Daniel Pipes Quotes
My career divides in two: before and after 9/11. In the first part I was trying to show that Islam is relevant to political concerns. If you want to understand Muslims, I argued, you need to understand the role of Islam in their lives. Now that seems obvious.
Pipes, Daniel. Interview. Middle East Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1, Winter 2002.
English Muslim terrorist organization. This quotation illustrates what is perhaps the greatest difference between Muslims and most members of other religions. Most others think of their personal identity in national terms and then occupational, religious and racial. A Christian might say ‘I am a French Attorney who is a Christian’; a Buddhist , ‘I am a Cambodian Buddhist. But most Muslims would say, ’I am a Muslim from France’ or a ‘Follower of Islam residing in Lebanon.
This statement is so absurd, that one marvels that an agency of the United States Government could publish such a statement. It was all the more embarrassing in that the FBI had as one of its objectives developing relationships with Muslim communities across the country. The FBI did withdraw the publication, but there were dozens of FBI officials who read this and approved its publication. They were either themselves Islamaphobic and/or extremely ignorant. One of the worst things about such a statement, is that it does not warn about one real problem that some extremist Muslims want modern Islamic states to adopt a literal view of the Koran which reflects 7th century values, knowledge, and culture. Those fundamentalists have kept modernism from changing and developing several Islamic countries. Most Muslims nations have very little that resembles 7th century Arabia and a nation like Turkey is more modern than many of the nations of Europe.
Legal Religious Ruling. This is an example of a source of tension between some Muslims and others. Non-Muslims are required to have a Muslim Education in Muslim countries, but they insist that any required Christian or secular education in a non Muslim country is anti-Islamic.
Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East.
