Education Quote by Taslima Nasrin

Nasrin’s line is less a cosmology lesson than a provocation designed to force a choice: modernity or doctrinal obedience. She grabs a stark, almost classroom-simple “fact” (heliocentrism) and uses it as a litmus test for whether a religious tradition can tolerate correction. The rhetorical move is blunt by design. By reducing “advance” to a single, checkable claim about the sun and earth, she makes the larger argument feel obvious: if an institution can’t concede on something empirically settled, why trust it on ethics, law, or gender?

The subtext is her long-running critique of religious authority in Muslim-majority societies, where scripture is not just spiritual but political. “They teach things like that” isn’t really about astronomy; it’s about the social machinery that turns interpretation into discipline. In Nasrin’s world, the cost of that machinery is measured in censorship, threats, and the narrowing of women’s lives. Her “we” is doing heavy work too, positioning the speaker with a public locked in a tug-of-war between scientific literacy and clerical gatekeeping.

Context matters because the line also courts backlash. Muslims can reasonably point out that the Quran’s language is often read as phenomenological (“the sun rises”) rather than a literal scientific claim, and that Islamic scholarship historically included serious astronomy. Nasrin knows this; she’s not unaware, she’s escalating. The intent is to dramatize how literalism and institutionalized deference can freeze a culture’s relationship to evidence - and how easily “faith” becomes a shield for power.