Henry M. Elliot, who oversaw the bulk of the translations, with the help of John Dowson. But Elliot, keen to contrast what he understood as the justice and efficiency of British rule with the cruelty and despotism of the Muslim rulers who had preceded that rule, was anything but sympathetic to the “Muhammadan” period of Indian history."

"We realized that this wasn't something that would happen sometime, or later, or in a few years. We thought, oh shit, we have to do this thing now... I can still remember sitting at that long table with all those big-shots [in Washington, D.C. at the Bureau of Prisons] and marveling that just a few years earlier, I sat around with revolutionaries arguing about how to blow up those very buildings. Life is very funny."

"Mom, think of all the good things that could happen to us instead of dwelling on what might go wrong," I urged her unsuccessfully."

"Later, she said that life would have been much easier and more spiritually rewarding for her if, instead of channeling her energy and time to discredit Alphonsine and Anathalie, she’d stopped for a moment and really listened to the messages. After one apparition, Marie Claire commented that one of Our Lady’s greatest sorrows during her many visits to Kibeho was that not enough people truly listened to the loving advice and counsel she offered through her visionaries. Too many individuals came to the village simply to witness a miracle, and while their eyes and ears searched the heavens for a supernatural event, their hearts failed to hear the messages Mary repeated again and again: love God, love and be kind to each other, read the Bible, follow God’s commandments, accept the love of Christ, repent for sins, be humble, seek and offer forgiveness, and live the gift of your life how God wants you to—with a clean and open heart and a clear conscience."

"Then Jesus spoke: 'Mountains are moved with faith, Immaculate, but if faith were easy, all the mountains would be gone."

"I see thunderstorms around us now, but these are just baby storms,” the psychic told her. “The mother storm is coming. When she arrives, her lightning will scorch the land, her thunder will deafen us, and her heavy rain will drown us all. The storm will last for three months and many will die. Those who escape will find no one to turn to—every friendly face will have perished."

"I said the Lord's Prayer hundreds of times, hoping to forgive the killers who were murdering all around me. It was no use-every time I got to the part asking God to "forgive those who trespass against us," my mouth went dry. I couldn't say the words because I didn't truly embrace the feeling behind them. My inability to forgive caused me even greater pain than the anguish I felt in being separated from my family, and it was worse than the physical torment of being constantly hunted."

"We carried on like that through letters and phone calls for the next two years. And things didn’t change when Aimable graduated as a doctor of veterinary medicine."

"The world had seen the same thing happen many times before. After it happened in Nazi Germany, all the big, powerful countries swore, “Never again!” But here we were, six harmless females huddled in darkness, marked for execution because we were born Tutsi. How had history managed to repeat itself? How had this evil managed to surface once again? Why had the devil been allowed to walk among us unchallenged, poisoning hearts and minds until it was too late?"

"The more I prayed, the more aware I became that, in order to receive God's true blessing, my heart had to be ready to receive His love. But how could He enter my heart when it was holding so much anger and hatred?"

"This is the same power that I feel propelling me forward into the next phase of my life. God saved my soul and spared my life for a reason: He left me to tell my story to others and show as many people as possible the healing power of His love and forgiveness."

"Author says her father was so diplomatic that when people came to him for solutions, people not only accepted them, but they believed they thought of them."

"The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image."

"I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me."

"Instead of negotiating or begging for mercy, [my brother Damascene] challenged them to kill him. "Go ahead," he said. "What are you waiting for? Today is my day to go to God. I can feel Him all around us. He is watching, waiting to take me home. Go ahead--finish your work and send me to paradise. I pity you for killing people like it's some kind of child's game. Murder is no game: If you offend God, you will pay for your fun. The blood of the innocent people you cut down will follow you to your reckoning. But I am praying for you. . . I pray that you see the evil you're doing and ask God's forgiveness before it's too late."

"Faith moves mountains, if faith were easy there would be no mountains."

"Never refuse any who ask you for help; if your pockets are empty, give them hope. Your every action must be born of kindness, your every word spoken with love. Live as God would have you live, and others will be inspired to do the same."

"They can only kill us once."

"But I came to learn that God never shows us something we aren't ready to understand. Instead, He lets us see what we need to see, when we need to see it. He'll wait until our eyes and hearts are open to Him, and then when we're ready, He will plant our feet on the path that's best for us...but it's up to us to do the walking."

