If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
Interpretation
To defeat terrorism, Islam must embrace modern secular principles for true freedom.
Salman Rushdie's quote emphasizes the necessity for the Islamic world to adopt secular and humanist ideals in order to effectively combat terrorism. He suggests that without integrating these principles, the aspirations for freedom and progress in Islamic nations will remain unattainable and merely a dream.
In practice
In a debate on global peace strategies, this quote can highlight the need for secular values in combating extremism.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.
I don't care what color you are, what size you are, where you're from. It is disturbing that there's an idea that only tall, thin, willowy, size 0 women are attractive - even for the tall, thin, willowy, size 0 woman! We all should get to feel like there's something powerful and beautiful about who we are.
Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.
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