Salman Rushdie Quotes About Islam

Quotes about: Islam

• Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Art, Real

  "Salman Rushdie: ‘I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must’". blogs.wsj.com. January 07, 2015.

• No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Islam, Labels

• Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Real, Heart

  "Salman Rushdie condemns attack on Charlie Hebdo". www.englishpen.org. January 7, 2015.

• What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.... It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.... Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

  Salman Rushdie

  Sibling, Moving, Air

  "Everybody needs to get thicker skins" by Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. July 10, 2008.

• This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

  Salman Rushdie

  Islam, World, Growing

  Salman Rushdie (2008). “Step Across This Line”, p.218, Random House

• To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.

  Salman Rushdie

  Ideas, Religion, Islam

• If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

  Salman Rushdie

  Order, Voice, Islam

  "Moderate Muslims must roar, says Rushdie". www.cnn.com. November 3, 2001.

• I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom.... Actually Existing Islam ... which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

  Salman Rushdie

  Islam, Culture, Weapons

  "Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor'". Address at Columbia University, www.nytimes.com. December 12, 1991.

• Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, Men, Ideas

• When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Islam, Satanic

  "A translated man". Interview with James Campbell, www.theguardian.com. September 29, 2006.

• Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

  Salman Rushdie

  Father, Mean, Civilization

  "Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor'". Address at Columbia University, www.nytimes.com. December 12, 1991.

• If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, Islam, Fiction

• If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Country, Islam

  Salman Rushdie (2008). “Step Across This Line”, p.219, Random House

• I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Father, Growth

• In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

  Salman Rushdie

  Iran, Islam, Trying

• Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.

  Salman Rushdie

  Mean, Views, Islam

• In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.

  Salman Rushdie

  Views, Islam, Messengers

• Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Maturity, Giving

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

  Salman Rushdie

  World Religions, Historical, Islam

• Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

  Salman Rushdie

  People, Islam, Age

  "Living Novelistically". Interview with Richard Wolinksy, www.guernicamag.com. October 15, 2012.

• The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.

  Salman Rushdie

  Mistake, Oil, Giving

  ‘There is no right not to be offended’ by Mukund Padmanabhan, www.thehindu.com. October 6, 2012.

• I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.

  Salman Rushdie

  Pride, Soul, Islam

  "Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor'". Address at Columbia University, www.nytimes.com. December 12, 1991.

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