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Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women QUOTES

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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