Discontent and Its Civilizations Quotes

“In a world of intrusive technology, we must engage in a kind of struggle if we wish to sustain moments of solitude. E-reading opens the door to distraction. It invites connectivity and clicking and purchasing. The closed network of a printed book, on the other hand, seems to offer greater serenity. It harks back to a pre-jacked-in age. Cloth, paper, ink: For these read helmet, cuirass, shield. They afford a degree of protection and make possible a less intermediated, less fractured experience. They guard our aloneness. That is why I love them, and why I read printed books still.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protect them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilization instead of savagery.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem nearly impossible to enact. Instead of the seeds of reform, we are given the yoke of misdirection. We are told to forget the sources of our discontent because something more important is at stake: the fate of our civilization.

Yet what are these civilizations, these notions of Muslim-ness, Western-ness, European-ness, American-ness, that attempt to describe where, and with whom, we belong? They are illusions: arbitrarily drawn constructs with porous, brittle, and overlapping borders. To what civilization does a Syrian atheist belong? A Muslim soldier in the US army? A Chinese professor in Germany? A lesbian fashion designer in Nigeria? After how many decades of US citizenship does a Spanish-speaking Honduran-born couple, with two generations of American children and grandchildren descended from them, cease to belong to a Latin American civilization and take their place in an American one?

Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law.

Civilizations encourage our hypocrisies to flourish. And by so doing, they undermine globalization’s only plausible promise: that we be free to invent ourselves. Why, exactly, can’t a Muslim be European? Why can’t an unreligious person be Pakistani? Why can’t a man be a woman? Why can’t someone who is gay be married?

Mongrel. Miscegenator. Half-breed. Outcast. Deviant. Heretic. Our words for hybridity are so often epithets. They shouldn’t be. Hybridity need not be the problem. It could be the solution. Hybrids do more than embody mixtures between groups. Hybrids reveal the boundaries between groups to be false.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“What distinguishes the “war on terror” is that it is a war against a concept, not a nation. And the enemy concept, it seems to me, is pluralism.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“Our coerced silence is the weapon that has been sharpened and brought to our throats.

This is why Nawaz Sharif’s statement in defence of Ahmadis met with such an angry response. Because the heart of the issue isn’t whether Ahmadis are non-Muslims or not. The heart of the issue is whether Muslims can be silenced by fear.

Because if we can be silenced when it comes to Ahmadis, then we can be silenced when it comes to Shias, we can be silenced when it comes to women, we can be silenced when it comes to dress, we can be silenced when it comes to entertainment, and we can even be silenced when it comes to sitting by ourselves, alone in a room, afraid to think what we think.

That is the point.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels - with fewer pages of plot to them - are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“The blast wave that passed through my sister’s office doubtless passed through devout Muslims, atheist Muslims, gay Muslims, funny Muslims, and lovestruck Muslims—not to mention Pakistani Christians, Chinese engineers, American security contractors, and Indian Sikhs. What civilization, then, did the bomb target? And from what civilization did it originate?”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“The privileged liberal position: “There should be equal rights for all; I should not have to share my riches with the poor.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“most powerful military in the world is sent to do a task best accomplished by schoolteachers, police forces, persuasion, and time.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“The self we create is a fiction. On this point, religion and cognitive neuroscience converge. When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as the television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“It reveals opinions and attitudes that are malleable, showing the plasticity of what in any given present moment one typically presents as a rock of certainty.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

“Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the group.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“Human beings don’t necessarily exist inside of (or correspond to) the neat racial, gendered, or national boxes into which we often unthinkingly place them.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“ambitious cleric position: “Religion makes us all equal; only I decide what religion says.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“America is our enemy; America should give us more aid.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“In Pakistan, my friends and family are frightened, as they should be when the”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“stories of evil can be projected on them with as little difficulty as stories of good.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“In America, the murky, unknown places of the world are blank screens:”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“Armed college students were telling women to cover their heads.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“Painted images of F-16s given by America were appearing on the backs of buses under the words “God is great.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

“one is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations