apostrophe A

“In Islam, prayer is a full- body experience: you stand, bow, stand, kneel with your forehead to the ground, and stand again repeating a variation of this cycle several times You become part of a mathematical algorithm linking earthly and heavenly bodies. Your calendar is based on the phases of the moon, your daily prayers on the movement of the sun across the sky. Mecca becomes an idea with a location. You orient yourself toward it not with a compass, but with a Great Circle, calculating the shortest distance between the spot where you stand and the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca believed to be built by Abraham.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“God is the sovereign because He literally owns everything. Human ownership of any kind, including the absolutely unencumbered ownership of property, is merely metaphorical and ultimately unreal. It is at best derivative of the original state of sovereign ownership. (This explains, for instance, why in Islam the care for the poor is legislated as “their right” against the wealth of the well-to-do, since the wealth of the latter is God’s, and God’s compassion is first and foremost bestowed on the poor, the orphans, and the wretched of the earth.) If the physical world in its entirety is derivative, then it cannot have any real form of original possession, including possession of a law or a moral code. It is God therefore who is the sole Legislator, and it is with Him and Him alone that sovereignty and sovereign will lies.”
― Wael B. Hallaq, الدولة المستحيلة: الإسلام والسياسة ومأزق الحداثة الأخلاقي

“Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.”
― G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen

“Let us come to the point now. It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFOs are craft from a superior space-civilization, because this is a hypothesis science fiction has made widely acceptable, and because we are not altogether unprepared, scientifically and even, perhaps, militarily, to deal with such visitors. Unfortunately, however, the theory that flying saucers are material objects from outer space manned by a race originating on some other planet is not a complete answer. However strong the current belief in saucers from space, it cannot be stronger than the Celtic faith in the elves and the fairies, or the medieval belief in lutins, or the fear throughout the Christian lands, in the first centuries of our era, of demons and satyrs and fauns. Certainly, it cannot be stronger than the faith that inspired the writers of the Bible—a faith rooted in daily experiences with angelic visitation.”
― Jacques F. Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers