Hisham Matar Quotes
In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.
Matar, Hisham. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. Random House, 2016.
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.
Referring to an Order-in-Council forbidding any discussions of the Canadian Cabinet's secret uranium deals:
Islam had been the center of intellectual thought in the world, until the clerics had decided that innovation itself was a sin and one that called for the death penalty. Although most non-Muslim religions went through stages of death for religious dissent. However, the Koran deals with every part of society. There is no separation of church and state. All knowledge is in the Koran the fundamentalist believes and anyone who expresses a new idea is not only wrong and a heretic, but is dangerous and must be executed. It is therefore not very surprising that the Islamic contributions to science, medicine, and the arts has been so small. The Islamic fundamentalists are opposed by Muslim modernists who try to change the Islamic culture but they are on the minority. Most religions have gone through bad earlier periods where dissent was heresy and warranted death. Fundamentalist Islam is the only one which bans original thought of any kinds even it does not contradict established doctrine.
The President was reacting to a chain of vents whereby Sony Entertainment produced a satiric movie which offended the leadership of North Korea who condemned, threatened and may have launched a cyberattack on Sony. That company reacted by withdrawing the movie and the President thought that was a mistake despite the fact that there were threats against theaters showing the movie and people attending the showings.
Hisham Matar (Arabic: هشام مطر) (born 1970) is an American born British-Libyan writer. His memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Matar's essays have appeared in the Asharq al-Awsat, The Independent, The Guardian, The Times and The New York Times. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to wide acclaim on 3 March 2011. He lives and writes in London.
