Where are the liberal Muslims? They're out there...but read the final paragraph of this article to see what happens to them all to often.
Richard
Clarity, Courage and Culture
Few defend the West like Somali-born Hirsi Ali.
by Bruce S. Thornton
The New Individualist
A review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (The Free Press, 2007, pp. 353).
Our most dangerous weakness in the war against Islamic terror is the failure of cultural nerve afflicting many Westerners. Faced with an enemy passionate about the superiority and rightness of his beliefs, many in the West are riddled with self-doubt and guilt about their own. Individualism, rationalism, and personal freedom and autonomy are incessantly questioned or scorned by the same people who enjoy those goods and take them for granted. Perhaps that is why the most passionate champion of the West these days is a Somali immigrant woman whose life offers powerful evidence of the oppression and misery created by a clan culture and religion that sacrifices the individual to the collective.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali details that life in her memoir Infidel. The daughter of a prominent Somali politician and writer exiled for opposing dictator Siad Barré, Hirsi Ali lived with her mother and siblings as a political refugee in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. She flirted for a while with the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, but her relentless reading of English literature opened her mind to the freedom and autonomy characterizing the West and evident even in children’s books like the Nancy Drew mysteries. When she was engaged in 1992 against her will to a cousin she despised, en route to join him in Canada she went instead to the Netherlands, where she was granted asylum as a political refugee. After a series of menial jobs, she earned a Master’s Degree in political science from Leiden University. Increasingly disaffected with Islam’s justification of violence against women and its oppressive limitations on freedom of thought, in 2002 she became an atheist. Her subsequent public criticisms of Islam and defense of Western freedom made her a celebrity in Europe, and in 2002 she was elected to Parliament.
Hirsi Ali’s life changed forever after the murder of documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali had made a brief film called Submission, which castigated Islam for its treatment of women. A Muslim immigrant murdered van Gogh in the street, pinning to his chest a letter that threatened to kill Hirsi Ali. She had to leave the country, living in the United States for a few months, then joining the American Enterprise Institute. She returned to the Netherlands, where she now lives in hiding.
As gripping as the story of her life is, the lessons of her journey are what make Infidel required reading. The fashionable multiculturalism that idealizes non-Western cultures as more meaningful and fulfilling than our own is exploded by Hirsi Ali’s memoir. Those Westerners who grow misty-eyed over the presumed boons of communal cultures, for example, need to read Hirsi Ali’s exposure of the dysfunction, intolerance, and bigotry of the sort of clan mentality that destroyed Somalia and contributes to the current disorder in Iraq. Each of the many Somali clans was defined in terms of stereotypes that swallowed any individuality and determined how people were treated: Kikuyu “had a right to rule,” Kamba were adept at making money but “stingy,” and the Luo “considered themselves smarter than the others.” At the Muslim girls’ school Hirsi Ali attended in Kenya, she discovered that other Muslim countries were stratified by the same sorts of categories: “every ethnic group was clearly distinct and splintered along lines of class and tribe.” A Yemeni Sharif is superior to a Yemeni Zubaydi, and “any kind of Arab girl considered herself superior to anyone else.” Indeed, in Saudi Arabia, Hirsi Ali and her sister were called “slaves” and scorned because of their black skin.
This bigotry is reinforced by the ignorance and superstition rampant in the Muslim Middle East. Hirsi Ali describes how in Riyadh an eclipse of the moon caused widespread panic, as many people thought the Day of Judgment had arrived. Muezzins across the city called for prayer, and “neighbors came knocking, asking us to pardon past misdeeds.” Hirsi Ali’s father had to explain to his panicked children that a shadow had covered the moon. After she moved to the West, Hirsi Ali began to see that the affluence and freedom taken for granted by Europeans were the fruits of a rational world-view sadly absent in the Muslim world.
