"The Sufism that survived and even prospered was tame and promised to subserve prophetism. Some great Sufi poets like Rumi and Attar convey a wrong impression of Islamic Sufism in general; they have been its show-pieces, not its representative figures. Mainstream Sufism has been represented by its silsilas like the Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Chishtiyya, Dervish, Marabout, Ribat, etc. They had no independent ideology of their own and they only served the spiritual-intellectual categories of prophetic Islam; in fact, they became its most willing spokesmen. They never questioned its dogmas, not even its barbaric ideas about the kafirs, the jihad, the zimmis, the dar al-harb. There is nothing to show that they ever spoke against Islamic wars and oppression. On the other hand, as their history shows they were part and parcel of Islamic Imperialism, its enthusiastic sappers and miners and also its beneficiaries. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Dervish and Sufis have fought against the unbelievers in time of war. The devotees have accompanied the Shaikh or Murshid or Pir to the threatened frontiers. ... In India, the sufis have been an important limb of Islamic Imperialism and expansion."

“Whenever the mind thinks of anything, it also invokes its corresponding form. The form has an essential sound or name attached to it. In fact, according to these seers, all phenomenal existence is nama-rupa, names and forms. Of these two, names are even more important than forms. An object is merely an outer expression, a material representation of the more internal and essential nama.”

“If there is sufficient aspiration, invoking, and soliciting, there is no doubt that even Gods apparently lost could come back again. They are there all the time. For nothing that has any truth in it can be destroyed. It merely goes out of manifestation; but it could reappear under propitious circumstances. So could the old Gods come to life again in response to new summons.”

“As regards Ramakrishna’s “practice of Islam and Christianity” of which the Mission makes so much, it finds no mention in the Gospel, the earliest and most authentic account of Ramakrishna’s thoughts and experiences in his own words. In this work we find that though Ramakrishna reminisces often about his experiences and God-filled states, there is hardly a word about his so-called practice of Islam and Christianity.... It also seems that the practice of Islam and Christianity made a less than deep impression on Ramakrishna, for subsequently he does not mention on his own initiative either Muhammad or the Koran, neither Jesus nor the Bible. Not even once! Nor did he draw from” his practice such excessive and indiscriminate conclusions as Mission monks now do.”

“The fact is that the truth of harmony and human brotherhood derives not from an absorbed trance but from an awakened prajñâ or wisdom; and its validity depends not on any dramatic ecstatic visions but it belongs to man’s deeper vision and even to his natural reason unspoilt by theologies of exclusiveness.”

“Hinduism is like a great reservoir of water from which many streams take their rise and to which they again repair after passing through many strange and fair lands. It is a great, creative matrix giving birth to many beautiful and living forms. Itself a historical, it has given birth to many sects and branches with interesting, chequered histories. Paying sole allegiance to the Guide within seated in the cave of the heart, it has put forward from time to time many teachers and sages of incomparable power and vision, incarnating the very Gods above and within.”

“In Western thought, the body holds the soul; in Indian thought, the soul holds the body.”