Quotes from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. “I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from 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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Politics needs a certain mental ability,” explained Ahmad Saati, the university’s spokesman. “Very few women have this kind of mind.” I”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Women, it says, “manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation. The”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“The lieutenant colonel wondered if the high scores reflected a defect in the newly built shooting range at the women’s academy. To find out, he commandeered the men’s academy shooting range and ordered the women to redo the test. There he watched in growing astonishment as bullet after bullet slammed home, right smack in the center of the target.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he’d told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“if her husband and children are suffering from her absence or her preoccupation with politics, then this is not Islam.” It”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“They threw rotten fruit at me and told me next time it would be acid.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from 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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“We have to fight now to make them understand that everyone has the right to live freely. It’s another war, I think.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he’d just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. “She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone stared at her,” he said with distaste. After”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a God-given right.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman’s voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“No, no,” he said. “She can’t raise it at all. She may only clap. Women must be very careful of their voices. If”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“She must not speak in a delicate tone. This is from the Koran. Things begun with a few words will continue to other things.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from 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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds’ opportunity to whisper in their prince’s ear.”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“trouble is, these people don’t understand their own culture,” said”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right.” A”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from 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, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

“This is Islamic dress—but not to them. According to them, the colors in the embroidery are haram. Where”
― Geraldine Brooks, quote from Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

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Popular quotes

“Comprendre... Vous n'avez que ce mot-là à la bouche, tous, depuis que je suis toute petite. Il fallait comprendre qu'on ne peut pas toucher à l'eau, à la belle eau fuyante et froide parce que cela mouille les dalles, à la terre parce que cela tache les robes. Il fallait comprendre qu'on ne doit pas manger tout à la fois, donner tout ce qu'on a dans ses poches au mendiant qu'on rencontre, courir, courir dans le vent jusqu'à ce qu'on tombe par terre et boire quand on a chaud et se baigner quand il est trop tôt ou trop tard, mais pas juste quand on en a envie ! Comprendre. Toujours comprendre. Moi, je ne veux pas comprendre. Je comprendrai quand je serai vieille [...]. Si je deviens vieille. Pas maintenant.”
― Sophocles, quote from Antigone

“He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.

Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.

It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance

“We'll know we've got it right when they choose for themselves," he used to say.
That doesn't make sense.
'That's what I thought too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don't think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We're talking about an adult dog, a dog that's been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him - he'd rather starve than make the wrong decision.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.

In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what?

But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.

That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide.

The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with lit He of its past glory remaining or appreciated.

The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives.

Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five.

When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“I love you." she whispered into the rough wool of his sweater.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle

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