{"author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali","total_quotes":37,"quotes":[{"text":"We who have the luxury of living in the West have an obligation to stand up for liberal principles. 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. And we need to say unambiguously to Muslims living in the West: if you want to live in our societies, to share in their material benefits, then you need to accept that our freedoms are not optional. They are the foundations of our way of life; of our civilization - a civilization that learned, slowly and painfully, not to burn heretics, but to honor them.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["islam","multiculturalism"],"id":5752,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["people","born","young "],"id":22369,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"It is easy to be disgruntled if you are denied rights and freedoms to which you feel entitled. But if you are not coherent, if you cannot put into words what it is that displeases you and why it is unfair and should change, then you are dismissed as an unreasonable whiner. You may be lectured about perseverance and patience, life as a test, the need to accept the higher wisdom of others.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["civil-rights","freedom","self-expression"],"id":23369,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"Islam influences every aspect of believers’ lives. Women are denied their social and economic rights in the name of Islam, and ignorant women bring up ignorant children. Sons brought up watching their mother being beaten will use violence. Why was it racist to ask this question? Why was it antiracist to indulge people’s attachment to their old ideas and perpetuate this misery? I read the works of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Mill, Voltaire—and the modern ones, Russell and Popper,with my full attention, not just as a class assignment. All life is problem solving, Popper says. There are no absolutes; progress comes through critical thought. Popper admired Kant and Spinoza but criticized them when he felt their arguments were weak. I wanted to be like Popper: free of constraint, recognizing greatness but unafraid to detect its flaws.Spinoza was clear-minded and fearless. He was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said. Reason, not obedience, should guide our lives. Though it took centuries to crumble, the entire ossified cage of European social hierarchy—from kings to serfs, and between men and women, all of it shored up by the Catholic Church—was destroyed by this thought. Now, surely, it was Islam’s turn to be tested.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["islam","multiculturalism"],"id":52452,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"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.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["coping-mechanism","insecurity","personal-responsibility","racism"],"id":75715,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans, would much rather ignore the fundamental conflict between Islam and their own worldview. This is partly because they generally assume that ‘religion,’ however defined, is a force for good and that any set of religious beliefs should be considered acceptable in a tolerant society. I can sympathize with that. But that does not mean that we should be blind to the potential consequences of accommodating beliefs that are openly hostile to Western laws, traditions, and values. For it is not simply a religion we have to deal with. It is a political religion many of whose fundamental tenets are irreconcilably inimical to our way of life. We need to insist that it is not we in the West who must accommodate ourselves to Muslim sensitivities; it is Muslims who must accommodate themselves to Western liberal ideals.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["islam"],"id":76707,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of secual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["infidel","islam","muslim"],"id":81502,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["democracy","god","government","holy-book","islam","muslim","religion"],"id":84953,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"...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.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["islam","politics","religion"],"id":86898,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"},{"text":"Many well-meaning Dutch people have told me in all earnestness that nothing in Islamic culture incites abuse of women, that this is just a terrible misunderstanding. Men all over the world beat their women, I am constantly informed. In reality, these Westerners are the ones who misunderstand Islam. The Quaran mandates these punishments. It gives a legitimate basis for abuse, so that the perpetrators feel no shame and are not hounded by their conscience of their community. I wanted my art exhibit to make it difficult for people to look away from this problem. I wanted secular, non-Muslim people to stop kidding themselves that 'Islam is peace and tolerance.","author":"Ayaan Hirsi Ali","tags":["islam","politics"],"id":87583,"author_id":"Ayaan+Hirsi+Ali"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":37,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}