This call for historic reform, by one of Islam’s most
divisive critics, only highlights the scale of the task
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| A woman is caned in public by a sharia police officer, in Aceh, a province in Indonesia that practises partial sharia law. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images |
The Somali-born author and human rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an unequivocal figure. Admired by many secularists for her fearless denunciation of Islamic fundamentalism, she is loathed not just by Islamic fundamentalists but by many western liberals, who find her rejection of Islam almost as objectionable as her embrace of western liberalism.
Confronted by the tribal, patriarchal and religious confines of her upbringing in east Africa, where she suffered female genital mutilation, and the liberty of the Netherlands, where she sought asylum from an arranged marriage, she chose the cultural values of her adopted home over those she had inherited. Not only did she turn her back on her native religion, she became one of its most articulate and vehement critics.
The price she paid was 24-hour police protection, and the loss of an artistic collaborator, the film director Theo Van Gogh – he was murdered in an Amsterdam high street by a jihadist, who promised to kill Hirsi Ali too. When she moved to the safer environs of America, and the welcoming arms of a conservative thinktank, her departure was little lamented in Europe. Hirsi Ali was variously accused of being a self-hating Islamophobe and a traumatised apologist for western imperialism.
Even in the US, she is still unpopular in progressive circles. As she records in her new book, Heretic, an honorary degree from Brandeis University was withdrawn following a petition by students and the faculty accusing her of “hate speech”. The campaign, she notes drily, saw “an authority on ‘Queer/Feminist Narrative Theory’ siding with the openly homophobic Islamists”.
Such a spectacle is just one of the many ironies that litter the contemporary discourse around Islam, freedom of speech, racism and terror. But Hirsi Ali is not much concerned with such sideshows. She is a plain speaker (too plain for some). Her views about the violence and misogyny she sees as inherent in Islamic culture have seen her denounced as an “enlightenment fundamentalist”.
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| ‘Plain speaker’: Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Photograph: Christian Marquardt/Getty Images |
Having previously argued that Islam was beyond reform, in Heretic she says she wants to strike a more conciliatory note. She sets out to find common ground with the majority of Muslims who view their religion as peaceful and spiritual. While this may be a noble aim, one doubts that a meeting of minds is about to occur anytime soon. For one thing, Hirsi Ali calls for a wholesale Islamic reformation. It makes no sense, she says, to maintain, as so many politicians and religious leaders do, that the terrorism seen in Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere has no religious justification in Islamic texts. “We delude ourselves,” she writes, “that our deadliest foes are somehow not actuated by the ideology they openly affirm.”
She quotes chapter and verse of violent exhortations in the Qur’an, and argues that as long as Muslims hold to the notion that the book is the literal word of God then extremists will be able to lay confident claim to theological rationale for their acts. Put simply, her position is that “religious doctrines matter and are in need of reform”.
But how? The statistics she assembles do not make optimistic reading. For example, 75% of Pakistanis are in favour of the death penalty for apostasy and sharia law is gaining ground in many Muslim-majority nations. However, Hirsi Ali sees the potential for change in the social protests of the Arab spring – even if they have mostly ushered in either dictators or Islamists.
She also believes that Muslims in the west have a vital role to play in forging a new identity for Islam. She divides followers of the faith into three distinct groups: the Mecca Muslims, the large majority who represent the more tolerant side of the religion, as articulated during Muhammad’s early Mecca period; the Medina Muslims (or the jihadist wing) who are inspired by the harsher aspects of the Qur’an that Muhammad is thought to have expressed during his later consolidation in Medina; and the Modifying Muslims – those dissidents and reformists who actively challenge religious dogma.
The reformers and extremists, writes Hirsi Ali, are currently locked in a battle to win the hearts and minds of the mass of passive Mecca Muslims. She claims to be hopeful that the reformers will prevail, yet she produces little evidence to support such an outcome. Instead, her strengths lie in showing the difficulties in bringing about reform – not least the widely held belief that as a final and perfect rendition of God’s word, Islam is powerfully resistant to the very concept of reinterpretation.
Even her fiercest detractors would struggle to deny much of what Hirsi Ali states about the current predicament within Islam. Unfortunately that doesn’t make it any more palatable, particularly in an era dominated by the modern commandment not to offend anyone.
It’s an unpleasant paradox that Islam’s best hope of reform might lie in its worst incarnation. In making such a visible horror show of their crimes, groups such as Isis, Boko Haram, the Pakistan Taliban and Al-Shabaab have laid down a challenge to mainstream Islam for the soul of the religion. Simply denying that these groups are part of the faith is no longer a viable option.
Whatever one may think of her solutions, Hirsi Ali should be commended for her unblinking determination to address the problem.
Heretic is published by Harper (£18.99). Click here to order it for £15.19
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Is this a turning point? Is the West finally waking up? Has Ayaan
Hirsi Ali managed to achieve what no
one before her managed to do – make the liberals in the West actually read quotes
from the Islamic religious texts and understand the difference between the
Mecca and Medina Islam?
Hopefully, eventually even the Israeli Islam ignoramuses – Amos Oz, David Grossman and Isaac Herzog will be cornered into reading Heretic.
Thank you Ayaan Hirsi Ali!