Quotes About Culture

If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask for permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority.

Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance.

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.

It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.

Force and rape are not an issue because he is a believing Muslim and he is an Osman Mahamud.

I found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.

If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you.

The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. By the time they menstruate they are rendered voiceless. They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks. They are required to comply with their father's choice of a mate, and after the wedding their lives are devoted to the sexual pleasures of their husband and to a life of childbearing.

Excision of my genitals didn't eliminate the human sex drive, and neither did the fear of hellfire. Repression only led to hypocrisy and lying, strategies that corrupt the human individual, and it failed to protect people from unwanted pregnancy and disease. The

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.

You could see her face, because she was Somali. Saudi women had no faces.

leading Muslim clerics (the ulema) have come to the consensus that Islam is more than a mere religion, but rather the one and only comprehensive system that embraces, explains, integrates, and dictates all aspects of human life: personal, cultural, political, as well as religious. In short, Islam handles everything.

Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace.

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.

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.

Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

Most unmarried Somali girls who got pregnant committed suicide. I knew of one girl in Mogadishu who poured a can of gasoline over herself in the living room, with everyone there, and burned herself alive. Of course, if she hadn't done this, her father and brothers would probably have killed her anyway.

The murder of Pakistan's first prime minister heralded the imminent derailment of the political process and the onset of a brutal political culture of assassinations, sustained by the state's direct or indirect complicity.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.

The point of freedom was that everyone could dress however they wanted, was it not? Was it genuinely such a point of offense to women who dressed more liberally that she, Nour, chose not to?

Ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations are as old as civilization.

Cooperation is dramatically more effective when cultural codes -above all language, but also customs, values and other patterns of thought and behavior- are shared. Culture, cultural diversity, and, hence, the facility of shared culture cooperation are unique to humans and differentiate them from other social animals. Hence the innate human tendency to prefer those who belong to their kin-culture community over strangers.

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.