“When we therefore want to locate the origin of the economic development of current civilization, it is not this or that invention (…) that we must put at this origin, but all the historical circumstances in which all the ideas germinated , all the creations, all the productions of this civilization. »

“(…) in a first global definition, [we can] consider culture as an atmosphere made up of colors, sounds, shapes, movements, familiar things, landscapes, figures, diffuse ideas. It is an atmosphere which exerts its action on the shepherd and the scholar at the same time. It is the environment in which the individual's psychic being is formed, just as his physical being is formed in the biosphere. We don't learn a culture, we breathe it and assimilate it like oxygen in the air. »

“The prejudice is inherited from this bulitics, which, through confusion, was called politics and separated the idea from the action, so that one remains powerless and the other blind. It resulted in these anti-intellectual demonstrations which appeared quite frequently in our nationalist movement. »

“[Democracy] is the culmination of a culture, the crowning of a humanism, that is to say of a certain evaluation of man on his own scale and on the scale of others (…) we must ask ourselves if Islam can increase the feeling towards oneself and towards others, compatible with the functioning of democracy in the psychology of the individual and if it can create the general social conditions favorable to the maintenance and development of democratic feeling as well as its effectiveness. »

“The apologetic literature of the Enlightenment centuries of Muslim civilization thus played this dual role. It allowed in a certain phase an adequate response to the impact of Western culture while preserving, to a certain extent, the Muslim personality. But in this personality there was a taste for the marvelous instead of a sense of efficiency. »