The complete Ayaan Hirsi Ali interview, about which I wrote briefly here, is up at Reason. Read it all, but one thing that particularly caught my eye was her response to a charge that is frequently levelled at me also: that if we speak about the elements of Islam that give rise to violence, we will drive peaceful Muslims into the arms of the jihadists.
Reason: Are you concerned about the efficacy of your message? Do you worry that, at least in the short term, you have exacerbated the miserable treatment of women under much of mainstream Islam by prompting moderate Muslims to turn inward to their religion because they really don’t want to follow the path of the apostate Hirsi Ali?
Hirsi Ali: Young men now want to become terrorists in response to something I”ve written, that sort of thing? I don’t think that is the case. If we continue that reasoning, we”ll never scrutinize anything. Can we ever write? Can we ever criticize anything?
And:
Reason: Tolerance is probably the most powerful word there is in the Netherlands. No other word encapsulates better what the Dutch believe really defines them. That makes it very easy for people to say that when they”re being criticized, they”re not being tolerated””and from there it’s only a small step to saying they”re being discriminated against or they”re the victims of Islamophobia or racism or what have you.
Hirsi Ali: We have to revert to the original meaning of the term tolerance. It meant you agreed to disagree without violence. It meant critical self-reflection. It meant not tolerating the intolerant. It also came to mean a very high level of personal freedom.
Then the Muslims arrived, and they hadn’t grown up with that understanding of tolerance. In short order, tolerance was now defined by multiculturalism, the idea that all cultures and religions are equal. Expectations were created among the Muslim population. They were told they could preserve their own culture, their own religion. The vocabulary was quickly established that if you criticize someone of color, you”re a racist, and if you criticize Islam, you”re an Islamophobe.
Reason: The international corollary to the word tolerance is probably respect. The alleged lack of respect has become a perennial sore spot in relations between the West and Islam. Salman Rushdie receiving a British knighthood supposedly signified such a lack of respect, as did the Danish cartoons last year, and many other things. Do you believe this is what Muslims genuinely crave””respect?
Hirsi Ali: It’s not about respect. It’s about power, and Islam is a political movement.
Reason: Uniquely so?
Hirsi Ali: Well, it hasn’t been tamed like Christianity. See, the Christian powers have accepted the separation of the worldly and the divine. We don’t interfere with their religion, and they don’t interfere with the state. That hasn’t happened in Islam.
But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.
The Western mind-set””that if we respect them, they”re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away””is delusional. The problem is not going to go away. Confront it, or it’s only going to get bigger.