Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

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.

Unlike the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth, the umma, or Muslim community, has no symbolic leader, let alone a formal one.

American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam.

There are sincere and reputable people on both sides. They disagree, but their disagreement has not undone Christianity. And neither side is blowing anyone else up over it. Week in and week out, rabbis, ministers, and priests do not stand before their congregations, preaching about the world to come and exhorting them to seek martyrdom as a fast track to heaven.

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

European children are educated in a narrative of human tolerance every day, and if you want to be sure to prevent a backlash, you should at least think of bringing Muslim children and teenagers into the fold of that narrative of tolerance.

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.

It's wrong to treat Muslims as if they will never find their John Stuart Mill. Christianity and Judaism show people can be very dogmatic and then open up.

Christians - at least Christians in a liberal democracy - have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state.

If they lived in Saudi Arabia, under Shari'a law, these college girls in their pretty scarves wouldn't be free to study, to work, to drive, to walk around. In Saudi Arabia girls their age and younger are confined, are forced to marry, and if they have sex outside of marriage they are sentenced to prison and flogged. According to the Quran, their husband is permitted to beat them and decide whether they may work or even leave the house; he may marry other women without seeking their approval, and if he chooses to divorce them, they have no right to resist or to keep custody of their children. Doesn't this matter at all to these clever young Muslim girls in America?

I'd like Muslims to look at their religion as a set of beliefs that they can appraise critically and pick and choose from.

If this incomplete ayaan hirsi wants fame sooo much then she shouldn't use religion as a base to be known. Some people justify their in justifications by selling their souls to the devil, ayaan I'm sure u have taken the time to read the bible. Do tell me it's stance on woman comparing to men ...

We have to start with the little babies who are born now, socialize them in freedom and critical thinking. We don't have to throw away their faith. People confuse the two, thinking if you are enlightened that means apostasy. It doesn't.

If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you.

If we don't take effective measures now, the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights.

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.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

Excision of my genitals didn't eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The

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.

I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves.

The idea that if people are just friendly and demonstrate they want peace, that will be answered with good will - that is really naive.

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.

The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.

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.

Where I grew up, death is a constant visitor. A virus, bacteria, a parasite; drought and famine; soldiers, and torturers; could bring it to anyone, any time. Death comes riding on raindrops that turned to floods. It catches the imagination of men in positions of authority who order their subordinates to hunt, torture, and kill people they imagine to be enemies. Death lures many others to take their own lives in order to escape a dismal reality. For many women, because of the perception of lost honor, death comes at the hands of a father, brother, or husband. Death comes to young women giving birth to new life, leaving the newborn orphaned in the hands of strangers. For those who live in anarchy and civil war, as in the country of my birth, Somalia, death is everywhere.

Muslim leaders should ask themselves what exactly their relationship is to a political movement that encourages young men to kill and maim on religious grounds.

Scheffer said a new ethnic underclass of immigrants had formed, and it was much too insular, rejecting the values that knit together Dutch society and creating new, damaging social divisions. There wasn't enough insistence on immigrants adapting; teachers even questioned the relevance of teaching immigrant children Dutch history, and a whole generation of these children were being written off under a pretence of tolerance. Scheffer said there was no place in Holland for a culture that rejected the separation of church and state and denied rights to women and homosexuals. He foresaw social unrest.

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.

A key problem for Islam today can be summarized in three simplifying sentences: Christians worship a man made divine. Jews worship a book. And Muslims worship both.

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.

Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad's decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.

My first experience in the Netherlands was very pleasant, extremely pleasant. I mean, I got my residence permit, refugee status, within four weeks of arrival. People treated me extremely well.

Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

As a legal text, the Qur'an reflects its origins in a tribal or clan-based society, particularly on issues concerning inheritance, male guardianship, the validity of a woman's testimony in court, and polygamy. This is even more obvious in the hadith, the compilation of sayings attributed to the Prophet or documenting his actions. This combination of the Qur'an and the example of Muhammad forms the basis of sharia. The derivation of these legal rules, known as fiqh, is the responsibility of Islamic jurists and takes place on the basis of ijma (consensus). When conflicts of interpretation arise, scholars consult the Qur'an and hadith.

The pope also knows that wherever radical Islamists become a majority they oppress other faiths. In Muslim countries there is no equal competition for souls, hearts, and minds, because atheists and missionaries and communities of Christians are forced to operate in an atmosphere of physical menace. And
although there are plenty of mosques in Rome, not a single church is permitted in Riyadh.

The argument in this book is that religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform. Non-doctrinal factors - such as the Saudis' use of oil revenues to fund Wahhabism and Western support for the Saudi regime - are important, but religious doctrine is more important. Hard as it may be for many Western academics to believe, when people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are not trying somehow to dignify their underlying socioeconomic or political grievances.

The West is duly terrified. But it should not be surprised ...

My friend, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was murdered in 2004 for having been insufficiently reverent toward Islam.

I want people to emphasize life before death as opposed to life after death.

The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.

When I was admitted to the University of Leiden, I expected to be presented with a single narrative of events and their significance and one explanation for why everything had happened as it did. Instead, the professors began every course with a central question; spent a lot of time on definitions and their importance; then presented key thinkers and their critics over time. My job as a student was to grasp the central question; to learn about the thinkers, their theories of power, political elites, mass psychology and sociology, and public policy; the methods by which they got to their conclusions; their critics and their methods of criticism. The point of all these exercises was to learn to improve on old ways of doing things through critical thinking.

We have welcomed fundamentalist preachers into our cities and stood idly by as thousands of disaffected young people have been radicalized by their rantings. Worse, we have made almost not attempt to counter the proselytizing of the Medina Muslims. If we continue this policy of nonintervention in the culture war, we will never extricate ourselves from the actual battlefield. For we cannot fight an ideology solely with air strikes and drones or even boots on the ground. We need to fight it with ideas – with better ideas, with positive ideas. We need to fight it with an alternative vision.

We must reclaim and retake feminism from our fellow idiotic women.

Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.

It even contains rules on what types of blows are permissible when a husband beats his wife.

There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.

There is a huge difference between being tolerant and tolerating intolerance

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.
None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation.

Mahad had done wrong, but I had been unforgivably trusting, which meant I was fatally dense. I had failed to be suspicious. I deserved my grandma's scorn. I was not allowed to talk back to Grandma, and Ma said nothing to defend me. I could only sob, and seethe.

Such is the tragedy of girls and women who by the strictures of their upbringing and culture cannot own up to their body's desires, even to themselves.

The Sudanese intellectual Mahmoud Mohammed Taha argued that Muslims should embrace the spiritual Islam of Mecca and let go of the Islam of Muhammad's more warlike and political Medina period, which, Taha argued, applied only to that specific moment in time and not to subsequent generations. Taha also campaigned against introducing sharia in Sudan. Though he still believed there was no god but Allah, and that Muhammad was his messenger, Taha was nonetheless hanged for apostasy in 1985.

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your

we need to stand up for our own principles as liberals. Specifically, we need to say to offended Western Muslims (and their liberal supporters) that it is not we who must accommodate their beliefs and sensitivities. Rather, it is they who must learn to live with our commitment to free speech.

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls' genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women's rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, "Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?" There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Isl

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.

I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.

If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status, we could do it as well.

A virgin's silence is the proper answer to a marriage proposal; it signifies a dignified consent.

Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck." "If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place." "Wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them." "You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them.

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.

Cultural relativists prefer to wrap the issue of sharia in the intellectual equivalent of a black jilbab or blue burqa and intone the old platitudes that we should be nonjudgmental about the religious practices of others. Why? The ancient Aztecs and other peoples practiced human sacrifice, tearing the still-beating hearts out of their sacrificial victims. We teach our children that this happened five hundred years ago, but we don't condone it -- and wouldn't if the practice were suddenly revived in Mexico today. So why do we condone the 'sacrifice' of women or homosexuals or lapsed Muslims for 'crimes' such as apostasy, adultery, blasphemy, marrying outside of their faith, or simply wishing to marry the partner of their choice? Why, aside from the publication of reports by human rights organizations, is there no discernible reaction? In the twenty-first century, I believe that all decent human beings can agree that such barbarous acts should not be tolerated. They can and must be condemned and prosecuted as crimes, not accepted as legitimate punishments. The abuses carried out under sharia are irrefutable. If we are to have any hope for a more peaceful, more stable planet, these punishments must be set aside.

Why is it so hard to question anything about Islam? The obvious answer is that there is now an internationally organized 'honor brigade' that exists to prevent such questioning. The deeper historical answer may lie in the fear of many Muslim clerics that allowing critical thought might lead many to leave Islam. [...] a staunch Medina Muslim and a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said: 'If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam would not exist today.' [...] The clerics fear that even the smallest questions will lead to doubt, doubt will lead to more questions, and ultimately the questioning mind will demand not only answers but also innovations.

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.

You'll be pleased to hear, Christopher, that I am no longer a Muslim liberal but an atheist [ ... ] I find that it obviates the necessity for any cognitive dissonance.

You must learn what to fear and what not to fear.

This wasn't just a band of frustrated Egyptian architects in Hamburg. It was much bigger than that,. and had nothing to do with frustration. It was about belief.

We walked into my mother's house at 10:30 in the morning at the end of February 1992. I had been gone for three weeks. She had been so desperate about us - she, too, looked thin and haggard. She was stunned to see me walk in, filthy and crawling with lice, with a huge crowd of starving people.
We ate and drank clean water; then, before we even washed, I put Marian in a taxi with me and told the driver to go to Nairobi Hospital. We had no money left and I knew Nairobi Hospital was expensive; it was where I had been operated on when the ma'alim broke my skull. But I also knew that there they would help us first and ask to pay later. Saving the baby's life had become the only thing that mattered to me.
At the reception desk I announced, "This baby is going to die," and the nurse's eyes went wide with horror. She took him and put a drip in his arm, and very slowly, this tiny shape seemed to uncrumple slightly. After a little while, his eyes opened.
The nurse said, "The child will live," and told us to deal with the bill at the cash desk. I asked her who her director was, and found him, and told this middle-aged Indian doctor the whole story. I said I couldn't pay the bill. He took it and tore it up. He said it didn't matter. Then he told me how to look after the baby, and where to get rehydration salts, and we took a taxi home.
Ma paid for the taxi and looked at me, her eyes round with respect. "Well done," she said. It was a rare compliment.
In the next

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.

