Jihadi Jane Quotes

“People who do not understand irony cannot understand fiction.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Why did Allah have to create Shaitan, or God have to create Satan? Why create evil? We were told then—as I was told at home—that it was to test humanity. But why test humanity if you are all-powerful and purely good? Why not just drench humanity in pure goodness, as if in your divine rays? The answer—don't laugh at me—that I have now is this: Evil is precondition to goodness. Goodness reveals itself only in its capacity to tolerate the pettiness and dullness of evil. Goodness has to live with the possibility of evil, not eradicate it. As long as it does so, the evil that confronts goodness stays petty, dull, limited, essentially unimportant. But when goodness wants to become pure and alone, that is when it turns evil, truly evil; not the grubby evil that it has to tolerate in order to be goodness, but Evil itself.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“For the first time in two or three days, I heard the cry of birds—oh well, it was a crow, but even a crow's croaking sounded wonderful. There still was life. There were birds and the breeze. There were clouds in the blue sky. And we could look at them for a moment, hear them again. You have no idea how beautiful the world looks and sounds in the hours after a battle stops!”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“What had I decided to do? I had no idea. If there was anything I had decided to do, weeks ago, it was to do just what was necessary to survive, and nothing more. To survive until some stroke of fortune released me into the wider world outside. I had so often rejected that world for being imperfect and thus an affront to the perfection of my God, but its human imperfection was exactly what I had grown to respect in this place where all talk of perfection and purity led, by a straight and narrow road, directly to suffering, mistrust, destruction and death.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“...can one really believe if there is no freedom to disbelieve? What is the credit in having faith if you allow others and yourself no real choice at all?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Even today, after all that has happened, I keep this scarf wrapped around my hair because of men's interest in me. It is not because of faith any more; I still believe in Allah, don't misunderstand me, but I do not think Allah is a fashion designer. He observes people's hearts, not their clothes.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“No, don't think she is weak because she is sobbing; she is a Kurdish girl; she is not weak; never underestimate a Kurdish woman, as you will find out soon, if you haven't yet, you men of Daesh.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Yes, there were thousands of women like them. Yes, they were Muslims. No, they did not think Allah would punish them. No, she was not afraid of what Daesh might do. Yes, that is what she would call them—Daesh—whether they liked it or not. Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to women? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to women? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to woman? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Yes, there were thousands of women like them. Yes, they were Muslims. No, they did not think Allah would punish them. No, she was not afraid of what Daesh might do. Yes, that is what she would call them—Daesh—whether they liked it or not. Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to woman? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Is this what I had come to: the inability to trust even my best friend? If human beings cannot have faith in other human beings, despite all their mutual failures, then can they ever have faith in the Almighty, I wondered.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“[Those two Kurdish women soldiers] made me feel guilty towards the goodness I had not seen because pettiness had blinded me to it. How had I failed to register the many people who did accept me as I was, veiled and alien in their world, just because there were some who stared, or muttered—or shouted, like that crazy woman on the bus? How had I failed to see the decency of vibrant parks with children, care for the weak and unemployed—for what can one call it but decency? How, I sometimes wondered with shock and pain, how had I failed to register this basic decency, simply because there were also idiots in the world who excluded me and mine?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“I had not lost my faith—I still have not—but I had lost my belief in the exact ways I had been brought up to follow my faith in. It did not make sense any more—this intense hatred and violence being practised in the name of a religion that stood for peace, this endless nitpicking bureaucratic intolerance being practised in the name of a God whose most common attributes, as I had been told from the time I was an infant, were mercy and forgiveness!”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“You know how it happens when sometimes one starts arguing, knowing well that one is in the wrong, and this knowledge just makes one get more vicious and unbending in argument?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“...I say to you, daughter, reconsider your glorious resolve, for surely the role of a woman is to give birth, not to throw bombs.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“I had become convinced that if there was evidence of divinity in anything on earth, it was in life. Without the miracle of life, there was no God.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“The careerists win everywhere, believe me! Hassan's fanaticism was a career to him. Killing was his corporate job. The apocalypse was how he planned to corner the market.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Yes, that is what a claustrophobic world can cause: infections spread faster in confined space.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“...violence spreads like a virus by contaminating others. ... Jealousy and suspicion spread like viruses too.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Burning a book's like burning a human being. Once yer start burning books, yer end up burning the entire world, every damn human being in it!”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“...I wonder now if she noticed the irony of it all: how she had left a world in order to rebel, to fight for what she considered right, and now, now...”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“You have to care for the animal you sacrifice; you have to love it. Why should you offer Allah a sacrifice that means nothing to you?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Halide gave [the goat] a name: 'Kaplan'. 'What does it mean?' I asked her. 'Oh, it means tiger in Turkish,' she said, laughing. 'Don't you think it is a ferocious little thing?'

Halide would also, when she could, go out and whisper in Turkish to the goat. When I asked her about it, she said, in her sombre manner, 'But of course, animals understand what you say. They just do not speak. Every good farmer knows that.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“You read articles about how the Internet has created a lonelier world, with people isolating themselves behind their screens, connecting to a flat keyboard rather than to other people in a park or a party. Yes and no. Yes and no. It depends on who you are, and where. Some of us never had parks or parties to connect in. Some of us never will.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“[A Muslim woman opts] out of the glitter of the West because of [her] belief. It takes strength to do so. More strength than Muslim men realize: I wonder if imams would insist on the hijab as much as they do if they had to put it on themselves and cope with the consequences in ordinary life. It takes strength and character.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Perhaps it is those who are most vulnerable in their hearts who learn to grow the toughest skin.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Marriage had always been something like the swirling rumours of a distant war; now, suddenly, the cannons were at my doorstep.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“You've said that even if God existed you could not know the mind of God, for that would be a sacrilege from any religious perspective. Divinity is divinity only to the extent that it exceeds the bounds of human understanding, you said. That was one of the statements that made me think of accosting you here. Well, perhaps, happiness is like that too: we cannot really understand the happiness of other people. Or their sorrow.”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane

“Do you have such periods too? Periods you wish you could go back to, because you let them pass, because you wasted them, not realizing how precious they were? Periods you threw away like—how does the line go—like pearls before swine? Periods that, if only you could turn the wheel of time back to them, you would knit and embroider forever into your being, never letting them go?”
― Tabish Khair, Jihadi Jane