Elif Safak Quotes
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.
Shafak, Elif. "The Politics of Fiction." TED, July 2010.
He meant gender, not the frequency of sexual activity.
After Independence, the original credo of the Indonesian hero and leader was slowly ignored. The Muslim majority established Islam as the dominant religion and began to create laws that discriminated against Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews. The ethnic Chinese had been very successful in business and commerce and soon they were discriminated against and even physically attacked in Pogroms.
At the time there was an issue of religious freedom that is in public discourse: It emanated from the Obama Care law which required employers to provide health insurance that does not discriminate against women by refusing to disallow coverage for birth control (pills, diaphragms, etc.) This legislation covered the employees of general institutions run by religions such as schools, hospitals, and retirement communities. Roman Catholics and other religions which viewed birth control as a sin were put in a position where they had to pay for something that they regarded as sinful. So the church did not have complete religious freedom. However, if these institutions would deny to their employees a basic right that the law says belongs to all institutions. If an exception would be made for birth control what about blood transfusions. The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that autologous blood transfusions are contrary to the world of God. So what if institutions they run decided to not cover these transfusions in their insurance policies? Or a Jewish University or a Muslim cultural center decided not to cover medical procedures in hospitals that serve pork? There have been many examples where one religion’s freedom has been curtailed slightly when they conflict with individual rights or other rights. Plural marriage for Mormons and Muslims are against the law. Christian Scientists have been forced to provide medical care for some members even though their religion prohibits it. There is no solution that will not curtail someone’s rights under some circumstances.
He was referring to the historical and traditional American political argument of whether the country should be more or less multicultural. There have, even before the founding of the country, this people who favored not only new people from new cultures and nations, but adopting new and foreign ideas. At the same time, there were those who wanted the American culture to not be corrupted of even changed significantly by large number of new people or those new people reaching positions of influence or power. They also often opposed foreign ideas from certain religions to foreign science; from foreign law to foreign philosophy. This interview was just after the Donald Trump Presidential victory.
Elif Shafak, in Turkish Elif Şafak, is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, academic, public speaker and women's rights activist. In English she publishes under the anglicized spelling of her pen-name Elif Shafak.
