Veil Muslim Quotes

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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.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations)
My face is my identity. No one will cover it. I’m proud of my face. If my face bothers you, don’t look. Turn your own face away, take your eyes off me. If you are seduced by merely looking at my face, that is your problem. Do not tell me to cover it. You cannot punish me simply because you cannot control yourself.
Manal Al-Sharif (Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening)
Hijab adalah pembebasan dari ketergantungan kosmetik dan topeng. Hijab adalah pembebasan untuk jujur pada hatimu. Hijab adalah pembebas jiwamu dari rantai-rantai duniawi.
Mahdavi (Ratu yang Bersujud)
Why Aren't We Screaming Drunks? by Hafiz (Daniel Ladinsky) (1945? - ) Timeline Original Language English Muslim / Sufi Contemporary The sun once glimpsed God's true nature And has never been the same. Thus that radiant sphere Constantly pours its energy Upon this earth As does He from behind The veil. With a wonderful God like that Why isn't everyone a screaming drunk? Hafiz's guess is this: Any thought that you are better or less Than another man Quickly Breaks the wine Glass.
Daniel Ladinsky
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 (Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles)
What do you see when you think of me, A figure cloaked in mystery With eyes downcast and hair covered, An oppressed woman yet to be discovered? Do you see backward nations and swirling sand, Humpbacked camels and the domineering man? Whirling veils and terrorists Or maybe fanatic fundamentalists? Do you see scorn and hatred locked Within my eyes and soul, Or perhaps a profound ignorance of all the world as a whole? Yet . . . You fail to see The dignified persona Of a woman wrapped in maturity. The scarf on my head Does not cover my brain. I think, I speak, but still you refrain From accepting my ideals, my type of dress, You refuse to believe That I am not oppressed. So the question remains: What do I see when I think of you? I see another human being Who doesn’t have a clue.
Uzma Jalaluddin (Ayesha at Last)
Both the veil and makeup are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency. But in both cases there is considerable evidence of the pressures arising from male dominance that cause the behaviours. For instance, the historian of commerce Kathy Peiss suggests that the beauty products industry took off in the USA in the 1920s/1930s because this was a time when women were entering the public world of offices and other workplaces (Peiss, 1998). She sees women as having made themselves up as a sign of their new freedom. But there is another explanation. Feminist commentators on the readoption of the veil by women in Muslim countries in the late twentieth century have suggested that women feel safer and freer to engage in occupations and movement in the public world through covering up (Abu-Odeh, 1995). It could be that the wearing of makeup signifies that women have no automatic right to venture out in public in the west on equal grounds with men. Makeup, like the veil, ensures that they are masked and not having the effrontery to show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory. Makeup and the veil may both reveal women’s lack of entitlement.
Sheila Jeffreys (Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West)
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 Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations)
Just as clouds cannot affect the presence and power of the sun’s light, but can alter our experience of the intensity of the light, sin can veil our perception of our inner goodness, but it cannot change it.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Heart of Islam)
The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and "burkas", are all gradations of mental slavery. (...) The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. (...) I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated (...) by so many Western societies where the equality of sexes is legally enshrined.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations)
[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, in our secular societies based on “choice,” people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position: even if they are allowed to practice their beliefs, these beliefs are “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion; they moment they present them publicly as what they really are for them, they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of free choice” (in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense) can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn away from one’s particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots.
Slavoj Žižek (Living in the End Times)
Islam was, at least during its first centuries, the religion of reasoning, responsible individuals capable of telling what was true from what was false as long as they were well equipped to do so, as long as they possessed the tools of knowledge - specifically, the collections of Hadith. The fact that, over the course of centuries, we have seen believers who criticize and judge replaced by muzzled, censored, obedient, and grateful Muslims in no way detracts from this fundamental dimension of Islam.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
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 (Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins (Dress, Body, Culture))
The veil of secrecy shrouding high-profile political assassinations in postindependence Pakistan has extended to information on the inner dynamics of its frenzied history.
Ayesha Jalal (The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics)
At first I fought it, my teenage self diligently playing the role of the good Muslim, the cool Muslim, the palatable Muslim. I quickly learned that Muslims are accepted in Britain, so long as we are the ‘good ones’. Britain requires us to dilute our identities until we become nothing but Muslim name – and sometimes not even then. Even our names must be repackaged, reduced, bleached of their Muslimness.
Nadeine Asbali (Veiled Threat: On being visibly Muslim in Britain)
Alas! We really do not choose the ending of a journey, especially journeys that transforn1 our lives. For women, security would never return to the city. No more than dreams, can a journey back in time change the fact that the Medina of women would be forever frozen in its violent posture. From then on, women would have to walk the streets of uncaring, unsafe cities, ever watchful, wrapped in their hijab. The veil, which was intended to protect them from violence in the street, would accompany them for centuries, whatever the security situation of the city. For them, peace would never return. Muslim women were to display their hijab everywhere, the vestige of a civil war that would never come to an end.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
Eating disorders and body dissatisfaction are reaching epidemic proportions in the West, yet this is possible only in a culture that no longer believes that God causes all things, including one's body shape...The Qur'an's message is to be happy and content with one's body because God created our shapes: "He it is Who shapes you in the wombs as He pleases (3:6);" and He created us "in the best of moulds" (95:4). The Prophet used to advise people to be healthy and consume and exercise in moderation.
Katherine Bullock (Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes)
There are many different words inside a city. The world of the rich and the world of beggars. The world of men and the world behind the veil. The worlds of Muslims and of Christians and of Jews. If you are a rich woman living inside a harem, the world of a poor Christian beggarman is as foreign as China or Abyssinia. All the worlds touch at the bazaar. And the other place where they touch is in stories. Shahrazad crossed borders all the time, telling tales of country women and Bedouin sheikhs, of poor fishermen and scheming sultanas, of Jewish doctors and Christian brokers, of India and China and the lands of the jinn. If we don’t share our stories—trading them across our borders as freely as spices and ebony and silk—we will all be strangers forever.
Susan Fletcher (Shadow Spinner)
The Islam of Muhammad banished the idea of supervision, of a police system of control. This explains the absence of clergy in Islam and the encouraging of all Muslims to get involved in understanding the written word. Individual responsibility came into play to balance the weight of aristocratic control, finally making it ineffective in an umma of believers whose behavior followed precise, internalized rules. Recognizing in women an inalienable will fitted into this scheme of making everyone individually responsible.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
Either we are submissive and subjugated, victims of our own patriarchal cultures and faith – or we are a perverse danger, a veiled threat, wrapping our heads and bodies in our outright rejection of western culture and holding tight to religious views, which are at odds with superior, enlightened European values.
Nadeine Asbali (Veiled Threat: On being visibly Muslim in Britain)
I told my family that, in my opinion, the remaining traditions of that era were what kept us women in bondage, and not the Koran. Few people know the facts, that the Koran does not call for veiling, nor the restrictions women endure in the Muslim world. It is the traditions passed down that so hinder us from moving forward.
Jean Sasson (Princess Sultana's Daughters)
The perfect immigrant is the rich immigrant. The privileged immigrant. The highly educated immigrant who comes from a wealthy family abroad and align themselves with right wing politics once they’re here – ironically – to stop people like them from coming into England ever again. The only ideal, perfect immigrant is the one that is barely an immigrant at all. An Englishman in brown(ish) wrapping.
Nadeine Asbali (Veiled Threat: On being visibly Muslim in Britain)
… not only the women of the Qurashi aristocracy were highly enough esteemed as a social group to come, like the men, to swear allegiance and to take part in the negotiations with the new military leader of the city, but also that they could express a boldly critical attitude toward Islam. They were not going to accept the new religion without knowing exactly how it would improve their situation. This critical spirit on the part of women toward the political leader remained alive and well during the first decades of Islam. It only disappeared with the onset of absolutism, with Mu'awiya and the turning of Islam into a dynastic system. This meant, on the one hand, the disappearance of the tribal aristocratic spirit with the formation of the Muslim state, and, on the other hand, the disappearance of Islam as the Prophet's experiment in living, in which equality, however merely potential it might be, opened the door to the dream of a practicing democracy.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
Islam's prohibitions against pictoral representation of the human being have prevented the ubiquitous spread of the use of the female body for corporate purposes. Advertisements do not feature superfluous female body there to titillate potential buyer. In advertisements...image is not advanced as an ideal to which other women should aspire. Hence the use of images of women (and men) does not promote the phenomenon of self-correcting and self-policing, as is the case with the use of images in the mainstream Western culture.
Katherine Bullock (Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes)
It was clear to me by now that studying Islam was one thing – and absolutely worthwhile, because it helped me grasp the meaning of the religion and how it all fitted together. However, I felt as though I was standing in front of a shop window full of lovely things, and all I could do was admire them from afar. I was still separated from them by the window, or, as Muslims might say, a veil. In order to lift this veil, there was only one way forward: to get down onto the prayer mat and start living according to Islamic principles.
Kristiane Backer (From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life)
What a strange fate for Muslim memory, to be called upon in order to censure and punish! What a strange memory, where even dead men and women do not escape attempts at assassination, if by chance they threaten to raise the hijab that covers the mediocrity and servility that is presented to us as tradition. How did the tradition succeed in transforming the Muslim woman into that submissive, marginal creature who buries herself and only goes out into the world timidly and huddled in her veils? Why does the Muslim man need such a mutilated companion?
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
The limitation of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil is visible here, too. Women are permitted to wear the veil if this is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment women wear a veil to exercise a free individual choice, the meaning of wearing a veil changes completely. It is no longer a sign of belonging to the Muslim community, but an expression of their idiosyncratic individuality. The difference is the same one between a Chinese farmer eating Chinese food because his village has been doing so since time immemorial, and a citizen of a Western megalopolis deciding to go and have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. This is why, in our secular, choice-based societies, people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position. Even if they are allowed to maintain their belief, their belief is "tolerated" as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion. The moment they present it publicly as what it is for them, say a matter of substantial belonging, they are accused of "fundamentalism." What this means is that the "subject of free choice" in the Western "tolerant" multicultural sense can emerge only as the result of extremely violent process of being torn out of a particular life world, of being cut off from one's roots.
Slavoj Žižek (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections)
A Muslim woman in Michigan was the plaintiff in a lawsuit a few years ago, and she came to court wearing the traditional niqab, a veil covering all but her eyes. The judge asked her to take it off. She refused. So the judge dismissed her case. He didn’t think he could fairly adjudicate a disagreement between two parties when he couldn’t see one of them. He told her: One of the things that I need to do as I am listening to testimony is I need to see your face and I need to see what’s going on. And unless you take that off, I can’t see your face and I can’t tell whether you’re telling me the truth or not, and I can’t see certain things about your demeanor and temperament that I need to see in a court of law.2 Do you think the judge was right? I’m guessing many of you do.
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
Umar's solution, imposing the hijab/curtain that hides women instead of changing attitudes and forcing "those in whose heart is a disease" to act differently, was going to overshadow Islam's dimension as a civilization, as a body of thought on the individual and his/her role in society. This body of thought made dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) at the outset a pioneering experiment in terms of individual freedom and democracy. But the hijab fell over Medina and cut short that brief burst of freedom. Paradoxically, 15 centuries later it was colonial power that would force the Muslim states to reopen the question of the rights of the individual and of women. All debates on democracy get tied up in the woman question and that piece of cloth that opponents of human rights today claim to be the very essence of Muslim identity.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
In the struggle between Muhammad's dream of a society in which women could move freely around the city (because the social control would be the Muslim faith that disciplines desire), and the customs of the Hypocrites who only thought of a woman as an object of envy and violence, it was this latter vision that would carry the day. The veil represents the triumph of the Hypocrites. Slaves would continue to be harassed and attacked in the streets. The female Muslim population would henceforth be divided by a hijab into two categories: free women, against whom violence is forbidden, and women slaves, toward whom ta'arrud [taking up a position along a woman's path to urge her to fornicate] is permitted. In the logic of the hijab, the law of tribal violence replaces the intellect of the believer, which the Muslim God affirms is indispensable for distinguishing good from evil.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
It remains to be asked why today it is the image of the woman of the "Golden Age" [the Abbasid dynasty] - a "slave" who intrigues in the corridors of power when she loses hope of seducing - who symbolizes the Muslim eternal female, while the memory of Umm Salama, A'isha, and Sukayna awakens no response and seems strangely distant and unreal. The answer without doubt is to be found in the time-mirror wherein the Muslim looks at himself to foresee his future. The image of "his" woman will change when he feels the pressing need to root his future in a liberating memory. Perhaps the woman should help him do this through daily pressure for equality, thereby bringing him into a fabulous present. And the present is always fabulous, because there everything is possible - even the end of always looking to the past and the beginning of confidence, of enjoying in harmony the moment that we have.
Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
I leaned back against the hearth, and the fire's warmth and fluttering light lulled me into gentler thoughts of Francesca. I closed my eyes and saw the beloved face dominated by wide-set antelope eyes. Her eyebrows arched like the wings of a swan, and the whites of her eyes, almost bluish, made a startling contrast to her caramel skin. I later learned that her great-great-grandmother had been kidnapped by slavers in Turkey, brought to Venice, and then sold to a German trader. It was a common story in Venice. Francesca's more recent ancestors had been German and Italian, and the result was a mix of northern ice and Mediterranean warmth. Francesca's upper lip curved in that sensual way that caused jealous Muslim husbands to veil their wives' faces. Her smoldering Levantine beauty contrasted with her silver-blond Teutonic hair, shockingly fair next to her dusky complexion and the sultry hint of Byzantium flashing in her dark eyes. Her nostrils were shaped like perfect teardrops.
Elle Newmark (The Book of Unholy Mischief)
While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.
Sam Harris
this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations)
There was another price too, though again, Aisha had no way of knowing the full extent of it. The sight of her riding into Medina on Safwan’s camel had branded itself into the collective memory of the oasis, and that was the last thing Muhammad needed. In due course, another Quranic revelation dictated that from now on, his wives were to be protected by a thin muslin curtain from the prying eyes of any men not their kin. And since curtains could work only indoors, they would soon shrink into a kind of minicurtain for outdoors: the veil. The Revelation of the Curtain clearly applied only to the Proph et’s wives, but this in itself gave the veil high status. Over the next few decades it would be adopted by women of the new Islamic aristocracy—and would eventually be enforced by Islamic fundamentalists convinced that it should apply to all women. There can be little doubt that this would have outraged Aisha. One can imagine her shocking Muslim conservatives by tearing off her veil in indignation. She had accepted it as a mark of distinction—but as an attempt to force her into the background? The girl so used to high visibility had no intention of being rendered invisible.
Anonymous
For starters, there is the orgy of violence that the United States and its allies unleashed in Iraq in 2003, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the sexual torture of Abu Ghraib. Also, the majority of suicide bombings during the twentieth century were not carried out by Muslims but by non-Muslims, and the majority of those carried out by Muslims targeted not Westerners but their fellow Muslims. Robert Pape, the world’s foremost researcher into suicide bombings, has shown that the overwhelming majority have been carried out by non-Muslims.
John R. Bradley (Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East)
In any event, as a hint of what is now in store for Egypt, consider the city of Alexandria—for decades the Muslim Brotherhood’s stronghold. Once it was a cosmopolitan summer resort famous for its secular, carefree atmosphere. Now it is about the least fun place to live in North Africa. All Muslim women in the city are veiled, among the young often for fear of otherwise being labeled whores by the unemployed guardians of public morality; and violence between local Christians and Muslims is commonplace. Extremist Muslims rioted in the city when the postrevolutionary regime happened to appoint a local mayor who was a Christian. Most bars have stopped serving alcohol. The
John R. Bradley (After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked The Middle East Revolts)
Egypt nevertheless remained socially liberal until the 1970s, when Nasser’s successor, Anwar Al-Sadat, brought the rank-and-file of the Muslim Brotherhood back from exile (they had mostly decamped to Saudi Arabia) and used them to counter the influence of the leftists, who had organized in protest at Nasser’s increasingly despotic rule. During that decade, and throughout the 1980s, Islamic fundamentalism therefore grew in influence in Egypt, and “belly-dancing nightclubs were torched and dancers were barred from television.”36 Today, dancers are free to perform in Cairo’s city center, but they must cover their navels or risk fines or arrest.
John R. Bradley (Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East)
the majority of women in the Muslim world across the ages, who worked in the fields, did not cover their faces and do not do so to this day. Full veiling is an urban and largely modern institution.
Fred Halliday (100 myths about the Middle East)
The difference in my faith was that Jesus is alive. I talked with Him, and He talked with me because He was not someone dead and gone. He interactively and authoritatively reigned in my life. Whether I had been taught about Him or taught about someone else did not change who He is. It did not stop His living presence. No teaching or religion could change or substitute that.
