Daily Inspiration Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy’s provocation lands because it weaponizes a religious term - “mullahs” - as a universal category: not Muslims per se, but clerics and gatekeepers of orthodoxy across faiths. By calling Hindu and Christian hardliners “mullahs,” she collapses the polite Western habit of treating fundamentalism as an exotic, foreign pathology. The line is a dare: stop pretending theocracy is someone else’s problem.

The repetition does the political work. Three times “mullahs,” three times “world,” building a sense of coordinated power - not a conspiracy in the cartoonish sense, but a shared method: policing bodies, throttling dissent, laundering hierarchy as sacred duty. Roy is less interested in theology than in governance. Her target is religion when it functions as an enforcement arm for patriarchy, nationalism, caste, and class.

Then comes the turn: “And we are against them all.” It’s deliberately polarizing, even risky. The “we” is an imagined coalition of secular radicals, feminists, anti-caste activists, and dissidents who refuse the standard culture-war trap of defending one community’s dogma to oppose another’s. Subtext: if you align with any fundamentalism because it’s “yours,” you’ve already ceded the moral ground.

The context is Roy’s long-standing critique of majoritarian politics in India and of global post-9/11 rhetoric that sanctifies certain religions while demonizing others. She’s carving out a politics that treats religious authoritarianism as a transnational class of power - and asks readers to pick a side.