Shereen El Feki Quotes

Clash of civilizations

Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

In the latter half of the last century the impact of the expanding influence of Western culture and economic system brought about in China a severe conflict.

This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.

Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.

The West is even more apprehensive about Islam than it was about communism, because while it knows how to deal with material challenges, it has no idea how to go about facing a spiritual challenge.

Ironically, even as Westerners feel threatened by Islam, most in the Muslim world feel themselves besieged by the West.

We cannot sit in the West and prescribe for peoples in the East, whose societies and ways of life are being destabilized by Western and imperialistic religious, economic and technological initiatives -- without having walked in their shoes

We have appropriated too many Moslem countries for them to have any real trust in our disinterestedness.

A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for the defense of Western Christian Civilization.

Someone else is going to read for me or go at my place to the mosque, and/or to tell me you shouldn't take anything from the West because the West is the enemy and so on. It is to me to decide. I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.

Russian women are now interested in clothes. But they will never attach supreme importance to fashions as do Europeans and American women, because they are too vitally interested in all the various projects going on in their country.

I quickly came to realize that in the Middle East, God is God, and in the West, the sponsor is God - or, as I like to say, Tide detergent is God.

People in Shanghai make a lot more money than the farmers in the rice paddies. The rice-paddy farmers are not buying Louis Vuitton bags, but the upwardly mobile ones in Shanghai, who are all working in Wall Street-type firms, are infinitely better-dressed than people in the West. Their women take this fashion thing seriously.

Perhaps inevitably, media stories focus on differences, which exacerbates tensions; yet Islamic radicalization is, in part, an acute expression of broader trends that affect us all.

We cannot just ape the west. What may be good in an alien country may be unpalatable in India.

Often times, while filming 'WAGS Atlanta' with 3 male producers, we were told to dress 'WAGGY' for scenes, not realizing that WAG style isn't universal! WAG style can encompass a myriad of different looks.

While the Cold War had us questioning our next-door neighbors, big brands emerged to capture our trust. We became consumers.

The women I play don't sit in the corner eating lettuce leaves and talking about what designer shoes they have.

Others think their American ways will work in other countries. That's not always accurate and can be disrespectful to the local culture.

Had I guessed the trouble my name was going to cause a lot of people on the other side of the world, I would have changed it to something easier when I began writing books.

What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe.

At one point, in one of the kitchens where I worked, I was the only American pastry cook. They treated me poorly. 'You're stupid. You're American. You don't get it.' They'd speak French all day. At one point, my boss said to me, 'You learn French or get out right away.'