A collection of quotations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on atheism, death, life, tolerance, cowardice, motivation, Islam, feminism, women, activist, politics and rights.
27 Powerful Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes That Are Sure To Move You
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an activist, politician, feminist and writer. She is known to for fighting against all odds for the rights of Islamic women. After completing her graduation she joined the Netherland’s Labor Party as a researcher on immigration issues where she strongly criticized the Dutch laws towards immigrants. This helped her to shift to the liberal People’s Party where she was elected to the Dutch Parliament. During her term in the Parliament, she was known for her straightforward stance on the treatment of ladies in Islam. She further came into the limelight as an activist when she collaborated with the director ‘Theo Van Gogh’ to make the controversial documentary ‘Submission’ which described the abuse of Islamic women. This created a lot of controversy and eventually made her resign from the parliament. Thereafter, she moved to the U.S. There she published her debut novel ‘The Caged Virgin’ which aimed at the absence of intervention by western societies in Islamic countries to stop women abuse. She further wrote a couple of novels which justified her reputation as a feminist. Her contributions as an activist were honored by various awards including the ‘European Bellwether prize’. Here is a compilation of quotes and thoughts by Ayaan Hirsi Ali which have been excerpted from her writings, books, speeches, interviews and work. Go through these notable sayings and quotations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on freedom, self-expression, human rights, infidel, Muslims, fear, veil and liberalism.
There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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.
Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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.
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.
As a reader, I could put on someone else's shoes and live through his adventures, borrow his individuality and make choices that I didn't have at home.
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.
Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.
This move is called Qworegoys,
and the women of my grandmother's family taught it to their daughters just as they taught them to make thorn-bush fences to protect the hut from hyenas.
Adults never explained anything. They saw children as akin to small animals, creatures who had to be tugged and beaten into adulthood before they were worthy of information and discussion.
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.
Force and rape are not an issue because he is a believing Muslim and he is an Osman Mahamud.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In short, the liberation of the individual conscience from hierarchical and priestly authority opened up space for critical thinking in every field of human activity.
