I’d love to go and visit the Mosque in Mecca again, just for the sheer beauty of it, not for God – much the way a non-Catholic might go to Vatican City because of the beauty of the buildings and the artifacts.
AYAAN HIRSI ALIMany people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn’t prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn’t have to beg him for financial support.
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The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.
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I have had to pay a price for leaving Islam and for speaking out. I have to pay for round-the-clock security because of the death threats against me.
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Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists. Equating all Muslims with terrorism is stupid and wrong. But acknowledging that there is a link between Islam and terror is appropriate and necessary.
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It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
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You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it’s your own child. And that’s what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.
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In April 2006, a Dutch court ordered that I leave my safe-home that I was renting from the State. The judge concluded that my neighbors had a right to argue that they felt unsafe because of my presence in the building.
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My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
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I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.
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Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.
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You’ll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist, I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.
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Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.
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The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my mother’s angels and djinns.
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Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other ‘isms,’ it’s far superior.
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I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI