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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
Paving the Middle Path
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| In the East-West debate on Islam, who do Western Intellectuals want to talk to? Apostates or Believers? |
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FIORENZO MAFFIT/REUTERS |
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| Just how Islam fits into the Western social fabric is a contentious topic.
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AS THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD a pervert and a tyrant? Does Islam promote terrorism and enslave women? Does Islam oblige its followers to wage jihad on Westerners whose roots lie in the secular Enlightenment? Should Muslims consider converting to Christianity? For the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the answer to all these |
questions is a resounding “Yes!” Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her 30s, speaks from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia, briefly radicalised by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America. In her latest book, Nomad: From Islam to America (pubished this year by Free Press), she reminds her readers of the West’s tradition of intellectual revolt against clerical tyranny and warns of the insidious, intransigent enemies in their midst. “The Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad,” she writes.
She is not hopeful that Americans will heed her warning. Her initial job interviews in the United States were discouraging: the Brookings Institution, she writes, worried that she might offend Arab Muslims. (The conservative American Enterprise Institute, however, immediately appointed her as a fellow.) On college campuses, Muslim students accuse her of wanting to “trash” Islam, while Western feminists, convinced that white men are “the ultimate and only oppressors,” lack the “courage or clarity of vision” to help her knock down the mental “hovels” of the East. Pointing to Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous rampage in Texas, last November, she deplores the “conspiracy to ignore the religious motivation for these killings” in America.
| RAMESH SHARMA/INDIA TODAY GROUP/GETTY IMAGES |
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2010. |
Muslims today, Hirsi Ali believes, must be forced to choose between the darkness of Islam and the light of the modern secular West. In her new book, which bears the additional subtitle A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, she takes an uncompromising line with her own relatives, who remain faithful to their benighted religion. The book opens with an account of her visit to her father’s deathbed, in Whitechapel, in London’s East End, in 2008. Her father, a highly respected political opponent of Somalia’s Soviet-backed military dictator, became more religious during exile and old age. Father and daughter hadn’t spoken since 2004, when Hirsi Ali and van Gogh made the film Submission, about the oppression of Muslim women, and she learned that he was fatally ill only a few weeks before his death. She didn’t want to visit him at his home, since it was in “a mostly immigrant area and overwhelmingly Muslim,” and had to be escorted by policemen to his hospital. In a brief but moving scene, she describes her father longing, but physically unable, to communicate with her.
The emotions of the moment dissipate soon after she leaves the hospital, when, driving down Whitechapel Road with her bodyguards, Hirsi Ali glimpses covered Muslim women on the pavement and long-bearded men outside a large mosque. Overcome by “an instant sense of panic and suffocation,” she felt as though she were “the only true nomad.” The Muslims in Whitechapel “had brought their web of values with them,” values of a culture that she has left behind. She deplores her “conflicted” half sister Sahra, who is interested in studying psychology in London while remaining a devout Muslim, and who has an annoying habit of saying “Inshallah” after every phrase. “How long will Western societies. . .continue to tolerate the spread of Sahra’s way of life?” Hirsi Ali asks. Considering her vain and financially needy brother, she laments, “This is the tragedy of the tribal Muslim man.” She writes a letter to a deceased grandmother in Africa, educating her about the enviable ways of the Western “infidel”: “He may take care of his parents but has no use for a memory filled with an endless chain of ancestors. All the seeds of his toil are spent on his own offspring, not those of his brothers or uncles.”
“The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind,” Hirsi Ali writes. The book ends with a letter to an imagined unborn daughter, which is also a tribute to her fellow anti-Islam agitator Oriana Fallaci, who memorably claimed that Muslims “breed like rats” in Europe. Hirsi Ali worries that her daughter will confront “the bleakness of having no challenges in life,” in “an America of many posts: post-civil rights, postfeminism, post-cold war.” She wonders, “What will you fight for? What will you fight against?” Yet there are plenty of dangers that remain, and she warns her child about being brainwashed by “Allah and his agents,” and by the “many isms” that she will be exposed to in America: “socialism and communism and all sorts of cults and collectivisms.”
Nomad is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers. Neither will her recent support for the proposed French ban on face veils and the Swiss referendum outlawing minarets. In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire—though the 18th century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the “Christianity of love and tolerance.” In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realise. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe’s religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, “are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts,” who had “surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” and who “deserve to be punished.” Voltaire’s denunciations remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than the dawn of reason and freedom that Hirsi Ali evokes. Many followed Voltaire in viewing the Jews as backward, an Oriental abscess in the heart of Europe. Hirsi Ali, recording her horror of ghettoised Muslim life in Whitechapel, seems unaware of the similarly contemptuous accounts of Jewish refugees who made the East End of London their home after fleeing the pogroms.
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Whitechapel has much in its past—oppression, bigotry, poverty, radicalism—that would have helped Hirsi Ali understand not only the neighbourhood’s newest inhabitants but also her own family. But Nomad reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity. Many more young women are killed in India for failing to bring suf- ficient dowry than perish in ‘honour killings’ across the Muslim world. Such social pathologies no more reveal the barbaric core of Hinduism or Islam than domestic violence in Europe and America defines the moral essence of Christianity or the Enlightenment.
Islamic fundamentalist groups have long terrorised many Muslim countries, especially those, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, that were ravaged by blowback from the Cold War and the war on terror. These extremists, who now assault the West as well, have always lacked popular support within their own countries. The anarchic vivacity of contemporary Muslim societies—featuring such figures as Ali Saleem, Pakistan’s cross-dressing television host, and Cairo’s hijab-wearing sex therapist Heba Kotb, whose talk show is beamed across the Arab world—does not quite match Hirsi Ali’s description of an incurably medieval people busy devising ever-harsher laws for themselves while plotting mayhem for the infidels. In recent years, Islamist movements, led or assisted by women activists, have helped democratise Indonesia and Turkey; innumerable Muslims, such as Asma Jahangir, in Pakistan, and Shirin Ebadi, in Iran, fight to defend the rights of women against both Islamic fundamentalists and secular autocrats.
