Anne Norton > Quotes

“Muslim women, and critics, male and female, of Western models of sex and sexuality, are silenced. The price of speech for a Muslim woman in the West is the disavowal of Islam. Books condemning Islam are picked by publishers and featured on talk shows. Their authors are commended for their courage. Speech in defense of Islam is read as the speech of subjection. Islam oppresses women. Any woman speaking in its favor must be deluded or forced to speak against her will. If she defends the hijab or speaks in defense of polygamy, she cannot be believed. No woman in her right mind could defend these. Any woman who does must be deluded or coerced. The more Muslim women object to Western efforts to "help" them, the more need there is to liberate them.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“Derrida says adieu to Ishmael and to democracy. He hears the salvation in the “Latinity” of ‘salut’. Perhaps we should learn enough Arabic for simple greetings, enough to say Ahlan wa sahlan and Marhaba. Marhaba, which is used as English speakers use ‘Hello,’ carries within it the idea that the one greeted is welcome, that there is plenty of room. Arabic words, like words in Hebrew, are formed from roots. Each root leads to a tree of words. The root of the word r-h-b gives us rahb, which means spacious or roomy but also ‘unconfined’ and ‘open-minded, broad-minded, frank, liberal.’ It is also the root of rahaba, the word for the public square. Marhaba is a good greeting for liberals, who at their open-minded, broad-minded best, can find that there is plenty of room in the public square.

The Egyptian poet Farouk Mustafa translated Ahlan wa Sahlan as “you are among your people, and your keep is easy.” Like Marhaba, the greeting marks a welcome, a curious one. Ahlan wa sahlan is not saud simply to one’s own, to family and friends and fellow citizens. It is said to foreigners, to travelers, to people who are not, in the ordinary sense, one’s own. Like the American “Come in, make yourself at home”, it is said to people who are not at home, who might be turned away. The greeting recognizes a difference only to set it aside. Ahlan wa sahlan recognizes that there are different nations, and that they might find themselves in a foreign country, among an alien people. This greeting marks the possibility that the other, the alien, the wanderer, and the refugee might be met with welcome rather than with fear.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“In her brilliant study 'The Politics of the Veil', Joan Scott pulled the veil aside to show us what it concealed in French politics. The veil conceals the presence and durability of racial hierarchies the French insist are absent. The veil conceals the haunting resemblance of the treatment of French Muslims to the treatment of French Jews. The veil shrouds a colonial past the French insist is dead and gone. Scott spreads out that much-vexed piece of cloth and uses it to map the anxieties haunting French politics and society. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are not only the core values of France-they also are demands that the French (like other Westerners) find difficult to satisfy. Liberty becomes more manageable when it is reduced to sexual freedom. The persistence of colonial hierarchies abroad and racism at home haunts the aspiration to Equality. Fraternity is lost in the conflicts over the veil and those suburbs called the banlieues d'Islam. Once again, a seemingly Muslim question reveals itself as a series of questions the West obliquely asks itself.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“Many people seem to think that there are good political thinkers and bad ones; that the good are always good and the bad invariably bad. Condemning Heidegger or Carl Schmitt may seem quite straightforward. How can one trust the political thinking of men who worked with the Nazis? But if finding bad philosophies is philosophers is easy, finding an unremittingly good ones is surprisingly difficult. Plato’s condemnation of democracy and Aristotle’s service to tyrants may seem to belong to a distant (and hence more easily forgiven) time, but Hannah Ardent’s condemnation of black students and the civil rights movement cannot be easily placed in an unenlightened past. A little reading forces one to recognize that Locke, the great republican, was imperfect enough to defend slavery and condemn Catholics. Mill, the defender of liberty, was not so ready to defend the liberty of colonized Indians or less-educated workers.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“The use of female soldiers and interrogators [in the Iraq War] was said to strike at Arab and Muslim vulnerability to sexual humiliation. It also carried within it a claim of Western superiority. Arab and Muslim vulnerability to sexual humiliation was a consequence of sexism and sexual repression.

Yet who would not be humiliated by being forced to strip naked before strangers and enemies? Who (man or woman) would not cringe at being asked to simulate sexual acts, or find the idea of being smeared with menstrual blood repugnant?

The strategies of sexual humiliation transformed a common human vulnerability into a vulnerability peculiar to one culture and a site of the power of Western over Arab culture.

This discursive sleight of hand is the dark reversal of cultural sensitivity.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“The concerns the West directs at Muslims map sites of domestic anxiety. European states--indeed all the states of the liberal and social democratic West- are faced with continuing questions about the status of women, sexuality, equality, and difference, faith and secularism. They are fueled by anxieties over the meaning of the past and the direction of the future. The European constitutional crisis is impelled in part by an uncertainty over the status of Christianity in the constitution of Europe. Here, the question is not the inclusion or exclusion of Turkey, a nation predominantly Muslim in culture and faith, but the identity of the receiving nations. Europe is asked if it is Christian or secular, and it cannot find an answer.”
― Anne Norton

“In the West, marriage (gay or straight) is supposed to follow romance. People marry for love; they marry for happiness. When the conservative Theodore Olson and liberal David Boies argued that same-sex marriage was a constitutionally guaranteed right, they based their argument on the clause in the preamble of the constitution that secured "the pursuit of happiness."

But marriage, like so much sexual policing, is not just about love; it's about money. Marriage determines rights to property. Marriage is a contract. Like other contracts, it is governed by the state. Laws tell us whom we can marry and whom we cannot. They tell us when we can marry (not, say, before the age of sixteen). The laws don't care much about happiness. They do care about sex (if it's useful to the state). Laws in Europe, if not the United States, rewards people who have children. Marriage, in all cases, directs the flow of money. Property flows as marriage directs: to a spouse or a partner, to children. Domestic partnerships and civil unions have the same ties to money. When American corporations began offering benefits to same-sex partners, they required people to establish they really were partners. This was not a matter of sex or love or romance. It was a matter of money. Partners had to demonstrate not that they have romantic or sexual ties but that they had financial ones. They had to show that they owned property together, that they were named in each other's wills or shared a bank account.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“The vision that shows Muslims as opposed to freedom of speech also makes Muslim the compulsory targets of that speech. It is not enough that one speak of Muslims. It is not even enough that one speak ill of them. One is required to speak ill of Muslims-and to do it in prescribed ways. Freedom of speech is not secured in the study of Islam, in writing or in speaking of Muslims. Freedom of speech is not secured by those who call, however controversially, for the conversion of Christians to Islam. Freedom of speech is not advanced by the call to prayer. Speech is said to be "free speech" when-and only when-it is used to attack Muslims, Islam, or the Koran. When free speech becomes a Muslim question, its principle fails and its practice narrows. In this account, freedom of speech is no longer a matter of supporting the expression of unpopular opinions, defending the rights of minorities to a place in the public square, or speaking truth to power.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question

“Living with other people. in a city, a suburb, or a village, requires courage, trust, or forgetfulness. We know (though we forget) that as Hobbes famously observed, anyone can kill anyone else. We know (though we trust this it will not happen here) that one person can shoot x in a school, or x on a military base, or x in a shopping center parking lot. We know that, but we forget it. We forget because we trust our neighbors, or, more often, because we accept the risk of living how and where we do: because we want the things that other people bring us. We forget it because if we are to have democratic politics, we must have courage, and courage requires us to forget our fears.

The terrorist preys on our fear, but not only on the simple fear of death. The suicide bomber reminds us that we are always a mystery to one another. the suicide bomber holds the terror and the promise that the world could be blown asunder in a moment, and that this could be the work of one alone. The terrorist is the dark side of individualism. We fear terror because we know that power always lies within our reach.”
― Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question