Anatol Lieven > Quotes

“The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.”
― Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence

“The idea of Sufism as a vaguely deist, New-Age-style philosophy with lots of poetry, alcohol and soft drugs is also immensely appealing to members of Pakistan’s Westernized elites, whom it permits to follow a Westernized and hedonistic lifestyle without feeling that they have broken completely with their religion and its traditions.”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“In attacking the saints, the Islamist extremists – though they refuse to recognize this themselves – are striking at the very roots of Islam in South Asia. One might say that the beginnings of South Asian Islam were the Book and the Saint.”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“The Sayyids and Qureishis are groups peculiar to Islam, being (ostensibly) descendants of the Prophet and his clan, and therefore of Arabic origin. Yet their role and status in South Asian Muslim society has certain limited affinities to that of the Brahmins in South Asian Hindu society.”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“The economy recovered to a great extent from the disasters of Bhutto’s rule, but the boom of the 1980s under Zia proved as shallow as that under Musharraf – based above all on US aid and remittances from the Pakistani workers who flooded to the Gulf states in response to the oil boom.”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“In Pakistan, you often find that a wife is Shia, the husband Sunni. And in the past this was never a problem, but now extremists want to divide us. Sufism and Sufi shrines play a very important role against this, by bridging Sunni and Shia. When someone asks me if I am Sunni or Shia I reply that like my saints I really do not care. It is irrelevant. I think only of the will of God.”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“Thus the Citizens’ Foundation, the most widespread and effective educational charity in Pakistan (with more than 600 schools and 85,000 pupils), is a non-religious organization, but a majority of its founding members from the business community are practising Muslims – though they come from all the different branches of Islam represented in”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“On the other hand, charitable donation, at almost 5 per cent of GDP, is one of the highest rates in the world.”
― Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country

“Russians are not nationalists in the Baltic or Galician sense. For one thing, they have absorbed so many ethnic groups that they really have become a kind of "super-ethnos" and then the Soviet state sucked away all their national feeling into itself.”
― Anatol Lieven, Ukraine & Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry