Garton Ash and Hirsi Ali

Timothy Garton Ash tries to clear the air with regard to his attitude towards Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He's been criticised at signandsight, in this month's Prospect and at Slate by Christopher Hitchens for his lack of support for her and for calling her an "enlightenment fundamentalist". He claims that he does support her and, in fact, agrees with her on many things, but not on Islam. There, he prefers those who, from within, have a more liberal and enlightened view of their faith.

In part, his view is mere pragmatism and to be respected as such. After all, it is not as if a billion plus people are going to take Hirsi Ali's path. The hoped-for reform has to occur from within and be led by figures who are respected by their audience. That is essential, but it is not sufficient.

There is also the part that the West must play. Ash has attracted a lot of criticism because he sounds suspiciously like so many Western fellow-travellers of the Cold War. It wasn't the understanding, compromising both-sides-have-a-point doves who brought that conflict to a close; it was the Hawks. Islam is not the Soviet Union, but the fear is that, if we are to sit back and wait for Muslims to make Islam fit for the modern world, we'll end up with a world just fit for Islam.

One of Ash's commenters, aside from accusing him of a monolithic view of Ali, makes her point about the role of the West.

While I haven't read her book, I attended one of her lectures, and she explicitly rejected the caricature of her views as presented here. She was pretty clear in her argument, which is basically that there are parts of Islam that are compatible with Western values, and there are parts of Islam that are not. And what the West needs to do is draw a clear line as to which aspects of Islam are acceptable in free societies, and which are not; and to make this clear, first and foremost, to Muslims that choose to live in the West. The hope being that if the West can stand firm on its basic values, a new type of Islam ('enlightened' or 'reformed' or whatever you choose to call it) would have a chance of succeeding, starting with Muslims in the West and then spreading to Muslim countries.

A good test of Ash's modernising Muslims will be their reaction to the St Petersburg Declaration.

What is freedom for?

The best thing I've read about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or rather about what she's saying (this distinction is often missed). It's by someone called Rod Dreher and comes to you courtesy of bellevillenewsdemocrat.com, which I assume would be somewhere west of here. As he points out, the real weakness in her thought is not what she says about Islam, it's what she says about the West.

Hirsi Ali's final tragedy is that what she preaches is leading to the triumph of what she most fears. Having escaped a cruel culture dominated by religion, she understandably despises faith. But religion per se was not what oppressed Hirsi Ali; it was a particular religion, Islam. The militant secularism Hirsi Ali advocates has already created a spiritual vacuum in Europe that Islam is filling...

There is something deeply admirable about this passionate African woman's stirring defense of Western liberties. But the question remains: What is freedom for? It cannot be an end in itself. There must be purpose beyond self-gratification. Europe is proving that materialism - the philosophical basis for the secularism and libertinism that is modern Europe's creed - is not sufficient to sustain civilization.

Cold War rhetoric

Christopher Hitchens defends Ayaan Hirsi Ali from the snipers. He, like Ulrike Ackermann, sees in the rhetoric of her denigrators (as opposed to critics, who discuss arguments) a return to the old apologias of communism and the treatment of its critics.

He is especially hard on the Newsweek review of Infidel and its accompanying Q&A on her current life in the US; it is entitled "A Bombthrower's Life".

The subject of this absurd headline is a woman who has been threatened with horrific violence, by Muslims varying from moderate to extreme, ever since she was a little girl. She has more recently had to see a Dutch friend butchered in the street, been told that she is next, and now has to live with bodyguards in Washington, D.C. She has never used or advocated violence. Yet to whom does Newsweek refer as the "Bombthrower"? It's always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it's the victim of violence who is "really" inciting it.

He rounds on Garton Ash and Buruma, two people he remembers from a different life.

Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People's Republic of China of "heating up the Cold War" if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships? Is it because Islam is a "faith"? Or is it because it is the faith—in Europe at least—of some ethnic minorities?

The Newsweek headline conflates beautifully with Baruma's view that Hirsi Ali is an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" and all resemble in this smear by moral equivalence the Leftists of the Cold War who would label as "consumer terrorism" the market economies of the west and call freedom slavery and its defenders fascists.

Love and hate

With the publication of her autobiography, Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has confirmed what many of her critics claim: that she is divisive. This is the essence of Timothy Garton Ash's reservations about her; she doesn't encourage dialogue between the 'civilisations' - she divides them very clearly one from the other and is immoderate in her language to boot. Ash believes that there is a Third Way to be discovered that is neither Islamist nor "Enlightenment fundamentalist" and identifies it with such figures as Tariq Ramadan, who will "obey the laws, but only insofar as they don't force me to do anything against my religion." Ali doesn't make any concessions in this direction.

The big question is whether there can be a Third Way. If you believe there can be, then she is a most inconvenient figure. If you don't believe that Islam can contentedly exist as a minority culture within a dominant secular one, then she is a voice in the wilderness. Well, a wilderness that is getting very crowded. Personally, I tend towards the second position. It may be that my experience is very limited, but I am waiting to see devout Muslims (as opposed to people who are as Muslim as I am Catholic) enter enthusiastically into the body politic and contribute something that is not either a whinge or outrageous demands. I am, however, willing to be convinced otherwise.

Hirsi Ali is, if nothing else, a lightening rod, and by their lights shall they be known. There's been a fascinating discussion of Ali herself, but also of the issues she raises about multiculturalism at signandsight. This by Ulrike Ackermann is the latest contribution. She sees Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash through the prism of the Cold War when so many intellectuals would criticise Stalin but not Communism and

had reservations about eastern European dissidents because they were only fighting for the so-called "bourgeois liberties." Many dreamed at the time of a "third way" between capitalism and communism.

She goes on

For Hirsi Ali, the legacy of the Enlightenment - the separation of religion and state, political and individual rights, self-determination of the individual, reason and the equality of the sexes - are of fundamental importance, and so they should be. To have to defend these against an accusation of fundamentalism is, given the situation in which we find ourselves, pretty ludicrous.

On the other hand, there is this review of Hirsi Ali's autobiography by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

How does one comment objectively on anything Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes, says or does? The rebel against Islam has to be held aloft, coddled and paraded in defiance of her obscurantist foes who want to cut her into pieces.

What does this opening foreshadow? Discomfort, I would say. An awkwardness about someone who has risked her life to defend the rights of women but is saying a lot of uncomfortable things about the multicultural dream that Alibhai-Brown preaches. How does one excape such a dilemma? Snide insinuation.

With Ali we also have to allow for falsehood and duplicity. Her fabrications to get political asylum in the Netherlands were recently exposed. Yet she had spent years condemning "foreign" asylum seekers who do the same. No matter. She has got into political high places, moved from the left to the right, and is a mascot of liberal fundamentalists. The seraph is much adored.

"Falsehood and duplicity". Alibhai-Brown wants you to read Ali's book with those words in mind. The good journalist neglects to explain that Ali herself confessed to her "fabrications" long before they were "exposed". And that is it. She lied to escape an arranged marriage and so cannot be trusted on anything else, according to this view. (And the only word I can find for her last sentence is bitchy.)

Jay Nordlinger asks why Ali is hated so, why "they [don't] come out and attack her frontally — they just snipe at her, sniff at her."

I actually think that Hirsi Ali makes them ashamed — makes her critics ashamed. They know that she is courageous, that she has put her life on the line, that she sees into the heart of the major problem of our time. They hate her the way people hate anyone who delivers a message they can’t stand to hear.

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography The Infidel: The Story of My Enlightenment is out, and when I have some money, I shall certainly buy it. I haven't seen any decent reviews yet. This one from the Washington Times does little but retell her story. From the ABC (Australia), there's an interview from Friday in which she restates what she has said many times before. She answers this question well.

KERRY O’BRIEN: What do you say to those who would dismiss you as the migrant who came from a traumatic background and became a reactionary as a result?

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: In the first place, I use the tools that we are supposed to use in a democracy which is non-violent means to argue my assertions and views. Next, I don't see what is reactionary about saying, "Let's respect life as an end in itself, liberty as an end in itself and the equality of men and women."
[my emphasis]

The racism of the anti-racists

Pascal Bruckner fights in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's corner against Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. I can't say I am with him in his lauding of the French Model, but what he says about multiculturalism is bang on.

On moral equivalence

In politics as in philosophy, the equals sign is always an abdication. If thinking involves weighing one's words to name the world well, drawing comparisons in other words, then levelling distinctions testifies to intellectual bankruptcy.

On moral equivalence applied to Hirsi Ali and the Islamists

The difference between her and Muhammad Bouyeri, the killer of Theo Van Gogh, is that she never advocated murder to further her ideas.

On why Hirsi Ali gets under people's skin

As a Somali, she proclaims the superiority of Europe over Africa. As a woman, she is neither wife nor mother. As a Muslim, she openly denounces the backwardness of the Koran. So many flouted cliches make her a true rebel, unlike the sham insurgents our societies produce by the dozen.

On multiculturalism

Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied - as is so often the case - by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn't guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy.

Multiculturalism is a racism of the anti-racists: it chains people to their roots.

Anyone would think we are reliving the days of segregation in the southern United States. Yet this segregation has the full backing of Europe's most prominent progressives!
[my emphasis throughout]