"I knew that my heart and mind would always be tempted to feel anger--to find blame and hate. But I resolved that when the negative feelings came upon me, I wouldn't wait for them to grow or fester. I would always turn immediately to the Source of all true power: I would turn to God and let His love and forgiveness protect and save me."

"The love of a single heart can make a world of difference."

"I came to realize that God never shows us something we are not ready to understand. instead, he lets us see what we need to see when we need to see it. he will wait until our eyes and hearts are open to him, and then when we are ready. he will plant our feet on the path that is best for us. But it's up to us to do the walking."

"In Rwanda, nobody wants to see what we saw. If things are working, we want them to keep going."

"I still get tempted today about anger, if a friend betrays me. I want them to feel the pain that they are causing me. But when I feel that anger that takes away my peace, I beg God to help me. I know for sure that forgiveness is possible."

"Forgiving the men who killed my parents and brother was a process, a journey into deeper and deeper prayer."

"For Tutsi to be able to forgive is an individual matter, at the level of the heart."

"Cardinal Burke emphasized the real importance of the Catechism published in 1912: it is not simply a religious and historical aid to be celebrated, and urged by the public, he stated that the Pius X remains to this day a firm and indispensable point of reference."

"Nothing has changed in the Islamic agenda from prior times in which our ancestors in the faith have had to fight to save Christianity. And why? Because they saw that Islam was attacking sacred truths, including the sacred places of our redemption. To say that we worship the same God as stated in Nostra Aetate, which is not a dogmatic document, I think is highly questionable … How can the God that we know, a God fundamentally of love, St. John says `God is love,’ be the same God that commands and demands of Muslims to slaughter infidels and to establish their rule by violence."

"The Remnant Interview of Cardinal Raymond Burke, Corrispondenza Romana (January 13, 2017)"

"(On the Amoris Laetitia) So certainly, without the clarification of these questions, there is a potential of scandal. With regard to the question of heresy, one has to be very attentive to material heresy and to formal heresy. In other words, material heresy: are there actual statements in the text which are materially heretical? Are they contradictory to the Catholic Faith? Formal heresy: did the person—namely the person of the pope who wrote the document—intend to proclaim heretical teachings? And the last thing, I don’t believe myself at all. And I think with regard to the first question, the language and so forth is confusing and it’s difficult to say that these confusing statements are materially heretical. But they need to be clarified, and to refuse to clarify them could lead people into error, into radical thinking with regard to some very serious questions."

"This situation leads me to reflect more and more on the message of Our Lady of Fatima, who warns us against the evil—one even more serious than the very serious evils suffered because of the propagation of atheistic Communism—of apostasy from the faith in the Church. Paragraph 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that ‘Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers,’ and that ‘the persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.’ In such a situation, the bishops and the cardinals have the duty to proclaim true doctrine. At the same time, they have the duty to lead the faithful to make reparation for offenses against Christ and for the wounds inflicted on His Mystical Body, the Church, when the faith and discipline are not preserved correctly and promoted by her pastors. If the Pope does not perform his duty for the good of all souls, it is not only possible but also necessary to criticize the Pope. This criticism must follow Christ’s teaching about fraternal correction in the Gospel (Mt. 18:15-18). First, the lay person or the pastor must express his criticism privately, which will allow the Pope to correct himself. But if the Pope refuses to correct his seriously defective way of teaching or acting, the criticism must be made public, because the common good in the Church and in the world is at stake. Some have denounced those who have addressed their criticism to the Pope publicly, as though it were a display of rebellion or disobedience, but asking him—with due respect for his office—to correct confusion or error is not an act of disobedience but rather an act of obedience to Christ and therefore to His Vicar on earth."

"The idea of a one-world government is fundamentally the same phenomenon that was displayed by the builders of the Tower of Babel who presumed to exercise the power of God on earth to unite heaven with earth, which is simply incorrect. What we truly need is a religious conversion, in other words, a strong teaching and practice of faith in God and obedience to the order with which He has created us."

"The Catholic Church is a church that has one faith, one sacramental system, and one discipline throughout the whole world, and therefore we’ve never thought that each part of the world would define the Church according to particular cultures."

"our Lord Jesus Christ who alone is our Savior is not at the root and center of synodality."

"Cardinal Burke: “Synodality contradicts the true identity of the Church” (October 8, 2023)"