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Arab Quotes

Browse 52 quotes about Arab.

Arab Quotes

“Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?”

CultureReadingWomenFreedomBooksLiberationArab
Book:I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman
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“منطق العرب أن ليس لهم منطق .. إنما إنفعالات ونزوات شخصية تتحكم في الملايين عشرات السنين .. فالعرب لم يبتعدوا كثيرا عن التفسير الشخصي للأحداث .. وعن الإختراع الشخصي للأحداث أيضا ولذلك ف الدوافع شخصية و الكوارث قومية”

LogicArab
Book:في السياسة الجزء الأول
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“Grief is shameless; it refuses to be ignored. If you let it have its way, it becomes fatal. If you try to remove it piece by piece, it only multiplies like a tumor. And if you try to fight it, it becomes like quicksand; you try to claw your way back to the surface, and for a second you feel the fresh air against your face, thinking you've survived, only to be pulled fiercely back down again, swallowed whole, nothing left.”

LifePainDeathMotherSufferingGriefMissingMotherhoodMissing SomeoneLebanonAccidentBeirutArabMiddle Eastern
Book:Crossing
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“I don't think I ever fully understood before now the old saying that goes: "A mother's heart loves her young one until he grows; her ill one until he heals; and her traveler until he returns." I have experienced all kinds of waiting; I've waited for my young to grow and the sick to heal, but I am still waiting on my little traveler and I do not know how long it will be until I see him again.”

LoveLifePainDeathMotherSufferingMissingMotherhoodMissing SomeoneLebanonAccidentBeirutArabMiddle Eastern
Book:Crossing
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“In our country we use different words [than feminism] which mean the liberation or the emancipation of women. Of course I believe in the emancipation of women. It will change a lot of things in society for the better. But, you know, the class patriarchal system under which we live oppresses men too and the discrimination from which women suffer is not good for the life of men. Don’t you think so?”

ClassFeminismArabIntersectional Feminism
Book:Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words
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“My trauma is no longer what I define myself by, and it has taken a lot of therapy, self-love, and depression naps for me to get to that point. I define myself by a set of different virtues: the fact that I am a decent writer, the fact that I am a resilient person who has found healing, the fact that I am goofy as hell, the fact that after decades of being understood by everyone as white, I’m finally beginning to explore what it means to be an Arab American, the fact that I was eating my grandmother’s hummus way before white people decided hummus was cool.”

HumorSelf LoveSelf DiscoveryArab
Book:Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story
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“ابيضّ شعر يوسف في عمر السابعة حين شاهد الثلج يهدم حجرة أخيه الأكبر، فيسقط السقف عليه وزوجته وتوأميه، الأجساد الأربعة يراها يوسف بعد ذلك ممدة على السرير الحديد في القبو. وتظلّ تزوره في أحلامه حتى عمرٍ متقدّمة. كان يقضي يومه متأملاً ويفكّر إمّا مُعلّقًا على غصن التينة ومأرجحًا أحد ساقيه، أو تحت ظلّ شجرة التوت بجوار قبر أمّه سارة.تعلّم يوسف إبراهيم خاطر جابر الكتابة، أراد أن يشغله والده عن ساعات التفكير الطويلة. “تعلّم يوسف كيف يكتب اسمه، تعلّم كيف يكتب الأرقام، تعلّم كيف يكتب “الله جلّ جلاله” تعلّم كيف يكتب إبراهيم بالألف الطويلة كشجرة في الوسط، تعلّم كيف يكتب سارة بالراء التي تكرج كالمياه من “هارب قناة المير” وبالتاء المربوطة التي نلفظها كالألف بعد راء إبراهيم، تعلّم كيف يكتب نور الدين، وأحسّ حين كتب اسم أخيه الصغير أنه يسمع صوت بكاءه خارجًا من الحروف”. كان يمرر يده على الحروف بعد أن يكتبها فيشعر أنها تتنفس تحت أصابعه.”

LoveArtNostalgiaEnglishLebanonArabicArabJoseph
Book:يوسف الإنجليزي
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“Jana was loved by all the Libyan moms, especially the ones with eligible sons. Elizza was not such a big hit. She got along great with everyone, but the moms looked at her with a sort of disapproval. They couldn’t quite put their finger on what exactly they disapproved of. They just had an instinct that this girl would give their son trouble if he was to marry her, and so they warned each other with subtle looks and some outright rude comments about her, to steer their sons away. They wanted someone haadiya for their sons. Elizza was still trying to tap down the exact Arabic to English translation of that word, but the general idea of it was quiet, shy, obedient. All she knew was, she was not it.”

MuslimArabElizabeth BennetMuslim Pride And PrejudiceJane Bennet
Book:A Second Look
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“I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.”

CultureIsraelPalestineHomelandJewishMulticulturalArabMultilingualMultireligious
Book:Getting Home Alive
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“The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.”

Middle EastColonialismImperialismPalestineJewishZionismJewsArabPalestinian Israeli ConflictArab Israeli ConflictPeace And Conflict
Book:Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story
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“The UAE Sonnet I'm asked to compare USA with UAE, So here it is, in my free form sonnetary. For starters, there is no comparison - UAE is a civilized country, USA is not. Sure UAE has its share of violations, like every living country in the world, but unlike USA, the incredible growth and the very birth of UAE is not founded on the worst kind of atrocities in history. In fact, forget the rich, safe and prosperous UAE - on the civilization scale USA is the bottom scraper of history.”

UsaAmerican HistoryArabDubaiArabian NightsEmiratesUaeAbu DhabiDubai CityUnited Arab Emirates
Book:Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets
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“I'm asked to compare USA with UAE, So here it is, in my free form sonnetary. For starters, there is no comparison - UAE is a civilized country, USA is not. Sure UAE has its share of violations, like every living country in the world, but unlike USA, the incredible growth and the very birth of UAE is not founded on the worst kind of atrocities in history.”

American HistoryArabDubaiArabian NightsEmiratesUaeAbu DhabiDubai CityUnited Arab EmiratesExpo City
Book:Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets
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“Justru sesungguhnya akibat konsep yang singkat mengenai tinjauan dan luasan pengkajian bahasa, kesusasteraan dan kebudayaan Melayu itu, sehingga disamarkan hanya sebagai “Pengajian Melayu”, telah pula membawa akibat2 yang mempengaruhi penyingkiran bidang ilmiah tertentu dari pengajian Melayu, seperti pengkajian2 bahasa dan kesusasteraan Arab, bahasa dan kesusasteraan Farsi, bahasa dan kesusasteraan Sanskrit, yang kesemuanya telah memberi sumbangan yang berkesan dalam perkembangan bahasa dan kesusasteraan Melayu. Tambahan pula, bidang2 seperti sejarah pemikiran, falsafah, dan ilmu2 yang berkaitan dengan metodoloji penyelidikan ilmiah, kajian2 mengenai teori2 yang memang berkembang dengan pesatnya di Eropa, dewasa itu dan sekarang, semua ini diabaikan dalam pengkajian bidang2 kechil tertentu saja.”

SanskritArabBahasaJawaSasteraPengajian MelayuParsi
Book:Buku Panduan Jabatan Bahasa dan Kesusasteraan Melayu
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