Man will silence the voice of his conscience when it suits him to commit sin. But
Who would have thought that a single suicide—or a double suicide, more properly—could put an entire city in a sour temper? Vienna valued its suicides, especially those that were dramatic, conducted wi...
We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize, she sighed. The
Until Islam’s articulate spokeswomen such as Rana Kabbani target their misguided coreligionists with the fervor they expend on outside critics, the grave mistake of conflating Islam with clitoridectom...
To believe, to act, and to have events confound you—I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong—how can you not s...
They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
The island. As I tally my losses, it figures large there. If God takes a beloved one unto himself, we feel that loss in our heart. Yet we know well enough that nowt will quicken the dead, and so we mu...
She was loved by a man as a woman is meant to be loved.
Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,
Let’s go then, I whispered. Let’s go and live, since we have no choice in it.
I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see...
I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capab...
I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gent...
How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far dist...
He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation.
But now I could not gainsay the images of him, his silvered hair stained with blood and pale gray tissue, a bubble of crimsoned spittle forming on his lips as he tried to mouth the words of his last p...
All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and fel...
A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.
The surfeit of loss in my life has convinced me it will be easier to be grieved for than to grieve.Bethia as an old woman about to die p 257
With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam.