Joseph A. Massad > Quotes

“While I am sympathetic to the political project of an all-encompassing utopian inclusivity, I am less sanguine about its feasibility and more worried about
its cruelty.”
― Joseph Massad

“For conservative nationalists and Islamists, history is nothing but a repository of memories that can be galvanized in the face of a perceived danger, whether repression or debauchery, a sort of how-to guide to a glorious future that restores the glories of yesteryear.”
― Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs

“when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).”
― Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism

“The Egyptian chronicler of the Napoleonic invasion, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754-1826), was impressed with the scientific interests of the French but described their mores in scandalous terms:   Their women do not cover themselves and have no modesty; they do not care whether they uncover their private parts. Whenever a Frenchman has to perform an act of nature he does so wherever he happens to be, even in full view of people, and he goes away as he is, without washing his private parts after defecation. If he is a man of taste and refinement he wipes himself with whatever he finds, even with a paper with writing on it, otherwise he remains as he is. They have intercourse with any woman who pleases them and vice versa. Sometimes one of their women goes into a barber’s shop, and invites him to shave her pubic hair. If he wishes he can take his fee in kind.7”
― Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs

“Violence against women is blamed on individual criminality rather than cultural factors in the case of white males; for minority groups, it is linked to pathological cultures.215”
― Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism