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.
AYAAN HIRSI ALII 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.
More Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
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Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other ‘isms,’ it’s far superior.
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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.
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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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However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
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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.
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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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My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.
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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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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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But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can’t acquire knowledge.
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Bear true witness, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.
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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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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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If we don’t take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.
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The mistake that the Bush administration should admit to is not so much that they made the wrong choices. They made the right analysis; they made the right choices. But what they did wrong was the execution of those choices. That was wrong.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI






