61 quotes
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)
[W]ith like-minded people one cannot discuss. With like-minded people one can only participate in a church service, and, as is widely known, I do not like church services.
I am not against migration. It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe.
Women like this never pressed charges. The prospect of making their way alone seemed to them impossible. They were convinced that by accepting systematic, really merciless abuse, they were serving Allah and earning a place in Heaven. They always went back to their husband.
Infidel (2007)
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)
What the media also do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist.
"..Closed groups who live in superstitious conviction that mutilation is good for a child, can not be expected to be open about such matters. As a result of their conviction, the parents perceive mutilation of their own child not as a criminal..."
People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
Infidel (2007)
".. Should Islam embark on a period of enlightenment and modernization? Does Islam need a Voltaire to call Muslims to break free of Superstition, to use their mind not emotions, to take note, as he did in 1800s, that "Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense."
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)
Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
Infidel (2007)
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)