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.
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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Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.
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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 bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.
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They decided to let immigrants in and I am an immigrant. They gave us a chance to participate in this country’s life and I took it.
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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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Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
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But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.
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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.
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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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The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.
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I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.
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Every time you take a train, step into your car, walk into the shopping mall, go to the airport – every single time, something could happen. That’s how terrorism works.
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If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.
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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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I think of Canada, first and foremost, in terms of space. The amount of space available is breathtaking.
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Islam is not a race. Islam is simply a set of beliefs, and it is not ‘Islamophobic’ to say Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.
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What I find daunting always is to stand on a stage and talk to people, whether they agree with me or not.
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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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As soon as something like Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’ appears with a Muhammad figure as the main lead, directed by an Arabic Theo van Gogh, the controversial late Dutch filmmaker, we will have taken an enormous step forward.
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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.
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I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form.
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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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I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.
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Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn’t make it easier.
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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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My conscience is informed by reason. It’s like Kant’s categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.
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In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious…. The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person’s skin had burned off.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI