Yes, I know, I’m behind in my reading. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journa [1]l Joseph Rago puts up something that certainly wouldn’t get by the sensors over at Dean’s World:
NEW YORK–Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: “I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant,” she declares. “But that is apologizing for the truth.”
Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland–where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004–she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.
Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu–into, as she puts it, “the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization.” In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been “an arranged rape.” But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, “through observation, through experience, through reading,” she acquainted herself with a different world. “The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says. “But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved.”
Let’s face it, it would make it past the editorial board on any other paper in the country, either. Reasons; it’s telling the truth. However she tends to stray somewhat when she starts trying to nail it down to the cause;
At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made “Submission” or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. “And why?” Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. “Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see,” she continues, “that this isn’t something that’s caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It’s religion.”
Actually, no. That response is unacceptable. It’s not religion per say, it is the perversion of a particular religion. Granted, that the degree of perversion required to get a given religion to that point is variable according to the particular religion in question. I don’t doubt based on my readings of the Koran that Islam takes somewhat less of a trip to get to the despotism that she mentions. Indeed, she breaks down this phenom, in the case of Islam thus; .
What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history.” This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam’s most holy human messenger. “You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet,” and then ask: “Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?” She draws a connection between Mohammed’s taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions–what she calls “this imprisonment of women.” She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of “the most basic freedoms.” These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. “People say it is a bad strategy,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. “I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed.”
My problem with her (understandable) reaction is that it paints with far too broad a brush. When she can paint of the Judeo/Christian tradition, the same kind of picture she paints of Islam, she’ll have a point. As she herself says:
“I have my ideas and my views,” she says, “and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically.”
When she gets to that point, about the remainder of the world’s religions, perhaps somebody give me a call.
All that said, however, she is not totally without merit. For example, she does have it nailed pretty closely, when she identifies the central problem as culture;
“The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don’t improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place.”
Quite so. Further, when you been over forward for minorities in the name of multiculturalism, what you’re doing is denying that your culture and the success of it is the reason those minorities came to live in the protection of your culture in the first place. If that majority culture is lost, what is the protection for the minorities then?