Audra Grace Shelby (Behind the Veils of Yemen: How an American Woman Risked Her Life, Family, and Faith to Bring Jesus to Muslim Women)
I realized that what made me strong was living strength, given by Someone who could only supply it if He was alive. “You are Messiah!” I whispered.
Audra Grace Shelby (Behind the Veils of Yemen: How an American Woman Risked Her Life, Family, and Faith to Bring Jesus to Muslim Women)
As Muslim prayers penetrated my door I quietly prayed for him, “Lord, I ask that You lift the veil of spiritual blindness for my dear father so that he, too, may truly know the joy of salvation through Your Son, Jesus. Reveal to him that Jesus is not only a Prophet but the Son of the Living God.
Samaa Habib (Face to Face with Jesus: A Former Muslim's Extraordinary Journey to Heaven and Encounter with the God of Love)
embraced my religion and through choice wore a veil covering my long brown hair from about the age of seven. I didn’t question my beliefs and the way I was brought up. There was no reason to. I continued reciting the memorized prayers, hoping that one day Allah would answer my prayers. But it was a monologue, not a dialogue. There was no relationship. It was beyond my wildest dreams to think I could have a relationship with God.
Samaa Habib (Face to Face with Jesus: A Former Muslim's Extraordinary Journey to Heaven and Encounter with the God of Love)
For European colonialists like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British consul general to Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, the veil was a symbol of the “degradation of women” and definitive proof that “Islam as a social system has been a complete failure.” Never mind that Cromer was the founder of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England. As the quintessential colonialist, Cromer had no interest in the plight of Muslim women; the veil was, for him, an icon of the “backwardness of Islam,” and the most visible justification for Europe’s “civilizing mission” in the Middle East.
Reza Aslan (No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
Qur'an 6:25: Of them there are some who (pretend to) listen to thee; but We have thrown veils on their hearts, So they understand it not, and deafness in their ears; if they saw every one of the signs, not they will believe in them; in so much that when they come to thee, they (but) dispute with thee; the Unbelievers say: "These are nothing but tales of the ancients.
Peter Townsend (Questioning Islam: Tough Questions & Honest Answers About the Muslim Religion)
For those religious friends who told me that their veil was empowering to them, I say, “How selfish of you! When all Muslim women, including women in Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Muslim world have the right to choose not to cover without being reprehended, beaten, imprisoned or even in some cases killed, then I will agree with you. Until that day comes, when all Muslim women are free to choose for themselves, veiling is undeniably disempowering to women.
Nohad A. Nassif (Arab Humanist: The Necessity of Basic Income)
The prevailing imagery of Muslim women showed us covered from head to feet in black. The headscarves were long, black, flowing pieces of fabric, draping over a long black cloak, and sometimes with a niqab, a veil, over the faces too, also usually in black. The photographs were taken to make the women look eerie and inhuman, alien to western eyes. But underneath each one was a life, a story, a heart, which was denied by those who saw them just as a ghost covered in black cloth.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed (Love in a Headscarf)
Traditionally, education was restricted to Muslim women, so If those housewives had any children to nurture, guess how their futures had been determined? The issue became more complicated when they had set a seal upon their hearings! The illiterate and ear sealed women, only heard what their husbands had injected deep into them, but today their literate and fully veiled girls do not hear well in the classroom, but they clearly hear the under veil wireless voice during the exams.
Jahanshah Safari
that they take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people. They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect.’ Intermarriage, he wrote, was common, though the Indian women who took European partners were, he maintained, rarely respectable: ‘The women of people with no future, of corrupt Muslims, of evil Hindus, who of their own desire enter into the bonds of wedlock with the English, they do not interfere with their religion nor compel them to leave purdah veiling; when any son born of the union reaches the age of 4, he is taken from his mother and sent to England to be educated.
William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company)
Then this Flemish convert, who is now the head of an influential Islamic organisation, praises the veil, criticises race-mixing in the name of a (morbid) Muslim puritanism and explains that Islam ‘cannot accept the division of the world into nations’. In other words, here is a frank profession of faith in the final objective of Islam, the Universal Caliphate, that is, the worldwide Islamic state.
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care… Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.
Antonio Negri; Michael Hardt (Commonwealth)
Looking into Christ's eyes outside of church, through the cheery atheist yuppie with the sports car and the veiled Muslim clerk at Walgreens. Listening to Christ's voice in other churches, through the middle aged woman with the annoying nasal whine, and the self-righteous homophobic radio evangelist, and the conservative African bishop. I was not going to get to sit by myself and think loftily about how much Jesus loved me in particular. I was not going to get to have dinner, eternally, with people just like me
Sara Miles
As the thirteenth-century mystic Ibn Ata’ Allah Al- Iskandari says, “Don’t think you are veiled from Allah by something that is not Allah. There is nothing besides Allah. You are veiled from Him by the illusion that there is something other than Allah.
A. Helwa (Secrets of Divine Love Journal: Insightful Reflections that Inspire Hope and Revive Faith)
It always astonishes me to discover people who think that religion and sex have nothing to do with one another, and that you can act as you like in the one sphere while thinking what you should in the other. In fact, of all the rites of passage that religions have taken under their wing, that of sexual initiation has been by the most tenaciously adhered to. English people today look with incredulity on the habit in some Muslim communities of veiling and hiding women, of forcing them to marry the man chosen for them, and of occasionally killing them for 'honour's' sake. What can this possibly have to do with obedience to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, they ask themselves? In fact, it has everything to do with it. Sex is not only the gateway through which the next generation enters the community; it is the place in which our actions are most unavoidably subject to the ethic of 'pollution and taboo'.
Roger Scruton (Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England)
As a Sufi Muslim you cultivated within yourself the thought of oneness, or monism, and made progress in experiencing each seemingly separate thing as an illusory veil over the eternal truth. You recognized the reality of God and the unimportance of matter, and one of the verses of the Koran that was the most dear to you was, “All things in creation suffer extinction and there remaineth the face of thy Lord in its majesty and bounty.
Gary R. Renard (The Disappearance of the Universe: Straight Talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness)
But the doctor who calls me into her office is browner than I'd expected from her anglicized name..."I'm definitely not pregnant because I'm gay." ... "Tell me something. Why? What kind of gay are you? Why do you still veil?" My skin crawls, not with humiliation but with anger. What does it matter that I'm gay? That I'm not out to my parents? That I wear hijab and don't participate in a particular kind of gay nightlife culture? This is the kind of gay l've grown into, this is what my queerness looks like and I have nothing to prove.
Lamya H. (Hijab Butch Blues)
In her brilliant study 'The Politics of the Veil', Joan Scott pulled the veil aside to show us what it concealed in French politics. The veil conceals the presence and durability of racial hierarchies the French insist are absent. The veil conceals the haunting resemblance of the treatment of French Muslims to the treatment of French Jews. The veil shrouds a colonial past the French insist is dead and gone. Scott spreads out that much-vexed piece of cloth and uses it to map the anxieties haunting French politics and society. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are not only the core values of France-they also are demands that the French (like other Westerners) find difficult to satisfy. Liberty becomes more manageable when it is reduced to sexual freedom. The persistence of colonial hierarchies abroad and racism at home haunts the aspiration to Equality. Fraternity is lost in the conflicts over the veil and those suburbs called the banlieues d'Islam. Once again, a seemingly Muslim question reveals itself as a series of questions the West obliquely asks itself.
Anne Norton (On the Muslim Question)
Citizens who do not cover their faces have the right to know who they are interacting with. What about their rights? The face veil is an insult to those who do not conceal their identity in public. In effect it says: “I have the right to know who you are but you don’t have the right to know who I am.
Farzana Hassan (Unveiled: A Canadian Muslim Woman’s Struggle Against Misogyny, Sharia and Jihad)
Educated women, many of whom had traveled, didn’t want to give up their gains, but the veil came back as a political fashion statement. It was happening across the Muslim world, especially in neighboring Egypt, as people looked for a way to show their disgust for corrupt and dictatorial secular governments that were regarded as serving Western interests. While Western women might see the head scarf as a sign of oppression, many Arab women saw it as an expression of identity.
Lindsey Hilsum (Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution)
Inexplicably, the Kingdom's clerics compel non-Muslim women to veil also, a rule which is not to be found codified in the Quran.
Qanta A. Ahmed (In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom)
What remained of that Baghdad, I wondered? The Baghdad of fountains of knowledge. The Baghdad at the centre, the fulcrum of a globalized culture that went on to humanize Europe: the Baghdad that taught Europe the distinction between civil society and barbarism, the difference between medicine and magic, and the importance of experimental method; the Baghdad that trained the West in scholastic and philosophic method, drilled it in making surgical instruments, told it how to establish and run hospitals and provided it with the model of a university complete with curriculum and syllabus, terminology and administrative structure; the Baghdad that schooled Europe in the importance of biography, the novella, the history of cities and historical and textual criticism. In short, the Baghdad that gave Europe its most prized possession: liberal humanism. By what intellectual conjuring trick had Europe self-servingly made the reality of its cultural debt disappear into a fairy-tale dream of Sinbad, Aladdin, harem ladies in diaphanous veils, the subject matter of pantomime and other such dissembling misrepresentations?
Ziauddin Sardar (Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim)
For Schuon, Ibn ʿArabī, like many Muslim mystics, succumbed to a “Semitic” propensity for a subjectivism that lacked the enlightened objectivity necessary to consistently discern the transcendent formlessness of essential truth from religious particularism. Yet such enlightened objectivity is, according to Schuon, inherent in the so-called “Aryan” metaphysics of Vedanta and Platonism. In fact, Schuon’s discourse regularly presents as self-evident the metaphysical superiority of a direct and active Aryan “intellection” over that of a so-called passive Semitic “inspirationism.” Thus, rather than a transcendent and symbolic nomenclature innocent of its discursive history of racism — as Schuon’s loyal devotees often claim — in what follows I throw into relief how Schuonian universalism harbors a buried order of politics ironically constituted by and through long-held European discursive strategies of racial exclusion. Such strategies are not simply empty linguistic survivals but, instead, substantively inform the core of Schuon’s metaphysics, providing the impetus to denude Ibn ʿArabī of his own Islamic exclusivism and distill from him a Vedantic essence — that is, a pure esotericism capable of transcending the so-called “Semitic” veils of exoteric religious form. As such, Schuon effectively de-Semitizes Ibn ʿArabī in order to legitimize his own Aryan ideal of authentic religion, the religio perennis.
Gregory A. Lipton
I still have one such booklet, printed on stock paper the size of a playing card, so that it might easily be carried in a pocket or a purse. Entitled “A Gift to the Muslim Woman,” its focus was the full veiling of the body, head, and face. It reads in part: My Muslim sister: today, you face a relentless and cunning war waged by the enemies of Islam with the purpose of reaching you and removing you from your impenetrable fortress. . . . Don’t be tricked by the ideas they are promoting. One of the things that these enemies of Islam are trying to discredit and eliminate is the niqab. The facial covering is what distinguishes a free woman from an infidel woman or a slave and avoids her being confronted with the wolves that walk among us. As the scholar al-Qurtubi said: the whole of the woman—her body and her voice—is a’ura (sinful to put on display) and should not be revealed unless there is a need for her to do so. One of the conditions of veiling is that it acts as a container for the entire body, without exception, and it should not be incensed or perfumed. This is demonstrated by the hadith which tells us that any woman who applies perfume and passes by others so they can smell her scent is an adulteress. Veiling is not imposed upon you to restrict you, but to honor you and give you dignity; by wearing the religious covering, you will preserve yourself, and protect society from the emergence of corruption and the spread of immorality. . . . My Muslim sister, keep this booklet and give it as a gift to your sisters after reading it.
Manal Al-Sharif (Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening)
In 2015, Chicago police attacked a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf and a face veil, suspicious of the food she was carrying in her purse to break her fast during Ramadan. They ripped the hijab off her head and strip-searched her, on video, which they then later released to the public. This wasn’t just a random act of security. There is a feeling of entitlement to brown women’s bodies, and her strip search—already an exertion of power over women—was compounded not just as an act of sexual humiliation, but also a racial one because of her ostensible religious identity.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh (Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age)
But code-switching itself confirms that we must live our lives by codes, by rules, by standards and by norms. That we must conform fully at any one time. We have no language for being more than one thing at once. We only know and we are only taught how to switch, to slot ourselves in, to constantly, constantly please.
Nadeine Asbali (Veiled Threat: On being visibly Muslim in Britain)
My hijab has come to shape everything about me - how I am perceived by others and even how I see myself. It negates my biology, eclipses my upbringing and supersedes all other aspects of my identity. At times, it feels like I'm made of chiffon and jersey, metal pins and social expectation instead of flesh and bone.
Nadeine Asbali (Veiled Threat: On being visibly Muslim in Britain)