The idea that if people are just friendly and demonstrate they want peace, that will be answered with good will – that is really naive.
AYAAN HIRSI ALIWe who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.
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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I’d like Muslims to look at their religion as a set of beliefs that they can appraise critically and pick and choose from.
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Let us recognize that we can no longer tolerate violent oppression of women in the name of religion and culture any more than we would tolerate violent oppression espoused by any other bully in the name of a twisted rationale.
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Many 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.
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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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If we don’t take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.
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I talk about a Christianity that is enlightened enough to separate spirituality from the rest of life. Not just church and state, but knowledge and church.
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When I was with the Labor Party, I’d get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn’t conducive to their policies or to electoral success.
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There are some mosques with facilities for women; it’s usually a back room with a back-door entrance.
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No one in the American Enterprise imposes their beliefs. We clash, and I think that’s what the West is all about.
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I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents’ culture.
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However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
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In Holland I have seen well-meaning, principled people blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, while ignoring criminal abuse of women and girls.
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Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
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In 2010, I suggested that if you are a good Muslim with a good conscience, go and look for a better God, and I think that was juvenile of me.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI