A Portrait of Courage
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has looked deep and hard at the Muslim world in which she grew up and has challenged Muslims to think equally deep and hard, writes Salim Mansur, in a profile of the controversial figure who has dared to speak out at great personal risk.
In her memoir, %%AMAZON=0743289684 Infidel%%, Ayaan Hirsi Ali poses the questions, ‘How many girls born in Digfeer Hospital in Mogadishu in November 1969 are even alive today? And how many have a real voice?’ The answers are likely few and none.
Hirsi Ali’s journey to freedom from the traditionally preordained life of a Somali woman, or for that matter most women in Africa and other parts of the developing world littered with the ruins of failed state and society, is an astonishing story of grace and courage. If Hirsi Ali had limited herself to recounting this journey – of the immense obstacles as a girl growing into a woman she confronted in her escape to freedom from Mogadishu via various sojourns in Saudi Arabia, then Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Nairobi (Kenya) to Holland – the story would have remained gripping and inspiring, and it would have opened a window for readers in the West to glimpse the doubly-wretched condition of one half of the population of wrecked states such as her native Somalia.
But Hirsi Ali’s story is much more than an escape to freedom from poverty, ignorance, civil strife and violence against women to security, peace and self-fulfillment. It is a story of a Muslim woman whose struggle to be free became eventually a confrontation with her religion, whose experience of genital mutilation and physical violence unmasked the extent of misogyny within Muslim societies that she eventually came to view as inherent to Islam, and whose escape to freedom culminated in abjuring the faith-tradition into which she was born.
This second aspect of her journey to freedom is the part of Hirsi Ali’s life which coincides with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent global war against Islamist terrorists. Hirsi Ali’s story as an activist and public intellectual, as an elected member of the Dutch parliament and partnership with the film-maker Theo van Gogh in scripting and producing a documentary titled Submission that portrays violence against women within Muslim society, as a woman under threat for life after the murder of van Gogh in November 2004 in retaliation for the making of the documentary by a 26-year old Islamist (Muhammad Bouyeri) of Moroccan origin, and once again as an exile departing from Holland and its politics for a new life in the United States, has become unintentionally yet inextricably bound with 9/11 and what has followed since then.
The change in Hirsi Ali’s view of the world around her came gradually, prompted by her experience and her university studies in Leiden. Then she saw on the CNN the second hijacked plane flown into the World Trade Center and her self-questioning became more urgent and radical. Finally, she reached her conclusion and one night some months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington Hirsi Ali ‘looked in the mirror and said out loud, “I don’t believe in God.” I said it slowly, enunciating it carefully, in Somali. And I felt relief.’
It might be assumed that Hirsi Ali did not at first fully grasp the level of anger she would provoke among Muslims in Holland by taking her views into the public. Hirsi Ali’s words on Islam, on the Koran and prophet Muhammad, were polarizing. She spoke from her own experience shared by millions of women in the Arab-Muslim world, and she was implacable, unrelenting and unwilling to be censored or silenced. In one interview for the Dutch media Hirsi Ali called the prophet a pervert saying, ‘By our Western standards, Muhammad is a perverse man, and a tyrant.’
Hirsi Ali might have been somewhat naïve not to consider in speaking out as she was doing she would be inviting the sort of censorship Рdeath Рpronounced by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989 on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses. But when Theo van Gogh was killed and his murderer pinned a note on the corpse that threatened Hirsi Ali with similar fate, there was no mistaking the Islamist war against the West had arrived in Holland and for her had also become personal.
The mood of people in Holland and beyond in Europe was troubled. The peril of radical Islamism was undeniable as Europe became home for a growing Muslim immigrant population variously estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 20 million. In March 2004 and eight months before the murder of Theo van Gogh, Islamists brought their war to Spain when they bombed a passenger-train in Madrid. A Europe-wide debate began, and continues, on how to contend with Islamist threat and accommodate or assimilate Muslims without risking the Islamist war against the West be turned into the West’s war against Islam.
Hirsi Ali found herself at the centre of this political debate in Europe on Islam, Islamism as a political ideology, status of women in Islam and violence against women by Muslims, and the proper European response in engaging with Muslims at home and with the Muslim world. Hirsi Ali’s conclusion on these matters was unequivocal; Europe and Islam confronted each other as polar opposites.
‘When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance, and freedom,’ Hirsi Ali writes in Infidel, ‘I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so.’ In contrast, she opines, life is ‘better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedom that are recognized and protected by the state.’
European opinion is divided, and some of Europe’s intellectuals view Hirsi Ali, her courage aside, as Enlightenment “radical” or “fundamentalist” and hence, the flip-side of a Muslim fundamentalist. In this opinion Hirsi Ali having renounced her faith scorns Islam just as Muslim fundamentalists and Islamist warriors view Europe as the land of kufr (unbelief). But any comparison made of Hirsi Ali with Islamists is disgusting. Her struggle to be free of any dogmatically proscribed inhibitions is one waged by words and reason; for the Islamist defenders of the faith she renounced, their weapon is violence and murder.
Many Europeans skeptical of Hirsi Ali’s views believe enraging Muslims by disparaging their faith and traditions closes any promise of rapprochement between Europe and Islam. A pluralist Europe where cultures co-exist together in evolving harmony is the promise to strive for, they argue, and this promise despite difficulties reside in the politics of multiculturalism that countries such as Holland and Britain adopted.
Other Europeans view multiculturalism differently. In this perspective multiculturalism in the guise of accommodating other cultures results in the dilution of Enlightenment legacy of individual liberty, separation of religion and politics in the public sphere, secularism and democracy. Multicultural accommodation amounts to one-way concessions to other cultures, in particular to Islam as Muslims generally seek acceptance of their traditional practices without embracing European values.
This debate once simmering below the relatively placid European surface burst furiously into the open following the murder of Theo van Gogh and Hirsi Ali’s outspoken views on Islam. It has been carried forward in the pages, for instance, of the webmagazine signandsight.com.
Ian Buruma, author of Murder in Amsterdam that explores the killing of Theo van Gogh and the politics surrounding it, wrote ‘I admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and agree with most of what she stands for.’ This was in reply to Pascal Bruckner, a very staunch defender of Hirsi Ali. But then Buruma went on to write that he is ‘not convinced that public statements, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made, that Islam in general is “backward” and its prophet “perverse”, are helpful.’ In other words Hirsi Ali’s views and those of her admirers subvert the promise of multiculturalism.
Timothy Garton Ash writing in signandsight.com agreed with Buruma. Ash also published a lengthy book review essay in the New York Review about “Islam in Europe”, and while he expressed like Buruma admiration for Hirsi Ali he wrote, ‘I do not believe that she is showing the way forward for most Muslims in Europe, at least not for many years to come. A policy based on the expectation that millions of Muslims will so suddenly abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers is simply not realistic. If the message they hear from us is that the necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion, then they will choose not to be European. For secular Europeans to demand that Muslims adopt their faith-secular humanism-would be almost as intolerant as the Islamist jihadist demand that we should adopt theirs. But, the Enlightenment fundamentalist will protest, our faith is based on reason! Well, they reply, ours is based on truth!’
Paul Bruckner had in some ways kicked off the debate in his essay reviewing the views of Buruma and Ash on Hirsi Ali. Bruckner was scathingly dismissive of Hirsi Ali’s critics in the name of multiculturalism. He wrote of multiculturalism as a ‘racism of the anti-racists: it chains people to their roots.’ Bruckner approvingly quoted Hirsi Ali from her memoir. ‘I moved from the world of faith,’ writes Hirsi Ali, ‘to the world of reason – from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally because of its values.’
The worlds of Europe and Islam are not alike, nor equal in terms of values. Muslims bent on proselytizing will, if unchecked, erode Europe of its Enlightenment legacy that makes of it a better place than the world of Islam; or Europe will need to turn Muslims around to accepting its values. In a subsequent response to Buruma and Ash, Bruckner wrote, ‘It’s not enough to condemn terrorism. The religion that engenders it and on which it is based, right or wrong, must also be reformed. Can one understand the Inquisition, the witches burned at the stake, the Crusades and the condemnation of heretics without referring to the dogmas of Roman Catholicism? The time has come to do for Islam what was done for Christianity as of the 15th century: by bending it to modernity and adapting it to contemporary mentalities.’
How can Islam be reformed as Bruckner insists, or is it open to reform? There is no simple answer. But any possibility of reform rests with Muslims, and any effort directed at reform must begin by Muslims acknowledging the state of their society. The malaise of the Muslim world indisputably burden and oppress most acutely the female half of its population. And when Muslim women bearing that burden speak out, though not often enough from fear of violence or other forms of punishment, their testimony of the living practice of Islam demolishes all the banal apologetics of Muslims and their non-Muslim friends.
Hirsi Ali’s testimony regarding the existing situation within Muslim societies, irrespective of her renunciation of Islam, comes from lived experience and not mere observation of an outsider or through academic study. She writes, ‘I first encountered the full strength of Islam as a young child in Saudi Arabia…the source of Islam and its quintessence. It is the place where the Muslim religion is practiced in its purest form…In Saudi Arabia, every breath, every step we took, was infused with concepts of purity or sinning, and with fear. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.’
Muslim reform can only progress by Muslims first taking an honest and unflinching look at their world. And the most urgent of reforms is bringing to an end the religiously sanctioned denial of women as equal in all respect to men that lies at the source of violence directed at women. But the emergence of Islamism has become a formidable obstacle for Muslims to engage without fear in critically examining the state of their society and the role of Islam in inhibiting reform and progress. The situation has worsened since 9/11, and it is only someone with extraordinary courage and total disregard of the inevitable harm might engage publicly in speaking from within about Islam and the ills of the Muslim world.
Hirsi Ali is not alone as a woman in discussing and examining the malaise of the Muslim world. There are other female voices as noble and brave as those of Taslima Nasrin, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Azar Nafisi, Necla Kelek, or those of an older generation such as Assia Djebar and Fatema Mernissi. It is the woman’s voice within Islam that is most searing in illuminating inequities and injustices of the Muslim society, and will remain the most powerful agent of change. The circumstances of the post-9/11 world provided Hirsi Ali with a deserving prominence in the Western media for her biography is riveting.
Yet all Muslim criticisms of Hirsi Ali cannot be simply dismissed as apologetics, especially when they come from reputable scholars such as Bassam Tibi. Tibi is an Arab of Syrian origin and German citizen teaching at Gottingen. In the debate carried in the pages of signandsight.com Tibi observed, ‘What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam. When, for instance, she claims that our prophet and our holy book, the Koran, are a fiction, she insults all Muslims and puts a smirk on the faces of all historians of Islam. Of course, Hirsi Ali has every right to turn her back on Islam in the name of religious freedom and this is what she has done. But she should not abuse the religion just to score points cheaply for herself’ (emphasis given).
Muslims are upset with Hirsi Ali. In my conversations with Muslim women in three continents, particularly in Europe (France), I have found all irrespective of their social background or professional occupation distancing themselves from Hirsi Ali’s views on the Koran and the prophet even as they agree with her on the malaise retarding Muslim societies. Admittedly my sampling is of limited statistical value, and yet it is anecdotally revealing for many of the women with whom I have conversed on the matter are highly educated, emancipated and professional women. For them, as for me, the vulgarity of Muslim fundamentalists and Islamists in display – (Taliban in Afghanistan, Iranian clerics and their medievalism, Wahhabis, Salafists and other variety of Islamists and their obsession with returning Muslim societies to the dictates of seventh century Arabia, and the limitless capacity of Muslim dictators to inflict cruelty on their people) – cannot be the only lens through which to read the Koran, the prophet’s life and the history of Islam over fourteen centuries.
The abuse of and violence against women did not originate with Islam, nor are they confined within the Muslim world. Jack Holland in a remarkable study of misogyny – he labeled it “the world’s oldest prejudice” – unveiled how ancient and how widespread across cultures and faiths has been the organized prejudice of men against women and the crimes committed as a result. This history should be, however, of little comfort to Muslims or provide them polemical escape from confronting the reality of misogyny in the here and now of Muslim societies. The misogynist history of Christianity and Christians is mostly in the past; the lesson for Muslims in this instance as in the wider case of Islamic reform is to draw upon that history of Christianity, hence Europe, by which Christians promulgated the reform of their faith and culture in adapting to the values of science and democracy as the pillars on which rests the modern world.
Hirsi Ali has much to contribute in the future even as she has done this far in a relatively young life. She has looked deep and hard at the world from which she made her break, and in the process she has done what Voltaire did in his time. Hirsi Ali has challenged Muslims to think equally deep and hard, even if they are upset with some of the language she has used, and if they refuse to engage with her it is more revealing of them in being in denial of their world’s broken reality than her so publicly visible stand on issues that can be mortally wounding.
A final thought, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s use of the word “infidel” (meaning simply an unbeliever) as title of her memoir and her identity brim with irony. She wears the word mockingly and boldly. But in Muslim perspective is unbelief unredeemable, and is an unbeliever condemned to an eternity in hell? For Muslim agitators and Islamist warriors from the late Ayatollah Khomeini to the lowly suicide-bomber in the ranks of al Qaeda the matter is settled; the place of unbelievers is indisputably in God’s inferno and they need to be dispatched there speedily and mercilessly.
Yet the matter is not simple nor settled as Muslims might think. Islamic history, apart from history in general, records how many an unbeliever has shown superior conduct in goodness than believers and God’s infinite compassion and justice give assurance of their redemption. The most instructive example of this in the history of Islam is that of Abu Talib, the paternal uncle of the prophet. Abu Talib raised Muhammad, who was an orphan, then protected him through his adult years and when he started preaching Islam in Mecca without ever abjuring the idol-worshipping faith of his ancestors.
The Koran indicts hypocrite (munafiq) as a worse offender of moral laws than an infidel. It devotes chapter 63 titled “The Hypocrites” to the perfidy of those who feign belief in public and behave perversely. In place where justice prevails and where the ruler in heaven as in earth is just, those Muslims learned and ignorant who have abused women or have failed to prevent their abuse, will stand condemned as hypocrites and for them redemption will be justly delayed.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario and a syndicated columnist in Canada and the United Kingdom. A Muslim native to Calcutta, India, and a noted Islamic scholar, Prof. Mansur has written extensively on Islamic extremism and the challenges facing contemporary Islam.
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One way to understand the thrust and effect of various religions is to take them as attempts by cultures to enshrine their practices and attitudes as eternal, and to provide for their ongoing imposition and preservation, in saecula seculorum. Judaism around 800 BC, Catholicism around 400 AD, Islam about 650 AD, Hinduism around 6000 BC, Buddhism around 1,000,000,000,000 BC/AD. Et cetera.
The Reformation and Enlightenment set Protestant Christianity’s clock to around 1700 AD, a major “improvement”, but resists much change after that.
But no era has the “right” to lock in all succeeding generations into its world view, even though this is perhaps the fundamental wish of every culture at any moment of time. In any case, one can certainly pick and choose between eras that one currently wants to emulate, if any. Ali, e.g., prefers the Enlightenment period over medieval Bedou Desert Arabism–not necessarily as an absolute, just as a huge improvement. But at heart the problem is the “lock-down” impulse.
Cultural relativism claims to be free of all that, but misses the mark totally. The point is not that all world views and cultures are equal and equally deluded; it is that they are powerful, and use many tools including religion to perpetuate themselves. Choose carefully and don’t give a blank cheque against your moral and mental bank account to any of them.
It’s Pascal Bruckner, not Paul. And the whole multiculturalism exchange can be found here:
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1167.html
Hirsi Ali threatens Muslim moderates like Mansur because they don’t want to acknowledge how bred in the bone misogyny is in their religion. It remains so today with the brutal discrimination against women in Sharia. Of course, this exists too in Judaeo-Christian tradition, but has been modified to a great degree. This is not a mild problem. This is brutal, actualy pathological, discrimination against half of humanity. Ali’s retreat into atheism is a natural response. Who needs religion when it’s like that? On a larger point, perhaps “organized” religion itself is finally anti-spiritual. It is only a power play. Islam would tend to prove that, as do the histories of other religions. Do we need them to find God – or do they hide him/her/it from us?
A major component of the problem is that Islam makes so many promises to its adherent, mainly men, in this world, concerning their relative status in life. Muslims are to dominate and not be dominated, provided they follow Allah’s will. Fine, for 7th century Arabia and the areas to which Islam subsequently spread by the sword, when the opposition to Muslims was even more disorganized peoples.
The problem is, the world Muslims face today could wipe Islam and every Muslim off the face of the earth within a matter of a few years, tops. Add to that the fact that Islamic rituals, especially the five times a day praying, simply are inconducive to attaining anything resembling a dominant position in the modern world. So, Muslim men end up in a humiliating position relative to the infidel men and they take it out on their women.
OK, that’s bad enough, but they also take the fact that they are humiliated and interpret that to mean that they aren’t following Islam strictly enough, which opens them up to radicalization by adherents of the stricter schools of Islam. These schools of thought, based as they are much more strictly on the later life of Muhammed and his band of followers, will inevitably tend toward the martial life, with all that entails in terms of treatment toward women and non-Muslim men.
So, what Muslim men have to come to realize is that sometimes they’ll dominate and sometimes they’ll be dominated, precisely because the Koran is not the actual word of God, hence Allah’s ability to actually dole out political favors in the real world is nil. It’s that simple.
What Hirsi Ali says about Islam is an affront to Muslims and to anyone who knows anything about Islam. When, for instance, she claims that our prophet and our holy book, the Koran, are a fiction, she insults all Muslims and puts a smirk on the faces of all historians of Islam. Of course, Hirsi Ali has every right to turn her back on Islam in the name of religious freedom and this is what she has done. But she should not abuse the religion just to score points cheaply for herself’
The Koran is a fiction. One doesn’t need to “claim” this is true, it is scientifically demonstrably true. The philological evidence that the Koran was put together over time and after the death of Muhammed is incontrovertible by any of the means of modern linguistic science. Believing that the Koran, or any other book in the history of the world, has an extratemporal origin is completely delusional and not worthy of debate in the slightest. Someone adhering to such a belief should be locked in a mental institution with the key thrown away and the educational system that produced such an individual should be dismantled immediately. The world has grown too small to be accepting of such delusions as it once was.
So sayeth the Gospel of Eternal and Absolute Scepticism.
The famously succinct answer to that, from Carl Jung, is:
The Koran is “from God” just as Handel’s Messiah and indeed Newton’s Principia are “from God”: inspired works of great power. They arrive at a point in time but they embody eternal truths. Science can indeed comment on the first aspect but has little power to assist on the second.
Arizona,
That’s mystical mumbo-jumbo. Name one “eternal truth” that the Koran embodies that science can’t comment upon and that Muhammed didn’t plagiarize from Judaism or Christianity. Strip away the factual errors and the plagiarism and the Koran is about as deep as the Sopranos’ family dialogue in the back room of the Bada Bing. Even when it tries to be deep, its own self-delusions and vanity prevent it from being anything but self-interested.
As for the “great power” of the Koran, sure, if you are a little kid and someone tells you a bunch of stories from the Koran, it will seem powerful. Coming to the Koran as an adult, like I did, after reading a heavy helping of Western philosophy, like I also did, leaves one scratching one’s head that such a book ever convinced anyone of anything, much less that I had learned something profound about the cosmos. As someone wittier than I once wrote, “Reading the Koran is like reading a truck driving instruction manual”. Are you going to tell me that truck driving instruction manuals can also be “from God”?
In any case, the Koran sets itself up to be disclosed as a fraud by proclaiming a special place amongst world literature with its assertion that it was dictated by Gabriel. Philological science can prove that it wasn’t, so on its own terms, the Koran is a fiction. If the Koran didn’t make that claim, the historical factuality of the claim wouldn’t be an issue. It’s the same thing with the Resurrection. If it could be shown historically that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, the entirety of Christianity could be justifiably called a fiction in the same way Hirsan Ali is calling Islam a fiction. We don’t have historical proof against one of these claims (it is very difficult to find the bones that would prove Jesus never rose from the dead, after all), but we do have historical proof against the other, as any competent historical linguist could show. And, as you can probably guess, I don’t really care if that is an insult to Muslims. They need to put on the big boy pants and realize they are not special just because a warlord who need to motivate recruits to enrich himself continually told those recruits they were the anointed people on this earth. I can’t even believe we have to have this discussion at this point in human evolution.
In a democracy the persuasive power of the word cannot be fully dissociated from the military power that comes to the winning party at election time. If Hirsi Ali is “heard” by enough voters, then a more hawkish party will take power and even more Muslims may find Western bombs raining down on them.
This is crass nonsense from a swaggering Western supremacist but it is a sentiment that can bring genuine fear into the hearts of ordinary Muslims.
…
It has been argued that misogyny is correlated with population pressures so that modern methods of fertility control are women’s chief saviour in the long term. This is yet another area of failed reciprocity: Western (and Chinese) women are taking up this option but Muslim women are not. If a woman has seven sons she can afford to sacrifice two or three to suicide martyrdom in the cause of Allah. If she chooses the path of uncontrolled fertility she forfeits the right to whinge about war which is its inevitable ultimate consequence.
“If she chooses the path of uncontrolled fertility she forfeits the right to whinge about war which is its inevitable ultimate consequence.”
How many Muslim women can really exercise a choice in this matter, when they are mentally and physically clamped down by draconian cultural demands and restrictive religious fatwas issued by men?
What a cruel thing to say.
She is so brave and courageous. I am proud of being able to live in her time and be able to see her talk like that. I hope she stays safe and healthy.
NOGA,
I am aware of the reality for many Muslim women but I see, every day, many a Muslim woman here in the West who really can choose.
I also see many a Muslim woman here in the West wearing a hijab when she really can choose not to. How does that help her sisters in countries where the choice is denied?
I’m not addressing the kind of Muslim woman who has so little empowerment that true choice is not viable. I’m addressing the kind of woman with possible access to the internet who might actually read this.
Yes, absolutely!
If your life depends on learning how to drive a truck, then such a manual will have great meaning for you. My life doesn’t depend on that so truck manuals mean nothing to me. For similar but more complex reasons, the Koran has no meaning for me. I can, nevertheless, recognize the meaning it has for Muslims, just as I can recognize the meaning that a truck manual would have for aspiring truck drivers.
The case for survival manuals being “from God” is best made, to my mind, in the Booker Prize winning novel “Life of Pi” by Canadian Yann Martel. The hero, Pi, is a Muslim Christian Hindu, finding “eternal verities” in all three faith traditions. However, once stuck out in the middle of the ocean with a Bengal tiger as fellow passenger, he has no other scriptural resource but a shipwreck’s survival manual which instructs him, among other things, on how to desalinate sea water using the most basic apparatus. For Pi, this might as well be the Holiest of Bibles, Korans, or Bhagavad Gitas.
Indeed, every word spoken or written by humanity is “from God” (at least to some small extent). So do be careful what you write: respect God at least thus far.
This is crass nonsense from a swaggering Western supremacist but it is a sentiment that can bring genuine fear into the hearts of ordinary Muslims.
So by stating facts (we have the killing power to do this, undeniably), one becomes a supremacist? If I state that the sun rises in the East, does that make me an Oriental supremacist? What my statement should do is give Muslims pause to reflect that despite their claims that Allah is all-powerful in his ability to create the conditions on Earth for Muslim supremacy, since he obviously has given the West superior firepower. This contradicts Islamic theology that the Muslims are a favored people.
I can, nevertheless, recognize the meaning it has for Muslims, just as I can recognize the meaning that a truck manual would have for aspiring truck drivers.
Pragmatic “meaning” and actual insight into the divine’s character are two different things. You’re verging on pantheism, which is why I initially called what you have to say “mystical mumbo-jumbo”. When I come across people like yourself, I often wish monasteries would make a comeback in the West, so that you could retire from practical life and navel-gaze to your heart’s content while those of us of a more down to earth temperament could pursue our goals free of your moralizing.
the Enlightenment fundamentalist will protest, our faith is based on reason! Well, they reply, ours is based on truth! “Our faith is based on contradictions,” a mutlti-culti fundamentalist chimes in.
A blindness to contradictions, to be specific. A multicultural fundamentalist sees no contradictions in valuing a culture that recognizes gay rights and women’s rights, and a culture that practises misogynist “honor” killings and executions of gays.
venividivici,
Your statement was not factual, it was – as I wrote earlier – crass nonsense.
First, it is not true. Thorough genocide of the sort you threaten is very difficult to achieve against a population as spread out as are the Muslims of this world. I’m sure the US has the practical means to wipe out most of the inhabitants of several large and exotic cities (Tehran, Mecca, Cairo, Karachi, Jakarta) but how do you deal with the large Muslim population of Londonistan?
Second, it is a highly vicious and therefore immoral statement to make, in contrast to the one about the rising sun.
A look back at history will confirm my thesis: Christian (and post-Christian) Europe did its best to exterminate the Jews but failed in the end. All the political and military power was on the “Christian” side but God stayed with the Jews and that’s the side I’d personally rather be on.
How do you know I don’t write from a monastery? And … if you don’t like what God writes through me, then don’t read it.
Arizona,
I think you’re underestimating what a motivated population could accomplish.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s immoral because the only way it would happen is if the Muslims brought it upon themselves. This, if you ask me, is the essence of the Belmont Club’s “Conjectures” thesis, i.e. that the West will only retaliate against Islamic aggression, it won’t initiate the aggression (all BS about ‘war for oil’ aside, since we are dealing with reality here, not anti-war fantasy). Much like the Southern states in the US who thought God would protect them against the superior war machinery of the North, Muslims appear to think that Allah will save them.
Who is going to come to their rescue? They’ve alienated the entire world with the exception of Western Leftists and assorted cultural relativists. The problem, as I see it, is that they create nothing of value for non-Muslims, who happen to constitute 75% of humanity. That 75% may disagree on a lot of things, but Islam should not be one of them. I consider myself just a messenger telling them that they’re playing with fire. Muslims like to brag how there are 1.2 billion Muslims, but they should stop and reflect that there are 4.8 billion non-Muslims who are getting pretty damn sick and tired of their BS. And those 4.8 billion people produce something like 95% of the world’s wealth.
Dan Simmons had a good piece on how this whole scenario could play out.
http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm
if you don’t like what God writes through me, then don’t read it.
Yeah, I don’t put much stock in anyone who says God is writing through him. I prefer the Aristotelian method of using my own reason to analyze someone’s thinking. After all, Aristotle put together what is arguably the greatest corpus of thinking in the history of mankind and I don’t believe he once said God was speaking through him.
Anyway, to bring it back around to the point of the thread, I think it’s great that Hirsan Ali is calling out Islam as a fiction because it clearly is.
venividivici,
Now that it’s happened twice, please note that it’s “Hirsi Ali” and not “Hirsan Ali”.
Like Salim Mansur, I have a great deal of admiration for this courageous and highly gifted woman. I don’t know whether she has said or written that “the Koran is a fiction”. Within Mansur’s article it is Tibi’s paraphrase of her views.
However, coming from you and allied to your genocidal threats, it comes across as plain bigotry.
We have wandered off into what is fiction and what is fact, what is religion and what is science. Clearly only the latter has validity for you but sadly, you seem not to understand what science is either.
Go refresh yourself on Kant who, for all intelligent people, settled the matter once and for all regarding what science can achieve in the face of religious quesitons.
Like Oedipus (and just as blind as he), you seem to want to kill the messenger. I’m not threatening anything or anyone. It just so happens that I know enough history (studied professionally under many Ph.Ds, so please don’t come at me with some charge of autodidacticism), to understand what happens when one side in a conflict makes a strategic mistake regarding its capabilities. As I mentioned, you have the example of the South in the American Civil War. You also have the Axis powers in WWII. It’d be interesting to hear how you think the conflict between the West and Islam would differ. Is the West going to “go gently into that good night”? Will Islam come to its senses? Will the conflict continue at low intensity for the next hundred years until demographic trends favoring Islam finally enable them to vote in sharia law globally? Just what, besides half-baked philosophical musings and weak parroting of Salim Mansur, do you have to add to the debate and analysis?
Go refresh yourself on Kant who, for all intelligent people, settled the matter once and for all regarding what science can achieve in the face of religious quesitons.
I guess Hegel would be surprised to find this out. Nietzsche also had a thing or two to say about Kant’s real motives in his analysis of the science/religion dichotomy. You seem not to understand the difference between the physical sciences and philology, which is the science I’ve been citing in relation to the idea that the Koran is fiction. My scientific contention has been that philology can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Koran is not what it claims to be and therefore Hirsi Ali is absolutely correct and Muslims do not have a philological leg to stand on in claiming otherwise, regardless of how this makes them feel.
However, coming from you and allied to your genocidal threats, it comes across as plain bigotry.
Just as you asked how I knew you weren’t writing from a monastery, how do you know I’m not an apostate Muslim woman from Somalia?
Your not liking what I have to say doesn’t make it any less true. Reality bites sometimes. Just keep your head in the sand, though. I’m sure that’ll work out for you.
Crikey! Even a primary school bully knows to steer clear of the hefty and determined defender of his less aggressive schoolmates. You hardly need assistance from PhDs for that!
I note that you fail to mention the Vietnam war, a debacle where military might proved ineffective in the face of persistent guerilla counter warfare. Some defence analysts have already drawn a comparison with the West’s current military might in the face of Islamist persistence.
I’m an ex-defence scientist myself, working in the field of operations research (mathematical modelling of war scenarios with a view to calculating and therefore planning for the most cost-effective strategies). This was back in the 70s and Israel was held up as a model for the limitations of our science. On paper, she should never have won that 6 day war, let alone survive the even more perilous assaults of 1948. She won because “God was on her side”, her people were highly motivated and their morale strong.
Of course, “God” is not enough. As an Arab saying goes: Trust in God but tie your camel first. To win, you must also have the practical means.
Kant demonstrated that science (or empiricism) cannot prove or disprove metaphysical statements such as “God dictated the Koran to Mohammad”. Where do Hegel or Nietzsche demonstrate otherwise?
I have my own voice and, so long as the moderators at Pajamas Media allow it, I will speak out.
I can no more predict the future than can you. However, so long as supremicism (“my p—s is bigger than yours” if we must bring Freud into this) reigns, then bloodshed is inevitable.
Soppy interfaith dialogue will get us nowhere just as fast – or slowly.
I like Salim Mansur because he is a political realist and an outspoken defender of fellow Muslims and ex-Muslims who are critical of Islam in its current mainstream manifestations. He sees the rot and he does look “deep and hard”. However, he is determined to stay true to his faith tradition. He is not an apologist: he is simply loyal, that’s all.
Like anyone, I can try my hand at prophecy. There is a third or alternative path to bloodshed or suicide. I call it the path of integration, where both Islam and the post Christian West will be altered by the other, each will make concessions and sacrifices, each will both “win” and “lose”.
I see Christ’s death and resurrection as central to the religious symbolism around this integration. Islam must concede that Jesus did die on the cross, that God can indeed allow such a fate to one of His greatest prophets. On the other hand, Christianity must concede that the literal resurrection is a nonsense (ex-Bishop Spong is leading the charge here).
Such symbolism has power. It is not mere mystical mumbo-jumbo. What really hurt on sep11 almost six years ago now was not the 3000 lives lost, as tragic as that was. What hurt was the symbolism, the power of Islam to reach into the very heart of the post Christian West. You can skite all you like about the West’s military might, the fact is it was of no avail on that fateful day.
I note that you fail to mention the Vietnam war, a debacle where military might proved ineffective in the face of persistent guerilla counter warfare. Some defence analysts have already drawn a comparison with the West’s current military might in the face of Islamist persistence.
I didn’t mention Vietnam because I don’t think the social or military context of the West is comparable, in general, to the Vietnam era. Socially, the US is much more confident of its role in world affairs now than it was in the Vietnam era, although still not confident enough, in my eyes. Militarily, we have an all-volunteer army which actually represents a higher average educational attainment than the civilian population, which is the reverse of the Vietnam-era situation. Thus, I would put the West, mainly the US, as in a position more akin to the North in the US Civil War than the US of the Vietnam era.
Here’s a relevant passage from Hegel on Kant’s dualism (in your example, his dualism of empiricism and metaphysics):
“In every dualistic system, and especially in that of Kant, the fundamental defect makes itself visible in the inconsistency of unifying at one moment what a moment before had been explained to be independent and therefore incapable of unification. And then, at the very moment after unification has been alleged to be the truth, we suddenly come upon the doctrine that the two elements, which, in their true status of unification, had been refused all independent subsistence, are only true and actual in their state of separation. Philosophising of this kind wants the little penetration needed to discover, that this shuffling only evidences how unsatisfactory each one of the two terms is. And it fails simply because it is incapable of bringing two thoughts together. (And in point of form there are never more than two.) It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as ‘Cognition can go no further’; ‘Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.’”
Read Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols”, where he deduces the psychological needs driving Kantian philosophy.
Someone once said, “Either Jesus was the Son of God or he was insane”. Your “third way” is incoherent in light of this.
Anyway, you miss the point again and again. If a book that claims to be perfect and contain no variant readings (you do understand how the history of manuscripts works, right?), because it was dictated by God directly, can be shown to have variant readings (forget the whole “God speaks Arabic” and the fact that there are non-Arabic words in the Koran), that is proof that the book was not dictated by God. This falls outside of the Kantian realm of “unprovable metaphysical statements” altogether, partially because the Koran itself opens itself up to empirical disproof by making the claims it does about its non-empirical origins.
Seriously, you don’t seem to understand the first things about textual criticism (not literary criticism, textual criticism) and the implications it has for Koranic theology. Textual criticism shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the the Koran is not what it claims to be. You are so ignorant on this point I feel like I’m explaining quantum physics to a chimpanzee. If the Koran made a more limited claim, akin to the Biblical claim that the authors are inspired by God or by Jesus, it wouldn’t be as big a deal that there were variant readings. If you don’t get that, you are missing the entire point. You are entitled to your opinion, but your opinion is just wrong factually.
If we followed your method of textual analysis, fake Platonic dialogues would still be considered the work of the actual Plato. Believe me, that’s how things used to work, but thankfully we’ve progressed beyond that.
re Vietnam: Of course, there are similarities and there are differences. The analysts I referred to point to the former and you to the latter. The simple point I was making is that those analysts’ views are published and accepted as credible. It’s enough that competent knowledgeable writers doubt the certainty of US military victory over Islamism. To my mind, that is quite enough to establish the “crass nonsense” of your own certainty.
re Kant: I never claimed that Kant’s philosophy was perfect or final in its full breadth. It was final on the question of empiricism’s powers viz a viz metaphysics. The quotes you provide do not negate that.
re Jesus: Your own statement is incoherent. “Jesus was the Son of God” is incorrect since Jesus *was* a man and *is* the Son of God. The first is an empirical historical fact which scholarly research can assist with; the second is a metaphysical (eternal) assertion that simply demands faith. “Jesus was insane” belongs in the same category as “Jesus was a man”. My “third way” allows all three statements to be true, the two empirical ones being subject to science while the metaphysical one remains a matter of faith. As a matter of fact, I do believe or accept all three myself and find no inconsistency in doing so. Tell me, vvv, what do you believe?
re the Koran: You must surely be aware that those variant readings of the Koran have absolutely no impact on Muslim faith in the Koran’s divine authorship. For one thing, the variants are trivial and the main gist of the book is quite unaffected. Secondly, there is a wide range of Muslim views on the divine authorship, ranging from the very naive belief that a bound book actually dropped into Mohammad’s lap from the skies to a more sophisticated understanding closer to the Christian view of the Bible. At neither end of this spectrum do those variants have an impact.
re Plato: Red herrings are never helpful in a debate.
That is, unless you consider Platonic and divine authorship to be comparable. Or unless you find it admissible to confuse empirical fact with metaphysical assertion.
If so, then I really cannot help you further.
If so, then I really cannot help you further.
You didn’t help me at all at any point in this discussion. That’s what’s so sad.
As a matter of fact, I do believe or accept all three myself and find no inconsistency in doing so.
Remind me to never ask you to be the person I send to find inconsistencies. Apparently, that’s not your strong suit.
It’s also apparent that one of my more pessimistic thoughts is true. There needs to be a civil war in the West before we can make any progress is the war against Islamic supremacism.
vvv,
Robust discussion and dialogue are the alternative to war, civil or otherwise.
However, where do we start if you will not acknowledge a distinction between science and religion, between cognitive knowledge and faith commitment, between Plato and God?
These distinctions must be made and the logical consequences accepted *before* we can move on toward a mystical or Hegelian/Nietzschian transcendance of such dualisms. Without step 1, step 2 is but confusion. When politics is thrown into the mix, the confusion is dangerous and will surely lead to bloodshed.
Have you not heard of the idea of paradox, of only *apparent* contradiction? The apparent inconsistency of “Jesus was a man” and “Jesus is the Son of God” is in fact a profound paradox with which rational Christians have struggled for two millenia. I think it is the “Jesus was insane” bit that bothered you. With enough time and talk we could sort that one out but I can see that it is very far from your current view (though I don’t know it exactly since you’ve chosen to remain silent on your own beliefs).
I don’t find God in the Koran as does Salim Mansur but we share a love of the mystic poet Rumi who characterizes his relationship with God, with soul, with lost lover, as that of a pair of drunks.
you are drunk
and i’m intoxicated
no one is around
showing us the way home
again and again
i told you
drink less
a cup or two
i know in this city
no one is sober
one is worse than the other
one is frenzied and
the other gone mad
come on my friend
step into the tavern of ruins
taste the sweetness of life
in the company of another friend
here you’ll see
at every corner
someone intoxicated
and the cup-bearer
makes her rounds
i went out of my house
a drunkard came to me
someone whose glance
uncovered a hundred
houses in paradise
rocking and rolling
he was a sail
with no anchor but
he was the envy of all those sober ones
remaining on the shore
where are you from i asked
he smiled in mockery and said
one half from the east
one half from the west
one half made of water and earth
one half made of heart and soul
one half staying at the shores and
one half nesting in a pearl
i begged
take me as your friend
i am your next of kin
he said i recognize no kin
among strangers
i left my belongings and
entered this tavern
i only have a chest
full of words
but can’t utter
a single one
– Translation by Nader Khalili
“Rumi, Fountain of Fire”, 1991
Cal-Earth Press, 1994
If this tavern dries up, we can adjourn to another, if you like. I know comments get cut off here, but you’re welcome to come and talk with me anytime at the Religion forum at free2code dot net.
Best wishes,
A