Asra Nomani Quotes
... in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling. This is why reform from within Islam is so difficult.
Asra Nomani, Journalist & Founder of the Muslim Women's Freedom Tour, "Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam", The Washington Post, January 16, 2015
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation makes it very difficult for Muslim modernists and reformers to persuade Muslims to adopt ideas, methods and approaches of the West, or China or India as this statement of the Prophet is a de facto stricture and inhibition against imitation of non-Muslims in any area.
10 centuries ago was a time when the Arabs were far more advanced and modern than other cultures including the Christian West that was in the Dark Ages. However, in the 12th century there was a “closing”—a narrowing of allowable Islamic thinking, and since then, Islamic people have had great difficulty with change or modernity. Not all Muslim nations are equally rigid but the Arabs are at the extreme among Islamic counties.
Ibn al-Nafis was one of the great scientists of all time. He analyzed the human heart, lungs, and circulatory system. This quotation is often given by Muslim modernists and reformers to illustrate that Islam at one time was open to new knowledge, dissent, ideas of all kinds. A century later, Islam closed intellectually and later and even today, Muslims are killed for what became heresy. Truth became determined by the Koran and the words of The Prophet only, Christianity and the Church imposed a similar restrictive view of truth using the Bible and Jesus. However, the Reformation and modernity led Christianity to merge and adopt the more modern and scientific view with the exception of some Christian fundamentalists. Islam had the modern view and abandoned it causing the many educated Islamic reformers and modernists of today great difficulty in changing the culture and laws as a whole.
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists. Even in England it is difficult to expose corruption because of the libel laws. In most countries, it is almost impossible which is one of the reasons corruption is so widespread. American law says that it is better to mistakenly hurt some public figures’ reputation than suppress the ability of citizens to criticize and expose corruption.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
He was one of the few Muslim political leaders who at that time called for reform of any aspect of Islam where reform and change are considered blasphemy and heresy by most Islamic theologians and clerics.
Asra Quratulain Nomani is an American author and former Georgetown University professor. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, a faculty-student, investigative-reporting project into the kidnapping and murder of her former colleague, The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
