Category: Quotes

“Now, when I look back [on the work of the WOI], it seems to me that our main mistake was not that we did not do other things which we should have done. Our main mistake was that we created conditions in which the contradictions related to modernity, progress, equality, and human rights, especially women’s…

“The values we have developed as feminists cannot be achieved within a patriarchal setting—whether local, national, or global. On the other hand, to ignore the systemic forces that shape our interactive lives is to become Quixotic.” – Rights of Passage

“We must subordinate power in all its manifestations to our shared humane values.” – Architects for Peace

“Women ought not to be forced to choose between freedom and God.” – Rights of Passage

“Religious zeal makes democracy problematic because it turns every attempt at understand and compromise – the hallmarks of democracy – into an evidentiary test of religious righteousness.” – Rights of Passage

“Islam is not the problem. Rather it is the misuse of Islam by interpreting it to fit the needs of the partriarchal order – the powers that be – and the privileges that one gender has held over the other.” – How are women working to eliminate violence against women in Muslim-majority societies?

“The crass infringement of women’s rights we see in the Muslim world has more to do with power, patriarchy, and misuse of religion as political weapon than with religion properly understood as individual faith.” – Gender Apartheid, Cultural Relativism, and Women’s Human Rights

“Rights and empowerment are interconnected: unless a substantial number of women in a community come to believe that they have rights and demand to exercise them, right remains an abstraction.” – Faith and Freedom