Muslim Women Quotes

You are my only prize; the kids are a bonus.' Baba had a way of reassuring Mama of how much she meant to him. Their love story inspired all of us; they exemplified everything that was beautiful about marriage. They worked together as a team, they complemented one another. The sacrifices were many, but they never kept count. ~ Hani Selim

It is all too easy to draw conclusions and make sweeping judgments about millions of Muslim women based on fleeting television images. That is not right. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

Some societies, and some people here, too, have decided that if women copy the West and start wearing skirts and jeans, they will find freedom, or if they are allowed to go out of their homes to work they will find freedom, but a woman in jeans can be beaten as much as a woman in a burqa. ~ Imran Omer

Because the traditional mode of dress for Muslim women is so distinct - the headcovering, which is not there for guys - women carry a greater burden of representation than Muslim men do in non-Muslim societies. ~ G. Willow Wilson

The Muslim women that I have met are super-powerful and amazing and smart and they are, they're not allowing themselves to be held back by the laws that exist. And you know, the Internet exists now, and mobile phones are freeing up stuff. I have a really good friend who's from Iran and a really good friend who's from Kuwait, and they talk about getting music on the black market and how that's such an intense, amazing experience. And how they value the music so much more, because it's such a risk to own it. ~ Larkin Grimm

If you ask Muslim women why they cover up, ninety-nine percent of them will say it's to avoid arousing men. Fuck that, where's your self-accountability? ~ Michael Muhammad Knight

I, as a Muslim woman living in 1993, I want to have two things - the mosque and the satellite, both at the same time. And no one can mutilate me by telling me I cannot have the mosque or the Koran. ~ Fatema Mernissi

All the time she's silent. All the women were silent except the white one talking to Trent. If it wasn't for the red, green and gold and that the skirts are often denim, I'd think I was surrounded by Muslim women. ~ Marlon James

Identity politics is killings free speech on campus, silencing Muslim women struggle, boosting both Islamism and the far Right and pushing reconciled Muslim voices to the fringes. It makes implicit assumptions about Islam - from an Islamist, Left or Right- perspective - and insists all Muslims must adhere to that definition or be regarded not truly Muslim. It ignores the fact that most ordinary Muslims are not in favour of a violent and that in surveys and polls they support British values more than the general UK population. Yet the myth persists that the ideology of Islamism is the true expression of what it means to be Muslim. ~ Tony McMahon, Sara Khan

The ultimate decision [of wearing hijab] must be that of the individual. Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don't get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves. ~ Roxane Gay

With my veil I put my faith on display - rather than my beauty. My value as a human is defined by my relationship with God, not by my looks. I cover the irrelevant. And when you look at me, you don't see a body. You view me only for what I am: a servant of my Creator.
You see, as a Muslim woman, I've been liberated from a silent kind of bondage. I don't answer to the slaves of God on earth. I answer to their King. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

Let's not ask Barbara Walters about how Muslim women feel. Let's not ask Tom Brokaw how Muslim women feel. Let's not ask CNN, ABC, FOX, The London Times, or the Australia Times. Let's not ask non-Muslims how Muslim women feel, how they live, what are their principles, and what are their challenges. If you want to be fair, ask a Muslim woman. Ask my wife. Ask my mother. Ask a Muslim woman who knows her religion, who has a relationship with her Creator, who is stable in her society, understands her responsibilities. Ask her. ~ Khalid Yasin

It is not Islam that oppresses Muslim women, it is the lack of knowledge or the lack of application of that knowledge that oppresses. ~ Na'ima B. Robert

As Muslim women, we have been liberated from this silent bondage. We don't need society's standard of beauty or fashion, to define our worth. We don't need to become just like men to be honored, and we don't need to wait for a prince to save or complete us. Our worth, our honor, our salvation, and our completion lie not in the slave. But, in the Lord of the slave. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

The more I photographed Muslim women, the more I was able to metaphorically strip away the burqas and hijabs, and start chipping away at the profound misconceptions that existed in other parts of the world about these women and their culture. ~ Lynsey Addario

I'm amazed by the misconceptions about Muslim women and the Arab world that I hear, and that really does hurt me. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women. ~ Geraldine Brooks

We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men. ~ Jane Harman

If they (Muslim women) wish to cover their faces and isolate themselves from the rest of the community and so thoroughly reject our culture then I cannot imagine why they want to be here at all. Perhaps they should just push off back to their own countries. ~ Norman Tebbit

The theft of brown women's narratives is not only an injustice placed on them, but also one extended to their male counterparts; by insisting they need to be liberated from their 'barbaric' civilization, Laura [Bush] summoned the colonial assertion that brown women need saving from brown men, when, in actuality, brown women have suffered at the hands of white men more than at those of any other oppressor in history. ~ Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

The bedroom is like a game room where you can explore many things within halal boundaries as a couple. So go ahead and have fun in your game room. In fact, bloom without reservation behind closed doors. ~ Papatia Feauxzar

