Salman Rushdie

1. To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death. [Salman Rushdie, In Good Faith, 1990]
   
   
   
2. God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. [...]and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. [...] From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. [Salman Rushdie, In God We Trust, 1985]
   
   
   
3. I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in. [Salman Rushdie, on David Frost show]
   
   
   
4. I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life. [Salman Rushdie, interview with David Frost)]
   
   
   
5. The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes. [Salman Rushdie, Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture, February 6, 1990, written in hiding a year after Shi'ite mullahs offered a two-million-dollar reward for Rushdie's murder for blasphemy, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt]
   
   
   
6. To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police. [Salman Rushdie, to Reuters News Service, 4/17/96]
   
   
   
7. If I were asked for a one-sentence soundbite on religion, I would say I was against it. [Salman Rushdie, to Reuters News Service, 4/17/96]
   
   
   
8. Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power.

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