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Quote by Margaret Atwood

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The Handmaid’s Tale

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Author

Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a renowned Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born on November 18, 1939. Her works are known for their unique style and profound insights into social issues, with notable titles including 'The Handmaid's Tale' and 'Cat's Eye'. more

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“Other historians have confined themselves to the recording of victories in war and triumphs over enemies, of the exploits of the commanders and the heroism of their men, stained with the blood of the thousands they have slaughtered for the sake of children and country and possessions; it is peaceful wars, fought for the very peace of the soul, and men who in such wars have fought manfully for truth rather than for country, for true religion rather than for their dear ones, that my account of God’s commonwealth will inscribe on imperishable monuments; it is the unshakeable determination of the champions of true religion, their courage and endurance, their triumphs over demons and victories over invisible opponents, and the crowns which all this won for them at the last, that it will make famous for all time.”

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“...the discoveries at Nag Hammadi reopen fundamental questions. They suggest that Christianity as we know it might not have survived at all. Had Christianity remained multiform, it might well have disappeared from history, along with dozens of rival religious cults of antiquity. I believe that we owe the survival of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the emerging church developed.”

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“We can see, then, how conflicts arose in the formation of Christianity between those restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path to self-discovery and the institutional framework that gave to the great majority of people religious sanction and ethical direction for their daily lives. Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring. Gnostic Christianity proved no match for the orthodox faith, either in terms of orthodoxy's wide popular appeal...or in terms of its effective organization. To the impoverishment of Christian tradition, gnosticism, which offered alternatives to what became the main thrust of Christian orthodoxy, was forced outside.”

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“In an important article, Angelika Neuwirth eloquently described the shortcomings of our field's insularity as a failure to situate the Qur'an in the "thought world" and "epistemic space" of Late Antiquity - a failure she diagnoses as rooted in the subconscious, but nonetheless persistent, tendency of modern scholarship to reproduce the premodern view of early Islamic history as momentous yet "foreign" and somehow outside and beyond the forces exerted by Late Antiquity on Western and European history.”

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“When Enlightenment thinkers naturalized Muhammad as a mere man rather than a demonic false prophet, they forged a humanistic intellectual environment that inexorably led to the naturalization of Moses and Jesus as men of history and of their times as well. Hence, the three founders of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam suddenly came to stand on par with one another in the humanists' imaginary, a parity and equilibrium that established the foundations of the very enterprise of the comparative study of religions.”

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“Several themes that are common in early non Muslim sources but far less so in sources from the Arabo-Islamic tradition feature prominently in al-Zuhrī’s account. For instance, al-Zuhrī portrays the ascendance of Muhammad’s followers: (1) as led by a new king (malik), or else as ushering in an era of new kingship/dominion (mulk); and (2) as primarily an ethnic dominion, being a rule not of a community of faithful believers (al-muʾminīn) but rather of “the circumcised people [al-khitān].” While this is not incompatible per se with early Islamic historiography, these themes deeply resonate with early Christian accounts of the rise of Islam, particularly in the Levant, which most often speak of the new Arab/Saracen rulers in terms a new dominion (Syr. malkūtā), not a new religion and hence just as often depict Muhammad and other early Muslim rulers as merely “kings” (Syr. malkē) and nothing more. The account of Ps.-Fredegar fits this pattern perfectly, inasmuch as it describes the “circumcised” conquerors in purely ethnic terms, designating them as either Hagarenes (Agarrini) or Saracens (Saracini), but displays no knowledge of Muhammad, his religion, or the religious convictions and motivations of the “Saracen” conquerors.”

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“The geography of faith had begun to shift profoundly with Islam—a religion that brought with it a renewed, robust vision of an empire of faith. It would also then fall to al-Zuhrī to be the new empire’s most eloquent and skillful articulator of its Islamic vision of the translatio imperii with the prophetic authority of Muhammad and his community at its center—reaffirming that with new faith came new dominion.”

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“Because the past shapes the present, responsible citizenship also requires some sense of history, an idea that applies particularly to the matter of religion. Too often public discussions of the religious dimensions of policy issues either overlook the past or concentrate on very recent years. But that shortened perspective makes it difficult to see what is new and what is not and which problems, such as climate change, economic disparity, and interreligious violence, are entangled in a longer past. We need a history that traces religion's role in the broad changes in ways of life, from foraging to farming to factories.”

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