Women covering their heads is traditional, but now we’re seeing more and more women covering themselves from head to toe. This is said to be for religious reasons but it’s actually the conflation of religion and politics – every political movement has its slogans, flags and dress.
AYAAN HIRSI ALII love life more than I love death.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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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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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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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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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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If we don’t take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.
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Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and main on religious grounds.
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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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There are some mosques with facilities for women; it’s usually a back room with a back-door entrance.
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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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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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I lived in countries that had no democracy. so I don’t find myself in the same luxury as you do. You grew up in freedom, and you can spit on freedom because you don’t know what it is not to have freedom.
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What we are now doing with the victory, and I agree with you if you condemn that and I condemn whole-heartedly the trivial bullshit it is to go after a man who makes a scientific breakthrough and all that we as women — organized women — do is to fret about his shirt?
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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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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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It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage.
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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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I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.
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My brother thinks it is very, very bad that I left Islam. My half-sister wants to convert me back; I want to convert her to Western values. My mum is terrified that when I die, and we all go to God, I will be burned.
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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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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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I come from a world where the word ‘trauma’ doesn’t exist, because we are too poor. I didn’t have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn’t all that bad.
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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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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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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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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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Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI