America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out harder to defeat that Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.
Salman Rushdie Quotes
I come from an Indian Muslim family, but I experience India as a very pleasant country, whereas in Pakistan I feel ill at ease. You would think it should be the reverse. But in spite of its many defects, India is a rich and open society, while Pakistan is culturally an impoverished and closed society.
To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him… If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of ‘dissing,’ then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.
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 […]
The worst most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument. It becomes almost impossible to conceive of what the suppressed things might […]
The most important part of the title is the comma. Because it seems to me that I am that comma. (of his book “East, West”, 1994)
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith… and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me […]