Nor do Hirsi Ali’s simple oppositions— traditional societies versus democracy, Islam versus Western secularism—sum up the experiences of Muslims in Europe, who are the Continent’s most globalised minority, with multilayered identities that are usually influenced less by the Koran or Sharia than by the politics, culture, and economy of various nations and transnational networks. Her praise for the United States, her new home, shows a growing familiarity with right-wing touchstones (self-reliance, distrust of government, family values, gun ownership, Christianity). But when she writes that a Muslim can be “an American patriot” only if he doesn’t “care very much about being a Muslim,” she seems suspicious of the country’s un-European traditions of cultural and religious pluralism. Eager to re-educate her “fellow nomads” in “the ways of the infidel,” Hirsi Ali is convinced that “lingering between the two value systems,” as her half sister does, “stunts the process of becoming one’s own person.” But those privileged enough to find refuge in the West rarely find it easy or desirable to abandon their ancestral culture and convert to the Randian individualism that she appears to uphold as the noblest form of human existence. The fate of the truly modern nomad is, rather, a ceaseless inner conflict between ways of life and value systems; this very quality has made the nomad an emblematic figure of the contemporary age.
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A Moorish mosque, converted into a Roman Catholic cathedral in Cordoba, Spain. |
If Hirsi Ali’s rhetoric has earned her critics among Western liberals, she has a fierce defender in Paul Berman, whose new polemic, The Flight of the Intellectuals (Melville House), hails her as a “classic example of a persecuted dissident intellectual.” He upbraids such writers as the Anglo-Dutch journalist Ian Buruma and the British academic Timothy Garton Ash, who, he says, “sneered at Ayaan Hirsi Ali for having taken up the ideas of Western liberalism.” Berman also condemns Buruma and Garton Ash for “grovelling” to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born Muslim professor at Oxford University, whose work seeks to integrate observant Muslims into secular Western societies, and whom Berman sees as an apologist for extremism. For Berman, the spectacle of writers attacking Hirsi Ali while embracing Ramadan points to a dangerous “reactionary turn in the intellectual world” of Europe and America.
Berman, who started his intellectual career in the early 1970s, as an anthologist of anarchist quotations, has emerged as a prominent critic of liberal-left pieties. In A Tale of Two Utopias (1996), he reprimanded the American student radicals of the 60s for failing to recognise the evil of Communism. In Terror and Liberalism (2003), he scolded liberals too timid to join what he saw as America’s crusade for liberal democracy in Iraq. His recent writings call for unambiguous ideological commitment in what he describes as a worldwide clash between liberalism and totalitarianism (or “fascism,” which Berman prefers, since to hear the “pungent” word “is to flare your nostrils”).
There is no doubt that 9/11 announced a new enemy of liberal civilisation—an enemy far more obscure than, say, Prussian militarism, Nazism, or Communist totalitarianism, all of which were embodied by territorial states and standing armies. What was one to make of men who hid in caves and spoke in apocalyptic tones, mixing modern antiimperialist rhetoric with invocations of a glorious Islamic past? Were they rootless and marginalised revolutionaries trying to realise an Islamic myth of community, or did they express a deeper pathology of backward tradition-bound societies? Had the Muslim world produced a modern totalitarian ideology called Islamism? Terror and Liberalism offered answers that could seem consolingly simple.
During the Vietnam War, Hannah Arendt noted that members of the Democratic Administration had frequent recourse to phrases like “monolithic communism,” and “second Munich,” and deduced from this an inability “to confront reality on its own terms because they had always some parallels in mind that ‘helped’ them to understand those terms.” Similarly, Berman, who wasn’t known previously for his expertise on modern political movements east of Europe, identified Islamism as a derivative version of the totalitarian enemies—Fascism and Communism—that liberalism had already fought throughout the 20th century. After “trolling the Islamic bookstores of Brooklyn,” he offered a genealogy of “Islamism” that rested almost entirely on his reading of Sayyid Qutb, an ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. According to Berman, liberal intellectuals were obliged to do battle with the new nihilistic Fascism, which included secular dictatorships like Iraq’s as well as pan-Islamist movements. “I’m happy to be a laptop general,” he wrote, and his work quickly united a variety of public figures, from Richard Holbrooke to Martin Amis, in the cause.
The book had its liberal critics. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma rejected Berman’s “radical vision of an American state, filled with revolutionary élan and military steel, battling heroically and alone with outside enemies,” and wrote, “There is something in the tone of Berman’s polemic that reminds me of the quiet American in Graham Greene’s novel, the man of principle who causes mayhem, without quite realizing why.” In 2007, when Buruma published a profile of Tariq Ramadan in the Times Magazine, Berman responded with a 28,000-word article in The New Republic that presented his own appalled discovery of the academic’s ideas and inspirations. He focussed on Ramadan’s “family relations that shape everything he writes and does,” particularly Ramadan’s grandfather Hasan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Vikshiptha
24 July 2010
02:12 PM
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Apropos Pankaj Mishra's essay, despite all his erudition what stands out is Ali's courage. It is lamentable that instead of lauding Ayaan's courage, Mishra goes on and on displallying his erdtion.He has not read 'Crowds and Power' by Elias Canetti, wherein Canetti states what Islam is all about, in no uncertain terms.
Vikshiptha, Mangalore
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