Robert Irwin (writer) - Quotes

Quotes

During the Rushdie case, the leader of the largest Buddhist organisation in Britain was asked how Buddhists would react to blasphemy, and he answered: "We support it, because it makes people think." – That was well said. I don't know how to react, but it strikes me that Muhammed is increasingly given a divine status which he didn't have in original Islam. Muhammed is no god. He is a human being making mistakes which, by the way, is evident from the authorised accounts about his life.

On Edward Said's work Orientalism:

I am a medievalist, but he hates the Middle Ages. Altogether he loathes the past, he does not have the ability to enter into the spirit of other ages. He lies about European novelists and twists their words; I am myself a novelist with great sympathy for some of those whom he denounces in his book. Finally, I am an orientalist, too, and his book is a long and persevering polemic against my subject, so I need to ask: is there anything at all to like in Said's book? – No. It is written far too quickly and carelessly. It abounds with misprints and mis-spelled names. It is an extremely polemic book, and throughout time many polemic books for or against Islam and the Muslim world have been written, but none have been taken seriously in the same way as Said.

On Edward Said:

The fact is that researchers cannot build anything on Said's thoughts-dead-end. ... He has made it difficult for Westerners to say anything critical about Islam and the Muslim world. You cannot do that because then you run the risk of getting denounced as an orientalist, i.e. a racist, an imperialist and other terrible things.