More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kim Ghattas
In doing so they constantly molded the ayatollah’s words and his image to reflect their own vision of the future of Iran. The resulting impression was that of an ascetic sage who had no interest in politics and would “spend the rest of his days in a seminary in Qom” once his goals of removing the shah and returning to Iran had been achieved.
hichi, and wonder how he had not understood the warnings, in Khomeini’s response but also in his writings.
“It seemed that the duty of the intellectuals was to bring Khomeini to Tehran and hand him over to the mollahs.”
He had manipulated the secular left and the Islamist modernists, as a vehicle, and he would dispose of them at the moment of his choosing.
While the Brotherhood’s request to break with this tradition and become an ecumenical political leader for millions was extraordinary, it was emblematic of the fluidity of sectarian identity in politics.
Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good.
Mecca’s diverse practice of Islam, which the Al-Sauds had tried their best to eradicate after their conquest.
Unlike previous custodians of Mecca and Medina, the Al-Sauds had neither lineage to the prophet nor ancestry in the holy cities.
Wahhabism was still considered heretical by much of the Muslim world.
For centuries, scholars from the four different schools of Islam had taught in the Holy Mosque and crowds of students had traveled from near and far to gather in halaqas, circles of study, around their preferred teachers.
Harmony could be brought back, Sami thought, only if diversity was allowed to thrive again in the House of God.
His first law minister was a Hindu, to make clear that laws were to be written by secular jurists, not clerics and theologians.
should the young thief of a mosque clock have his whole hand amputated or just his fingers?
Over time, imperceptibly, people’s memories of their own culture and history would be altered. Looking back, they would struggle to pinpoint the exact moment when everything had changed.
They were detached from reality, drowning in a fanaticism that would make it hard to return to their home countries.
On the morning of Sunday, July 3, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz as the plane made its way to nearby Dubai. There were 290 civilians on the plane, including sixty-six infants and children. No one survived. Their lifeless bodies floated in the sea amid the wreckage of the plane.
Mu’tazilah applied reason to the study of the holy book and believed in free will.
Ibn Taymiyya’s words, wrote Ghannami, were a true disaster, leading people to take it upon themselves to impose virtue on others.
country. Despair drives people to faith, and in Iraq they were flocking to the mosques as more and more women were putting on the veil.
In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011. The Quran is immutable, and all it does is tell believers to respond to blasphemy with dignity.
Iranians were simply too argumentative, too cultured and cultural: within the sanctioned parameters, there were still surprises in elections, lively parliamentary debates, reformist media that pushed the agenda, and intellectuals of all classes, who kept writing, meeting, and sketching a different future.
it was one of the ideological pillars of the revolution envisioned by Khomeini, part of the scaffolding holding up the structure—but it was also the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel, because the women were suffocating. The women who had marched in 1979, chanting “in the dawn of freedom, there is no freedom,” were still there, and with them a new generation of daughters, along with all those who had embraced the revolution before being disillusioned by it.
that she was not objecting to a piece of cloth but to the mandatory veil and the lack of choice.
This moment could not be their victory, nor the result of activism—in the absolute monarchy, everything good was the result of the king’s munificence. And to erase their decades of activism and their standing in society, they were being branded as traitors in a vicious smear campaign online and in newspapers.
nationalism could be the new ideology to rally young Saudis, and “traitor” could replace kafir as a rallying cry.
“Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?” In the eye of the storm, in those countries from which the ripples had emanated and life had been blunted since 1979, there was resentment toward the generation that had allowed it to happen.
From invasions to coups and support for dictators, America’s actions have fed and aggravated local dynamics.
“It is perfectly true … that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
