Anouar Majid > Quotes

“[...], the soul of man lives in his language.”
― Anouar Majid, Si Yussef

“One day you will understand why our prophet said that heaven is under the feet of mothers. Because they suffer so much in delivering humanity into existence.”
― Anouar Majid, Si Yussef

“That is the present: an emanation of memory bouncing on the illusion of the future”
― Anouar Majid, Si Yussef

“The divine is the experience of being part of one's natural environment, vibrating with its energy, connected to all, without having to erect imaginary boundaries between the self and the other.”
― Anouar Majid, A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent Is Vital to Islam and America

“‎"Such questions [about illegal immigration as 'a major threat to the state'], like the topics of slavery and Native Americans, are often met with a 'here we go again' attitude, an impatience with bringing up issues considered to be long gone (perhaps even resolved) and no longer applicable in America's here and now... Mexican and Hispanic cultures are part of the fabric of Americanness; to pretend otherwise is to invite more confusion and to fuel the xenophobic tendencies that have given strength to nativists and sanctioned violence.”
― Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities

“‎"Politicians and ideologues may continue to appeal to national essences based on imagined ethnicities or races to exclude new groups of undesirables, but there is, in the end, no escaping the fact that 'we are all Moors," that we are all minorities in a world of diversities. It is high time we banish the specter of the Moor from our consciousness and embrace the differences that enrich us all. It is far more sensible to start preparing for a new golden age when every human being on earth and every cultural tradition will be embraced with the love and care now accorded to any species threatened with extinction. For the margin between life and death seems to have narrowed considerably in the last few years.”
― Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities

“[...] It is not humanity that will tear the land asunder, but a certain inhumanity born from ingratitude and the explosion of souls_ in the usual name of progress.”
― Anouar Majid, Si Yussef

“[...] When you befriend old men you realize how innocent the human race is.”
― Anouar Majid, Si Yussef

“‎"What Zolberg calls the 'Melville principle' is an excellent expression of the fundamental right to free movement... for one surely needs to explain what is natural about state structures, in rich and poor countries alike, that confine the movements of billions of people to live and play anywhere they want. Melville's vision, echoed in Walt Whitman's poetry, is a far better prospect to imagine than the persistence of a primitive form of nationalism based on exclusion and expulsion, or a social model of gated communities antagonizing the poor by keeping them out of bounds. These are simply not rational long-term solutions for an already besieged planet. If Moors or Moriscos are the residual prototype of Gypsies, Native Americans, Africans, Jews, Hispanics, and, in general, the West's undesirables since 1492, we might as well avoid the tragedies that dogmatic concepts of national identities have engendered -- the expulsion of Jews in 1492; the expulsion of Moriscos in 1609; the scapegoating of minorities as infidels in the nation's holy body politic; and the horrors of genocide visited on various non-Europeans and on Jews in Nazi Germany -- by accepting our true nature as mestizos in a world where national, racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries are dangerous illusions.”
― Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades against Muslims and Other Minorities