A Quote by Salman Rushdie

The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.

Salman Rushdie

Quote Topics

Arabia Control Fortune Give Islam Mistake Oil Put Saudi Saudi Arabia Them Then Throne Used West Which World

Quote Author

Salman Rushdie
Indian - Novelist
Born: June 19, 1947

If you ask a Saudi Imam why women in Saudi Arabia can't drive, he'll say, 'Because Islam demands it.' But that's absurd, because - first of all - Islam demands no such thing; and secondly, the only country in the world in which women can't drive is Saudi Arabia. The inability to understand the difference between a cultural practice and religious belief is shocking among self-described intellectuals.

Reza Aslan

Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.

Nicholas Kristof

Saudi Arabia is militant Islamic extremism, Wahhabi Islam is extreme and violent. These are the people that execute gays. These are the people that stone women who show their face in public. You don’t hear much about it, but it happens.

Rush Limbaugh

So, I think even in Saudi Arabia there is movement. And we have to remember that over the years they've stabilized the oil price and that is tremendously important for the economies of the world. I think we have no choice but to work with the government of Saudi Arabia.

Frank Carlucci

The big risk in Saudi Arabia is that Ghawar's rate of decline increases to an alarming point. That will set bells ringing all over the oil world because Ghawar underpins Saudi output and Saudi undergirds worldwide production.

Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari

This is a book called Women in the Shade of Islam. It's published by the government of Saudi Arabia. I picked it up in Pakistan, where the Taliban Ladies Auxiliary, and our young wife in California would've picked up an item like this. And it puts out that Salafi-Wahhabi ideology that is ultimately the toxic poison that is crossing all these borders.

Dalia Mogahed

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the keystone of OPEC. Saudi Arabia has had the distinction of remaining stable through all the escalating tumult of recent decades, reliably pumping out its roughly 10 million barrels a day like Bossy the cow in America's oil import barn.

James Howard Kunstler

Saudi Arabian oil production is at or very near its peak sustainable volume (if it did not, in fact peak almost 25 years ago), and is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future. There is only a small probability that Saudi Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of petroleum that are assigned to it in all the major forecasts of world oil production and consumption.

Matthew Simmons

Saudi Arabia supplies much oil to the U.S. And it is the world's largest consumer of American weaponry.

Stephen Kinzer

What we argue in the piece is that the headscarf has become a political symbol for an ideology of Islam that is exported to the world by the theocracies of the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just like the Catholic Church in the 17th century did religious propaganda to challenge the Protestant Reformation, these ideologies are trying to define the way Muslims express Islam in the world.

Asra Nomani

I always found it ironic when a Saudi official bashes Islamists, given that Saudi Arabia is the mother of all political Islam - and even describes itself as an Islamic state in its 'Higher Law.'

Jamal Khashoggi

Americans want to democratise us. OK, but why not go and democratise Saudi Arabia. Are we anything like Saudi Arabia? No, we are far from that. So why aren't they democratising Saudi Arabia? Because they are bastards, but they are their bastards.

Alexander Lukashenko

If Islam opposes terrorism, then Saudi Arabia should announce that no one supportive of ISIS or Al Qaeda is welcome in Mecca to make Hajj.

Bob Enyart

Muslims, who have a completely different value system, come to the West, then they should accept that there are certain basic values in the West intrinsic to our culture. Just as I wouldn't suggest that any Westerner walk down the streets of Saudi Arabia in a bikini.