Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. […]
Arab Quotes
The Badoies (Bedouin) are wild men, amongst whom is no civill societie, no truth or civilitie used: They worship Mahomet, and are very bad Moores, above all other People they are given to Stealths and Rapine; they eate raw flesh, and drinke milke; their habit is vile and filthy, they are greatly endued with swiftnesse […]
I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans.
What above all distinguishes the Arabs from the peoples of the New World is that through the roughness of the former one can still see something of delicacy in their manners and customs: one feels that they were born in this East from which came all the arts, all the sciences, all the religions… In […]
The first American soldiers showed up (at the U. S. embassy in Kuwait City) and everyone had to kiss them and shove babies into their arms and get the soldiers to autograph Kuwaiti flags… And across one intersection downtown a thirty-foot banner had been strung, reading – in answer to the U. S. and European […]
The Arabs are a backwards people who eat nothing but Camel dung.
Listening to the Walkman is about the only fun American troops are having in a place where there’s no booze and most of the women either are covered with the front hall rug or they outrank you. By now every American soldier has listened to every cassette and CD in Saudi Arabia at least twice.
Forget Reds under the Bed, there’s Arabs in the Attic.
I stopped in one of the oasis towns to get gas and some more Coke cans to throw out the window. There was a Bedouin kid about fourteen years old at the little store there. Most Saudis are – whether they take their socks off during ablution or not – fastidiously clean, and they are […]
Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.