Liberal capitalism is not perfect, but compared to the other 'isms,' it's far superior.

You obey, and you serve Allah - that is the test. If you submit to God's will on earth, you will attain bliss in the Hereafter. The rule is strict and pure. My doubts severely diminished my chances for eternal bliss, but I found that I couldn't ignore them. I had to resolve this. *

we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.

You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it's your own child. And that's what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.

I would rather clean than beg.

I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was 22, and became a member of Parliament in Holland.

I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.

All scriptures contain contradictions and the Qur'an is no exception.

The overarching message of Boqol Sawm was that this life is temporary. If you lived outside the dictates of the Prophet you would burn in hell for the duration of your real life, the afterlife. But if you lived righteously, Allah would reward you in paradise. And men in particular would receive special blessings if they became warriors for Allah.

I cannot emphasize enough how wrongheaded this is. Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness. The experts may have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

There is in fact no good reason al-Ghazali and his ilk should have the last word in defining Islam. Muslims around the world cannot go on claiming that "true" Islam has somehow been "hijacked" by a group of extremists. Instead they must acknowledge that inducements to violence lie at the root of their own most sacred texts, and take responsibility for actively redefining their faith.

In response to the question "Do you favor or oppose making sharia law, or Islamic law, the official law of the land in our country?" the nations with the five largest Muslim populations - Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (178 million), Bangladesh (149 million), Egypt (80 million), and Nigeria (76 million) - showed overwhelming support for sharia. To be precise, 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims, 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims, 82 percent of Bangladeshi Muslims, 74 percent of Egyptian Muslims, and 71 percent of Nigerian Muslims supported making sharia the state law of their respective societies. In two Islamic nations that are considered to be transitioning to democracy, the number of sharia supporters was even higher. Pew found that 91 percent of Iraqi Muslims and 99 percent of Afghan Muslims supported making sharia their country's official law.

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

I accept that there are multitudes seeking God, seeking meaning, and so on, but if they reject atheism, I would rather they became modern-day Catholics or Jews than that they became Muslims.

We 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.

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.

Finally Abdellahi Moussa Boqor asked, "So why are you doing this?" I paused for a moment, and then the words just came out of my mouth. "It is the will of the soul," I said. "The soul cannot be coerced.

I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be
a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent - always - on someone treating me well.
I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it, and now I could see it, smell it in the air around me: the kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own.

This was not an attack by a mentally deranged, lone-wolf gunman. This was not an 'un-Islamic' attack by a bunch of thugs - the perpetrators could be heard shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. Nor was it spontaneous. It was planned to inflict maximum damage, during a staff meeting, with automatic weapons and a getaway plan. It was designed to sow terror, and in that it has worked.

It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.

I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.

In these pages, it is my intention to make many people - not only Muslims but also Western apologists for Islam - uncomfortable. I am not going to do this by drawing cartoons. Rather, I intend to challenge centuries of religious orthodoxy with ideas and arguments that I am certain will be denounced as heretical. My argument is for nothing less than a Muslim Reformation. Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam's core concepts, I believe, we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion. I intend to speak freely, in the hope that others will debate equally freely with me on what needs to change in Islamic doctrine, rather than seeking to stifle discussion.

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?

both the immigrants from the tribe and bloodline and the activists of prosperity share a common delusion: they believe that it is possible to make this transition without paying the price of choosing between values. One side wants change in their circumstances without letting go of tradition; the other, overcome with guilt and pity, wants to help newcomers with the material change but cannot bring themselves to demand that they excise traditional, outdated values from their outlook.

The morning after the 9/11 attacks...we began talking about the Twin Towers attack. Ruud shook his head sadly about it all. He said, "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?"
I couldn't help myself...I blurted out, "But it *is* about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam."
Ruud said, "Ayaan, of course these people may have been Muslims, but they are a lunatic fringe. We have extremist Christians, too, who interpret the bible literally. Most Muslims do not believe these things. To say so is to disparage a faith which is the second largest religion in the world, and which is civilized, and peaceful."
I walked into the office thinking, "I have to wake these people up."...The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion hadn't been present in Holland for centuries. It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.

What matters is abuse, and how it is anchored in a religion that denies women their rights as humans. What matters is that atrocities against women and children are carried out in Europe. What matters is that governments and societies must stop hiding behind a hollow pretense of tolerance so that they can recognize and deal with the problem.

The exercise of my reason itself was forbidden. But the questions never stopped coming, eventually leading to this one: "Why would a benevolent God set up the world like this, marking one half of the population to be second-class citizens? Or was it just men who did this?

Confronted with such flagrant acts of intolerance - such abuses of the freedom of speech - a free society must surely do more. For intolerance is the one thing a free society cannot afford to tolerate.

In 1985 as a teenager in Kenya, I was an adamant member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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.