Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes
The Koran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Politician and writer, prominent critic of Islam, Dutch Member of Parliament, Quoted in The Washington Post, February 2007
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
“Qur’an” is another way of spelling “Koran”. The belief in the perfection of the Koran is fairly common in Islamic nations. If Sharia is the civil law, as many Muslims insist that it is or should be, then there is no system of amendment and nothing that has occurred or has been learned since 800 AD that is any reason to improve or modify the law. Modern Islamic nations cope with this problem in one of three ways. The Fundamentalists take the Koran literally in all things and nothing is ever amended or modernized. Modernists will treat the Koran and Sharia as metaphorical and interpret it in the light of the modern world. More secular nations (like Turkey and Indonesia) reject Sharia as a civil legal system or as a source of inspiration of civil law.
The communal support of scholarship was common in the Middle East in both Muslim and Jewish communities.
This is actually a very widespread belief amongst many Muslims. Even sophisticated national leaders do not appreciate that other religions have adherents who feel just as passionately about their own religion. See {588668} for another example where Muslim leaders believe that if Jewish Kings David and Solomon came back to life they would worship Islam.
Al-Omar is one of Saudi’s leading clerics and the Saudi Arabian government—supposedly is a major ally of the United States—not only tolerates this type of inflammatory rhetoric but it makes no effort to repudiate this and other radical Islamic statements. There is no freedom of Speech in Saudi Arabia, and people are arrested all the time for saying things that are displeasing to the Royal Family. But no attempt to suppress this kind of virulent anti-American attack.
Turkey under its great leader, Ataturk, underwent a major cultural revolution. Although Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim, its constitution provides that it be a secular state with compulsory public non-sectarian education. They adopted a European style law and prohibited Sharia (Islamic law). The nation thrived as no other Muslim country has. Muslims, the world over, are divided on Turkey. For this Sheikh its secular government is an insult to Islam because there is complete separation of mosque and state. For others it is the model which all Muslim countries should emulate.
This is not terribly different however from Christians and Jews selectively quoting the Bible.
Oman was one of the first kingdoms to embrace Islam, albeit under the coercion described in this quotation.
This is another of De Tocqueville’s prescient statements that in retrospect seem so amazing given the time. This quotation could serve as an op ed in a newspaper of any of the industrial democracies of the early 21st century. However, he did not have the information of the details we have today that showed Islam as the pinnacle of scientific, philosophical, literary and medical achievement at the beginning of the second millennium, while the Christian nations of Europe were mired in the Dark Ages. It was the same Koran but a very different interpretation and framework that led to the decadence while it was the Protestant Reformation that triggered a Christianity that was hospitable to modernity and enlightenment.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, author, scholar and former politician. She received international attention as a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor violence, child marriage and female genital mutilation. She has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali works for the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.
