Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story filtered slowly into Britain at a tangent via Holland. Her fame preceded her, and her image became mired by controversy and confusion before her argument was properly heard. But apart from her would-be assailants who would kill her for her views on Islam, Hirsi Ali has an array of unlikely liberal critics, many of whom underestimate her and misrepresent her argument.
Hirsi Ali was a Somali asylum-seeker who took on her former religion, got into trouble for doing so, and became a Dutch MP but then resigned. Her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was famously murdered in 2004, but a surprising number of people writing on this subject got their Dutch political murders muddled up, and assumed, falsely, that because she was associated with one of them (Van Gogh), she was somehow linked with the other too (Pim Fortuyn), and that therefore she was largely responsible for convulsing Dutch politics over race and overturning the traditions of Dutch tolerance.
Her new book, Infidel, an autobiography, puts her life story and her position into a frame which should make it rather more difficult to dismiss her argument. By any standards it is an enthralling story about her life between three continents and several geostrategic cross-currents. It starts with her nomadic grandmother in Somalia and explains how, as a child, she fled Somalia (where her father was a warlord who opposed the presidency of Siad Barre), lived fleetingly in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia before ending up in Kenya. She then fled a forced marriage, arriving as an asylum-seeker in Holland in the early 1990s, where she became a cleaner and translator, studying political science in her spare time. While working as a translator in shelters for battered women, she began to see that some of the practices meted out to Muslim women (forced marriages, genital mutilation), which she thought she had left behind in Somalia and Kenya, were being carried on in the suburbs of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. She sought to raise these issues in political debates, and became a fiery critic of the segregation of different cultures instituted by a blinded version of multiculturalism. She was then invited by the Dutch Liberal party to become an MP.
Her motive has been to draw attention to the subordination of Muslim women. It is curious that feminists have not rallied more to her cause: one would have thought that Islam was the emerging constituency for feminism. If large numbers of Muslims had lived in Europe in the 1960s, it would not have been possible for the feminist movement to ignore Islam: the 1960s were universalist times when people believed that emancipation was something that applied to all cultural groups. Today we seem more fearful of such general principles.
Hirsi Ali's atheism may be one sticking point, at least for devout Muslim women, but if the claim is that feminism is already alive and well in the Muslim world—as Maria Golia and Fareena Alam of Q-News suggest—it is hard to see why it is quite such an insult to say that it is not as advanced as it should be. Hirsi Ali's point is that European Muslims need to expressly break with what might be considered misogynistic passages in the Koran. One doesn't have to reject Islam to do so. That female circumcision may have been practiced by non-Muslims too (and that it does not take place in all Muslim countries) does not negate the fact that the custom is legitimised by those who practice it as a Muslim tradition. One would not expect someone who had left the Catholic church to refrain from commenting on abuses that they themselves had witnessed, so why Hirsi Ali's atheism delegitimises her argument is also not clear.
In addition, Hirsi Ali's style of delivery is deemed to be "undiplomatic." But she has sought quite pointedly to make a splash, in order both to raise the issues, and in order to point out that Muslims in Europe need to be able to live with trenchant criticism. Her point that the veil is a means by which women take responsibility for the sexual desire of men (and that it would be preferable for men to learn to exercise self-restraint with regard to female allure) may be a characteristically blunt way of putting it, but is it so misconceived?
There are those Muslim reformers who believe only gradualism can work. Gradualism may have a role, but so too do people who draw attention to illiberal practices more urgently.
It is revealing that liberal figures such as Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma appear to have been alarmed by Hirsi Ali's outspokenness. It is peculiar that such people, who would have no qualms in seeing other religions attacked, feel that given the wider geopolitical implications, former Muslims should refrain from making offensive remarks and from saying what they actually think. They make much of Hirsi Ali possessing the zeal of the convert. Garton Ash, in the New York Review of Books, has referred to Hirsi Ali patronisingly as a "slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist." But one of the points about the Enlightenment was the stress on the need to return to simple language to point out the inconsistencies prescribed by certain texts and dogmas, especially religious ones. One need only read Voltaire's Candide to recognise this. Garton Ash does not explain what a more sophisticated Enlightenment view would be. Nor do he or Buruma make clear where and on what issues Hirsi Ali ought to compromise.
Buruma left Holland in the 1970s when the political debate was divided traditionally between the right and left of the political spectrum: he inhabited a middle ground, an ample space at that time. He returned to Holland in the 2000s—to write his book Murder in Amsterdam—to find his country convulsed by the multicultural drama, and sought again to find a middle ground. He placed Hirsi Ali on the one side, as a born-again atheist whose intransigence had a Thatcherite quality, and Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Van Gogh, on the other. But attractive though the middle ground often is, it is open to question whether it is as capacious on this question as Buruma and Garton Ash think. It is certainly extremely misleading to suggest that Hirsi Ali is pursuing a right-wing agenda, and to do so suggests a nostalgia for a left-right spectrum that is long out of date. The difference between her and Buruma and Garton Ash is merely that she asks questions which they would prefer not to.
What is Hirsi Ali's agenda? She wants to be free to criticise Islam, stridently if necessary, in the same way that Christians and Jews are able to attack their religions. She wants Muslims, especially Muslim women, to integrate into western societies and enjoy their liberal freedoms. She wants Muslims to be free to leave the religion as she has. And she wants to uphold individual rights against group rights.
Critics argue that Islam has many manifestations, and that the religion should be seen in a more nuanced light. They usually then proceed to ignore, dismiss or relativise all her other arguments.
Being allowed to "revise" one's conception of the good life and to "opt out" of one's group is a core value of liberalism, and I do not see why Muslims should be exempted from that possibility. Nor is it obvious why one should be called a "fundamentalist" for asserting this.
