Abdul-Rehman Asif

“Saying this, I know I'll hear 'anti-Semitic' from every direction again. Oh, yes! But truth is truth”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Sometimes in a panel or debate appearance, I’d find a jam-packed audience to hear me, alone, facing six or eight student and faculty scholars heads of departments such as sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and religion, and each of them coming at me in his specialty.

At the outset, always I’d confront such panels with something such as: 'Gentlemen, I finished the eighth grade in Mason, Michigan. My high school was the black ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my master’s was taken in prison. Mr. Muhammad has taught me that I never need fear any man’s intellect who tries to defend or to justify the white man’s criminal record against the non-white man—especially the white man and the black man here in North America.'

It was like being on a battlefield—with intellectual and philosophical bullets. It was an exciting battling with ideas.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“And there I stood, the invited speaker, at Harvard. A story that I had read in prison when I was reading a lot of Greek mythology flicked into my head. The boy Icarus. Do you remember the story?

Icarus’ father made some wings that he fastened with wax. 'Never fly but so high with these wings,' the father said. But soaring around, this way, that way, Icarus’ flying pleased him so that he began thinking he was flying on his own merit. Higher, he flew—higher—until the heat of the sun melted the wax holding those wings. And down came Icarus—tumbling.

Standing there by that Harvard window, I silently vowed to Allah that I never would forget that any wings I wore had been put on by the religion of Islam. That fact I never have forgotten…not for one second.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“I'm for anybody who's for freedom. I'm for anybody who's for justice. I'm for anybody who's for equality. I'm not for anybody who tells me to sit around and wait for mine.”
― Malcolm X