Aatish Taseer Quotes

I.P. was at that age when our sense of who we are, or of who we have been told we are, chafes against what we discover in our reading. And immediately a choice seems to appear: to let the reading show us the way forward, like water picking its course over unfamiliar ground; or to direct the reading, to channel the stream, so that it confirms what we already think we know. I.P. was among those few people who could do the former. He had a mind that welcomed doubt and uncertainty; he revelled in it, in fact; he was not one to ever make the perilous decision of deciding to know. His mind was happy to grope its way to its own conclusions, happy to breathe easy in a state of unknowing.

But he did not say a thing. Of late, almost as if he had been brought into line with the way people now spoke of the Sikhs, he had come to dislike the sound of his dissenting voice. It made him feel like a bore and an activist; and, like many people who try to fight an emerging status quo, no matter how ugly it is, he felt himself subdued, not by arguments, but by its casual tyranny. It is easier to fight the knowing bigot than it is to fight prejudice in the mouth of a child or the throwaway remark of a society lady.

A cultural Muslim: a term my father gave me when I asked him the same question. I used it now, not fully knowing what it meant, more as an out than as an honest answer to Kareem's question. I had learnt from my experience with my father that the term meant more than just a lax approach to religion: it contained political and historical allegiance to other Muslims.

I had begun my journey asking why my father was Muslim and this was why: I felt sure that none of Islam's once powerful moral imperatives existed within him, but he was Muslim because he doubted the Holocaust, hated America and Israel, thought Hindus were weak and cowardly, and because the glories of the Islamic past excited him.

For one of the peculiarities about prejudice is that it seems always to speak from the heart; it seems, in some daring way, to be speaking the truth, to be saying what others secretly believe, but do not have the courage to say themselves. And the man who speaks against prejudice can often come to seem like the peddler of shopworn banalities, while the voice of prejudice can seem bold and original; a lone voice with the power to drown out others, the power to subdue.

When you cause pain to those weaker than you, the guilt turns to loathing. Into a most secret and profound loathing, for we can never name it as such. We explain it away in other terms, but we, and we alone, know it to be the most animal of all hatreds: our hatred of weakness.