Kanan Makiya

"The Saudi government has been pumping money in a quiet kind of revolution to shape Islam in its own images since 1973, oil price rises. It wasn't a noisy revolution like the Iranian revolution was. It…"

"I find it very significant that no religious traditions, Islam included, is ever in a position, I think almost by definition, to put cruelty first in the order of its priorities of the terrible things…"

"The Muslim idea of God is, in many ways, more abstract, more remote and less human, certainly, than the Christian and the God of the Old Testament, who has passions and has angers and often behaves ve…"

"I don’t really think there is any kind of a reasonable argument against intervention in Syria. Quite the opposite: There is a moral and a human imperative to act that is larger than any nation’s inter…"

"I ran into a whole number of people for whom bodies did not count. You know: the historical process, the victory for the working class. The great big idea that could take place at the expense of any n…"

"People say to me, "Kanan, this is ridiculous, democracy in Iraq, a complete pipe dream," ... That's realism. You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are moral…"

"Millions upon millions of words have been written about the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages in order to bring about the creation of the Israeli state. And rightly so. Yet many of the v…"

"Suggesting evil is human doesn't mean we can always understand it, or doesn't mean there's only one way of understanding it. It's sort of like a great work of art. You can never fully absorb it. It's …"