Nine Parts of Desire Quotes

“While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“If Islamic countries can’t come up with their own principles for women’s competition,” she said in one widely reported speech, “then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on us.” Iran”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women’s hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile—if she smiles at a man he will think, ‘Ah, she loves me,’ ” Mohamed explained. As”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize,” she sighed. The”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn’t instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered,”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn’t wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Until Islam’s articulate spokeswomen such as Rana Kabbani target their misguided coreligionists with the fervor they expend on outside critics, the grave mistake of conflating Islam with clitoridectomy and honor killings will continue. And much more importantly, so will the practices themselves, at the cost of so many Muslim women’s health and happiness.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against “honor” killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“West Bank women’s groups argued that the time wasn’t right, that the struggle for independence from Israeli rule had to come before questions of women’s rights could be raised. The”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“It is this notion of women’s barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute,” said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“The practice of mutilating women’s genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn’t bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“In Muslim societies men’s bodies just weren’t seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women’s. Getting”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for “source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion.” In”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“The nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable. I found myself referring to two quite different English interpretations—George Sale’s for a feel for the poetry of the work, and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall’s for a clearer sense of what the text actually said about sex and marriage, work and holy war.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“I started with Arabic, the language of the Koran. Only one in five Muslims is an Arab; yet Arabic is the language in which the world’s more than one billion Muslims—a fifth of the world’s population—talk to God.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.” —Ali ibn Abu Taleb, husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and founder of the Shiite sect of Islam”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Sometimes substituting race for gender also is an interesting exercise. Say a country, a close Western ally and trading partner, had a population half white, half black. The whites had complete control of the blacks. They could beat them if they disobeyed. They deprived them of the right to leave the house without permission; to walk unmolested without wearing the official segregating dress; to hold any decent job in the government, or to work at all without the permission of the white in control of them. Would there have been uproar in our countries by now? Would we have imposed trade sanctions and subjected this country to international opprobrium? You bet. Yet countries such as Saudi Arabia, which deprive half their population of these most basic rights, have been subjected to none of these things. It”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Is it even our fight? As a mental test, I always try to reverse the gender. If some ninety million little boys were having their penises amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“At some point every religion, especially one that purports to encompass a complete way of life and system of government, has to be called to account for the kind of life it offers the people in the lands where it predominates. It becomes insufficient to look at Islam on paper, or Islam in history, and dwell on the inarguable improvements it brought to women’s lives in the seventh century. Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith has proved such fertile ground for almost every antiwomen custom it encountered in its great march out of Arabia. When it found veils and seclusion in Persia, it absorbed them; when it found genital mutilations in Egypt, it absorbed them; when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women’s participation withered.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women