One of my brothers in my adopted family converted to Islam and I love him with all my heart. I have Muslim women who understand my pain and they give me lots of love and support. But what Black Americans never think about is that the African version of Islam is totally different from American Islam. They've never seen mothers doused in gasoline and set on fire for 'religious' reasons. So they don't know what I'm talking about. ~ Kola Boof

Muslim women, and critics, male and female, of Western models of sex and sexuality, are silenced. The price of speech for a Muslim woman in the West is the disavowal of Islam. Books condemning Islam are picked by publishers and featured on talk shows. Their authors are commended for their courage. Speech in defense of Islam is read as the speech of subjection. Islam oppresses women. Any woman speaking in its favor must be deluded or forced to speak against her will. If she defends the hijab or speaks in defense of polygamy, she cannot be believed. No woman in her right mind could defend these. Any woman who does must be deluded or coerced. The more Muslim women object to Western efforts to "help" them, the more need there is to liberate them. ~ Anne Norton

I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things. ~ G. Willow Wilson

For the jihadists, Muslim women who embrace Western mores, and wear tight jeans or mini skirts, are hated symbols of corruption that need to be eradicated. For the ideological mentors of Breivik, a similar disturbance comes from the burqa, which is banned in France and Belgium, partly thanks to their efforts. ~ Mustafa Akyol

To these women, the veil constitutes an extremely important part of the idea of 'getting dressed', whereas in the West the veil represents a symbol of male dominance.. ~ Antonia Young

I was born in 1965. When I grew up in India, there was no expectation that a good Muslim woman wore the headscarf. But what happened when I came here to the U.S. and the emergence of the Saudi and Iranian theologies in the world is that the headscarf became the hijab and the hijab is now the idea that is synonymous with headscarf. ~ Asra Nomani

Betty's a good Muslim woman and wife. I don't imagine many other women might put up with the way I am. Awakening this brainwashed black man and telling this arrogant, devilish white man the truth about himself, Betty understands, is a full-time job ~ Malcolm X

The Quran says nothing about the veil, except for an injunction to veil the bosom, which is obvious. As for the face, Muhammad's wife Khadijeh never wore the veil, nor did the other wives of the Prophet after Khadijeh died. [ ... ] The ulema have twisted the Quran with their hadith, always twisting it toward those in power, until the message Muhammad laid out so clearly, straight from God, has been reversed, and good Muslim women are made like slaves again, or worse. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Muslim women must stand up and speak out about who we are, what we believe and where we are going. I think we need to know that our counterparts in the west are also willing to listen and reciprocate. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

[L]iberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents' life or that of the "English," they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do what would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them "English." This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one's immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, ~ Slavoj Zizek

Who would care if I became pregnant, who would be scandalized? Aunty Eva, Anwar's flatmates. Omar would never know unless I wrote to him. Uncle Saleh was across the world. A few years back, getting pregnant would have shocked Khartoum society, given my father a heart attack, dealt a blow ti my mother's marriage, and mild, modern Omar, instead of beating me, would called me a slut. And now nothing, no one. This empty space was called freedom. ~ Leila Aboulela

The hardest [part] is some of the misperceptions that are leveled against me as a person and against Muslim women. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home. ~ Bruce Bawer

I am totally against the idea that a Muslim woman should not have the same opportunities as a Muslim man to learn, to open up, to work, help shape the future. To close Islam down to a sexist approach is totally intolerable and ridiculous. It's not Islam. ~ King Hussein I

Allah is the forger of time, the molder of space, the weaver of souls, the turner of hearts, the One who creates everything in stages yet is beyond the limits of time. Life is created from His breath, the cosmos forms from the vibration of His speech, and love is birthed from the womb of His mercy. He is the One who said, "Be!" to the vast nothingness, and existence sprouted into being. His words inspire light to break the darkness of nothing into the dawn of life. ~ A. Helwa

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? ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on. ~ Anna Quindlen

If you can't toot your own horn, toot another woman's! It's the best way to elevate women to be leaders. ~ Geraldine Laybourne

To every woman who gave birth, to every citizen and taxpayer, it's our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women of the United States of America! ~ Patricia Arquette

Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you." ~Homer, The Book of Night Women ~ Marlon James

Women are not the weak, frail little flowers that they are advertised. There has never been anything invented yet, including war, that a man would enter into, that a woman wouldn't, too. ~ Will Rogers

The limitations of these methods make it easier to understand why so many women might leap at the prospect of removing hair through prolonged exposure to radiation. First introduced by professional physicians in the late 1890s, x-ray hair removal offered several distinct advantages over other techniques. To begin, x-rays were undeniably effective at removing hair, as even the staunchest critics grudgingly admitted.37 ~ Rebecca M. Herzig

Compared with the male benchmark, women are represented as more community minded and pacifist. When political women discuss why women are needed in politics in discourses that support the assumption that women are active primarily in these spheres, they contribute to the normalisation of dominant discourses of femininity. If women bring a 'women's perspective' to politics, what do men bring? This is a question that is rarely posed. Men are the norm, and women are the 'other'. Men do not need to justify their presence : it is taken for granted. ~ Emma Dalton

The money our society spends goes to appease those with power. As such, it goes mainly to those who don't need it. A nation that redistributes income to its poor buys a civilized and humane society, and it buys this with a miniscule share of the national income and a modest reduction in the supply of cleaning women. A country that subsidizes workers in the prime working years sacrifices, not a dust-free living room, but the very muscle of the national economy. ~ Mancur Olson

You see, my father was short, and my mother was short too. So was my grandparents, and my great grandparents - I come from a long lineage of short men and women - not one of us was above five feet. We were as tall as the Chinese. I know that sounded racist, but that will only be true if I was tall, so you see, being short has its own privileges. ~ Nick Nwaogu

How can I tolerate the slightest inconvenience to them, the women, the children, the sick, the aged, the blind, the decrepit, that come for counsel, consolation, courage and cure?. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Most women have small waists the world throughout, But their desires are thousand miles about. ~ Cyril Tourneur

Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that's where to head, boy. ~ Hanif Kureishi

I listened - much as you're listening now, Dick, but it wasn't from curiosity, it was something more. I hated the thought of this world that must be lived in - the sordid pitiful lives of men and women, who can't get beyond their own bodies. I could see this girl, living as she did without the excuse of poverty - she wasn't any prostitute having to keep herself, but spoiling her beauty, her health, and her own precious individuality, which is greater than anything in life, Dick, because some man had taught her to be self-indulgent. There wasn't anything more in it than that. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

I'm passionate about the empowerment and healing of girls and women. Where I do the most work in that regard is in my songwriting. ~ India.Arie

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art. ~ Elizabeth Alexander

More Brazilian women earn Ph.D.s every year than do men. ~ Tina Brown

I already unleashed Baghra on Nikolai. He's going to think I stockpile vicious old women. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Using one's beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that's how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife. ~ Shannon Celebi

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them. ~ Robert Graves

I'm a pragmatist. I think, as a woman, you have to be more careful. You have to be more communal, you have to say yes to more things than men, you have to worry about things that men don't have to worry about. But once we get enough women into leadership, we can break stereotypes down. If you lead, you get to decide. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

If I meet God, I hope she's female. I'm touched by the power of women. I'm married to a feminist. And I'm troubled by the fact that women in our culture are congratulated most for losing weight. ~ Leonard Nimoy

I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.'
I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don't tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things that you're frightened of, you tell other men if you tell anyone. ("Nightmare") ~ Cornell Woolrich

See what's happening to our sisters around the world. I'm very interested in the protection of women globally. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

Marriage is a linchpin in many women's lives, but many other things can create a satisfying life. I adore my career. It stretches every physical, emotional, and intellectual muscle I have. ~ Geraldine Stutz

I don't get much sauciness, I'm too old for saucy now, but back in the day I think there were a few marriage proposals. And I do use the fact women approach me as a chance to chat them up. They never seem to mind too much. ~ Roger Lloyd-Pack

Alys told her that it was the way of women, to tote a newborn and then adjust as it grew until by the time the child was plump and heavy, the weight seemed naught. ~ Lois Lowry

There's a general sense that women are more relaxed and less defensive in comedy than they used to be. I think it's easier than it was but underlying it all there is still a pretty sexist view of women on stage, which to me hasn't changed that much. ~ Jo Brand

A Woman who is generous with her money is to be praised; not so, if she is generous with her person ~ Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

In response to [the Philistine] threat [in the ninth century B.C.], the Hebrews could no longer rely on the leadership of 'judges,' ad hoc military leaders (some of them, peculiarly, women; perhaps reflecting as feminists claim, and earlier matriarchal society). ~ Norman F. Cantor

Arabic is the language of the Qur'an, but Arab culture is not the culture of Islam. ~ Tariq Ramadan

For men there are costumes like fireman, policeman and vampire. For women there are costumes like slutty fireman, slutty policeman and slutty vampire. ~ Dana Gould

A girl has to dream and expect more. If women expected nothing from men, men would never amount to much. ~ Natasha Boyd

I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women. ~ Louis XIV

Women. You'll interpret anything as love. You see a man wearing an idiotic expression, and you assume he's been struck by Cupid's arrow when in reality, he's digesting a bad turnip. ~ Lisa Kleypas

In our minds lives the madonna image
the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model
the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers. ~ Lillian B. Rubin

As Harry puts it, men and women can never be friends because 'the sex part always gets in the way. ~ Nora Ephron

men and women perform a different sexual calculus. As Harper's put it perfectly: "Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn't. ~ Christian Rudder

Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade. ~ Constance Baker Motley