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Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals

Mar 10, 2007 5:52 pm By Robert Spencer

In “Free Radical: Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals” in Opinion Journal, Joseph Rago allows Ayaan Hirsi Ali to air some politically incorrect opinions that ordinarily the Journal, which on other occasions has touted Karen Armstrong, is itself too politically correct to feature.

NEW YORK–Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: “I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant,” she declares. “But that is apologizing for the truth.”

Query: what should a pious Muslim do in response to a statement like that? Threaten to kill Hirsi Ali? Burn down the Journal’s offices? Denounce both Hirsi Ali and the Journal for “Islamophobia”? How about another option — how about discussing honestly and forthrightly the elements of Muhammad’s life that led Hirsi Ali to make that statement, and the effects that his example has had and still has in the Islamic world? In other words, why not engage in that “dialogue” that CAIR ostensibly wants, instead of vilification, dishonest pseudo-dialogue, and threats?

Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland–where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004–she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.

Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu–into, as she puts it, “the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization.” In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been “an arranged rape.” But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, “through observation, through experience, through reading,” she acquainted herself with a different world. “The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says. “But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved.”

Unease over Muslim immigration had been rising in the Low Countries for some time. For instance, when the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn–“I am in favor of a cold war with Islam,” he said, and believed the borders should be closed to Muslims–was gunned down in 2002, it was widely assumed his killer was an Islamist. There was a strange sense of relief when he turned out to be a mere animal-rights activist. Ms. Hirsi Ali brought integration issues to further attention, exposing domestic abuse and even honor killings in the Dutch-Muslim “dish cities.”…

Hirsi Ali then discusses the film “Submission” and the murder of Theo van Gogh, and says:

The killing made clear just how apart its groups were. “Immediately after the murder,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “we learned Theo’s killer had access to education, he had learned the language, he had taken welfare. He made it very clear he knew what democracy meant, he knew what liberalism was, and he consciously rejected it. . . . He said, ‘I have an alternative framework. It’s Islam. It’s the Quran.’ ”

At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made “Submission” or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. “And why?” Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. “Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see,” she continues, “that this isn’t something that’s caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It’s religion.”…

Not “religion,” but one religion in particular.

Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined “diversity” consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been “hijacked” by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: “Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous.”

The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. “Islam has a very consistent doctrine,” she says, “and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history.”

This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam’s most holy human messenger. “You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet,” and then ask: “Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?” She draws a connection between Mohammed’s taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions–what she calls “this imprisonment of women.” She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of “the most basic freedoms.”

These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. “People say it is a bad strategy,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. “I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed.”…

And yet contemporary democracies, she says, accommodate the incitement of such behavior: “The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don’t improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place.”

The most grievous failing of the West is self-congratulatory passivity: We face “an external enemy that to a degree has become an internal enemy, that has infiltrated the system and wants to destroy it.” She believes a more drastic reaction is required: “It’s easy,” she says, “to weigh liberties against the damage that can be done to society and decide to deny liberties. As it should be. A free society should be prepared to recognize the patterns in front of it, and do something about them.”…

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