All these dysfunctions of clan and tribal culture are reinforced and worsened by Islam, and that is the real value of Hirsi Ali’s memoir: exploding the Western delusions about Islam that hamstring our fight against the jihadists. The treatment of women, of course, is sanctioned by numerous Koranic verses. In her work as a translator in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali encountered many physically abused Muslim women who never pressed charges: “They were convinced that by accepting systematic, really merciless abuse, they were serving Allah and earning a place in Heaven.” Genital mutilation predates Islam and is practiced by some non-Islamic cultures, but as Hirsi Ali points out, “I knew of no fatwa denouncing female genital mutilation; on the contrary, suppressing the sexuality of women was a big theme with imams.”
This tradition of misogyny is supported as well by a crippling fatalism that retards both individual and collective improvement and development. During the 1991 Somali civil war, Hirsi Ali made a dangerous journey to help rescue some family friends from a squalid refugee camp. When they found the friends, a three-year-old emaciated child lay dying in her mother’s arms. But Hirsi Ali’s urgency to get the child to medical care was met with “‘Allah has given me this child, and if He wills it, Allah will take him away.’” “She felt,” Hirsi Ali comments, “that she was being tested by Allah; she had to accept that the child would die if Allah wanted it to be that way. To show bitterness, or despair, would be to fail the test of faith.” Such faith-sanctioned paralysis of will, coupled to the subjection of individual initiative to the needs of the collective, makes it difficult for Muslim-dominated cultures to improve the lives of their citizens.
Finally, Islam’s surrender of the individual’s moral judgment to the perceived will of Allah justifies the violence against the infidel that is perpetrated across the globe by Muslims. Hirsi Ali’s own abandonment of Islam began with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the duplicitous or deluded rationalizations for them. As she pondered the attacks, Hirsi Ali realized that they arose from Islam itself and the model of Mohammed, which subject the individual to a rigid pattern of behavior: “By adhering to [Mohammed’s] rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose.” And this surrender in turn facilitated the acceptance of violence against unbelievers. Reading the passages from the Koran and Hadith quoted by Bin Laden to justify 9/11, Hirsi Ali could see the continuity of Islamic violence across the centuries, a violence justified by Islamic doctrine. Sadly she concluded that the Koran “spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.”
After 9/11, Europe’s long appeasement of Muslim immigrant dysfunction, nourished by a refusal to acknowledge the true nature of Islam, struck Hirsi Ali as suicidal. In numerous ways, the Netherlands for years had coddled immigrants without demanding that they strive to learn and practice the values and beliefs that made Europe such a prized destination for them in the first place. In addition to generous welfare benefits, the Dutch, addled by colonial guilt and multicultural fantasies, fostered a separatism among immigrants that merely reinforced the dysfunctions of tribal Islamic culture: “The immigrants’ culture was being preserved at the expense of their women and children and to the detriment of the immigrants’ integration into Holland. Many Muslims never learned Dutch and rejected Dutch values of tolerance and personal liberty.” The result was honor killings, violence against women, genital mutilation carried out on kitchen tables, and high levels of immigrant crime and welfare dependency, all attended by a sullen refusal on the part of immigrants to take responsibility for improving their lives. But as Hirsi Ali discovered, merely stating these documented facts opened one up to charges of insensitivity and racism. When she tried to find out from the Ministry of Justice how many Muslim girls were murdered in honor killings, she was informed that such statistics weren’t kept because “‘it would stigmatize one group in society.’”
The death of Theo van Gogh and the threats against her own life crystallized for Hirsi Ali the deadly consequences of tribal and religious intolerance when it collides with a self-loathing, guilt-ridden Western culture too timid to defend its own values and beliefs. And when someone like Hirsi Ali or Dutch politician Geert Wilders do defend the West, they are met not just with death threats from Muslim fanatics, but with criticism and calumny from other Europeans who believe in nothing other than their own suicidal “tolerance.” In contrast, those who believe in the superiority of the Western way of individual freedom and autonomy — and who want it to survive — should be grateful that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has the courage to defend the West.