38 quotes
That is my dream. But frankly, I do not know if Western feminists have the courage or clarity of vision to help me realize it.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
I believe the honor-and-shame culture can be discarded. To think otherwise is to define Muslims as as incapable of growth and adaptation, and I can’t think of anything more pejorative and racist.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
In the text of the Quran and in Shari’a law, men and women are self-evidently not equal. Muslim women are considered physically, emotionally, intellectually, and morally inferior to men, and they have fewer legal rights.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
The fact that honor killings can occur in Texas, New York, and Georgia makes the virtual silence of Western feminists on this subject all the more bizarre and deplorable.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
In a clan society, every kind of human relationship turns on your honor within the clan; outside it, there is nothing—you are excluded from any kind of meaningful existence.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
Controlling women’s sexuality and limiting men’s access to sex with women are the central focus of the code of honor and shame. Muslim women are chattel, and every Muslim girl must be a virgin at marriage.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
There are activist groups of every stripe on campus, yet nothing for girls fleeing Islam, no group fighting for the rights of Muslim women. When violence is committed in the name of Islam these student activists are silent.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
The liberation of women is like a vast, unfinished house. The west wing is fairly complete….
Go to the east wing, however, and what you find is worse than unfinished.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
We make our sons. This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man, and especially the firstborn son: the overblown expectations, the ruinous vanity, the unstable sense of self that relies on the oppression of one group of people—women—to maintain the other group’s self-image.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
The Prophet said, “I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.”
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
On campus after campus I would stare in despair at these confident young men and women, born in the United States, who had so manifestly benefited from every advantage of Western education yet were determined to ignore the profound differences between a theocratic mind-set and a democratic mind-set.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
The intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century and produced its greatest works in the eighteenth, is based on critical reasoning. It employs facts instead of faith, evidence instead of tradition. Morality in this worldview is determined by human beings, not by an outside force.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
Certainly much nonsense passes for culture in the United States, including an obsession with celebrities of all kinds. But that is scarcely representative of the vast wealth of extraordinary art, literature, and music produced by Americans in the almost two and a half centuries of the country’s existence.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
It is not only the prohibition against criticizing the Quran and the Prophet that closes the Muslim mind, and not only the life-long socialization of learning by rote. It is also the continuous construction of conspiracy theories about enemies of Islam who are determined to destroy the one, true religion.
The chief enemy is the Jew.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
The West tends to respond to the social failures of Muslim immigrants with what can be called the racism of low expectations. This Western attitude is based on the idea that people of color must be exempted from “normal” standards of behavior. A well-meaning class of people holds that minorities should not share all of the obligations that the majority must meet.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)
Even today virginity is the linchpin of a Muslim girl’s education. Growing up, I was taught that it is more important to remain a virgin than it is to stay alive, better to die than be raped. Sex before marriage is an unthinkable crime. Every Muslim girl knows that here value relies almost wholly on her hymen, the most essential part of her body, far more important than her brain or limbs.
Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (2010)