5 Quotes by Joshua Hammer

We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years. We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way?

No, forget it. You people took the village and drove away all our business, it's you who must submit to Shariah.

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive.

We pushed it, but when the State Department says 'you're being a bunch of assholes' what are you going to do?

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts – treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love – represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive.