Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals

[Judith]

I finished Ali's book and continue to recommend it highly. Here's another review by Mona Charen from National Review Online's site:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGNkN...TY5ODY0ZDJkMTA=

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Braveheart

The story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

By Mona Charen

I first heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali when they pulled the knife from Theo van Gogh’s chest in November of 2004. The Dutch filmmaker had been shot and then nearly beheaded as he rode his bicycle to work in Amsterdam. His attacker felt justified in committing this filthy murder because van Gogh had insulted Islam in a short film titled Submission about the treatment of women in the Islamic world. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali by birth but by then a member of the Dutch parliament, had written the screenplay. Under that knife was a long rambling letter addressed to Hirsi Ali and to the West generally. Full of threats and imprecations, the letter warned that she was next.

It is appropriate that Hirsi Ali was singled out along with the United States, Holland, and Europe — “I surely know that you, O America, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Europe, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Holland, will be destroyed” — because as we learn from her new autobiography, Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has come to appreciate and to personify the greatest virtues of our civilization.

Her story, a completely engrossing narrative I found hard to put down, began in Somalia in 1969. She was born into the Osman Mahamud subclan of the Darod clan. For a Somali child, nothing is more important than memorizing her lineage for as many generations as she can count. It can mean the difference between murder and protection — and later in the story, it does for Ayaan.

Her birth coincided with the birth of the new Somalia, which was emerging from years of colonization by the English and the French. Her father, active in politics and later in the opposition forces, hoped to create a democratic society that would astound the world. Instead, as with nearly all of the newly independent African nations, Somalia spiraled down — first into a Soviet-style dictatorship and later into civil and tribal war and chaos.

Instead of finding within her family a refuge from the cruelties of the wider world, Hirsi Ali found persecution instead. She loved both of her parents, but her mother was her father’s second of three wives. He was often away (sometimes in prison for his political activities), and her mother was sometimes hysterical and frequently violent. Hirsi Ali relates being beaten with a rolling pin and being beaten while tied hand and foot. As a Muslim female she was expected to be obedient, servile and meek. All of the housework fell upon her, not her brother. He bullied her mercilessly and got away with it because he was the boy. When she was naughty and disobedient toward her Quran teacher, he cracked her skull and nearly killed her. She was also tortured — there is no other word for it — by female circumcision. She writes, “In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made ‘pure’ by having their genitals cut out.” This was done to Hirsi Ali when she was 5. Her description is graphic and blood-curdling.

Because of her father’s prominence in the anti-Siad Barre forces, the family was kept constantly in motion. They lived in Saudi Arabia, where Hirsi Ali heard the cries of women being beaten by their husbands, and in Kenya, where she saw young boys who had stolen something beaten to death by crowds cheering and jeering. She lived in Ethiopia among Christians her mother regarded as “despicable.”

She witnessed the rise of Islamic extremism — Saudi money and influence spread the virus worldwide — and even felt drawn to it herself for a while, shrouding her body in a hijab and trying to pray fervently five times a day.

But she also read all the Western books, novels mostly, she could cadge in Nairobi, and these planted seeds in her young mind. There could be equality between men and women. Instead of being force-marched into arranged marriages, young women could think of romance and even love.

Those seeds would sprout later, when she fled an arranged marriage herself and sought refuge in Holland. Far more perceptive than most around her, she could see that Holland’s unwillingness to give offense to Muslims was enabling the Muslim minority to continue to persecute its girls and women on European soil.

She is now in the United States, after a tumultuous time in Holland, and we are the richer for it. This is a brave, humane and fascinating book by an extraordinary woman.

© 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Chris Grieb]

Judith; Thanks for the review. I reserved Miss Ali's book at Fairfax Library and noted that there 194 reserves. That figure is not Harry Potter size but it is very good for a book that has been out for a while.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

What we're doing when we're doing "outreach" to members of any religion is trying to get them to abandon core elements of their religion.

Judith,

Of course. This is absolutely true. But we are actually doing more. We are also trying to get them to formally adopt reason in areas where they do not use it, including individual rights, separation of church and state, etc.

If a person has a very hostile attitude in approaching Muslims, they simply won't listen. Look at the message in most all anti-Islam rhetoric (which is rarely addressed directly to them):

"Everything they (Muslims) know is either wrong or evil. All of them can easily become terrorists, most likely suicide bombers, over time because of what they think. They are already terrorist supporters. They all want to kill me or enslave me."

On reading that, your average Muslim looks around at his life, his job, his healthy and loving family, the knowledge in his head, etc., and says, "No it isn't. I will not. I am not. And I do not." And he will be right, too. Nothing in his particular life corresponds to any of those observations.

He will also think another thing: "You are my enemy. Just listen to you." He heard that we are his enemy down at the mosque. When he reads overly-biased rhetoric from us telling him that he is all those dirty rotten things when he knows he isn't, he can certainly relate to what the holy men say. He may not understand or agree with everything they say, but when he looks at his own little world, it sure sounds a lot more rational to him than what we tell him. (Notice that word "rational.")

At this point there is no convincing since all real rational communication has shut down. He thinks Islam is rational because what we write in the name of reason isn't rational to him. It is refuted by his own existence.

If an approach is made where one acknowledges the good in that Muslim's life and tells him that it is not only good, but that it is good to preserve it, and then debate the bad/evil issues in Islam, the chance of being heard with an open mind increases (and that is an enormous understatement).

But then this means that we have to actually learn what his life is about. That takes effort. I have no problem in studying anything important and I judge making an objective evaluation of Islam, Muslim life and the Middle East to be very important right now.

Within this context, let's look at Ms. Ali's book. I am certainly interested in reading it. I love first-hand accounts of people who have been there and she has been active enough in her own views to be voted into office in a foreign land where she did not grow up. That in itself is quite an achievement. She sounds like a first-rate mind.

So let's say I like the book. Now we go to our average Muslim and say, "Here is a wonderful book that will explain to you all that is wrong and evil with your way of life." If he flips through it at all, he will automatically think, "This might have happened to her but it has nothing to do with me." He will dismiss it as more anti-Islam rhetoric.

This book can only be offered to him way down the line, after he has allowed himself to enter discussion and feels that he is not facing an enemy, but instead facing a friend (or at least a neutral person) who is just as interested in the good as he is. Hell, a person who acknowledges that he is even interested in the good. Even then, that book will have to be presented as what the bad elements in Islam can cause in a Muslim's life, driving him/her to damn Islam and look elsewhere, not as a wholesale all-there-is kind of evaluation of the entire Islamic world and culture.

If you can get a Muslim to read a book like that with an open mind, you are well on the way to getting him to abandon some of the destructive elements of his religion and embrace reason, individual rights, etc. If you shove it down his throat, or simply say what he lives in his own life shouldn't count as proof in judging Islam, this will reinforce those same destructive elements we wish to see him abandon.

Michael

[Judith]

The best part of the book, for me, came at the end:

It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. It was difficult for my grandmother, and for all my relatives from the miye. It was difficult for me, too. I moved from the world of faith 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 message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. That is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?

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 freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state. To accept subordination and abuse because Allah willed it -- that, for me, would be self-hatred.

[Judith]

What we're doing when we're doing "outreach" to members of any religion is trying to get them to abandon core elements of their religion.

Of course. This is absolutely true. But we are actually doing more. We are also trying to get them to formally adopt reason in areas where they do not use it, including individual rights, separation of church and state, etc.

If a person has a very hostile attitude in approaching Muslims, they simply won't listen. Look at the message in most all anti-Islam rhetoric (which is rarely addressed directly to them):

"Everything they (Muslims) know is either wrong or evil. All of them can easily become terrorists, most likely suicide bombers, over time because of what they think. They are already terrorist supporters. They all want to kill me or enslave me."

On reading that, your average Muslim looks around at his life, his job, his healthy and loving family, the knowledge in his head, etc., and says, "No it isn't. I will not. I am not. And I do not." And he will be right, too. Nothing in his particular life corresponds to any of those observations.

He will also think another thing: "You are my enemy. Just listen to you." He heard that we are his enemy down at the mosque. When he reads overly-biased rhetoric from us telling him that he is all those dirty rotten things when he knows he isn't, he can certainly relate to what the holy men say. He may not understand or agree with everything they say, but when he looks at his own little world, it sure sounds a lot more rational to him than what we tell him. (Notice that word "rational.")

At this point there is no convincing since all real rational communication has shut down. He thinks Islam is rational because what we write in the name of reason isn't rational to him. It is refuted by his own existence.

If an approach is made where one acknowledges the good in that Muslim's life and tells him that it is not only good, but that it is good to preserve it, and then debate the bad/evil issues in Islam, the chance of being heard with an open mind increases (and that is an enormous understatement).

But then this means that we have to actually learn what his life is about. That takes effort. I have no problem in studying anything important and I judge making an objective evaluation of Islam, Muslim life and the Middle East to be very important right now.

We agree.

Within this context, let's look at Ms. Ali's book. I am certainly interested in reading it. I love first-hand accounts of people who have been there and she has been active enough in her own views to be voted into office in a foreign land where she did not grow up. That in itself is quite an achievement. She sounds like a first-rate mind.

So let's say I like the book. Now we go to our average Muslim and say, "Here is a wonderful book that will explain to you all that is wrong and evil with your way of life." If he flips through it at all, he will automatically think, "This might have happened to her but it has nothing to do with me." He will dismiss it as more anti-Islam rhetoric.

This book can only be offered to him way down the line, after he has allowed himself to enter discussion and feels that he is not facing an enemy, but instead facing a friend (or at least a neutral person) who is just as interested in the good as he is. Hell, a person who acknowledges that he is even interested in the good. Even then, that book will have to be presented as what the bad elements in Islam can cause in a Muslim's life, driving him/her to damn Islam and look elsewhere, not as a wholesale all-there-is kind of evaluation of the entire Islamic world and culture.

If you can get a Muslim to read a book like that with an open mind, you are well on the way to getting him to abandon some of the destructive elements of his religion and embrace reason, individual rights, etc. If you shove it down his throat, or simply say what he lives in his own life shouldn't count as proof in judging Islam, this will reinforce those same destructive elements we wish to see him abandon.

First of all, you're assuming that the book is "anti-Islam rhetoric", which it actually isn't. You've decided what it is based on the reviews. My own take on the book is that it isn't that at all. Read it for yourself and decide what you think.

Secondly, who's talking about shoving anything down anyone's throat? When did this discussion become one of using this book to convince Moslems of the incorrectness of their faith? I put the discussion of this book here because of its subject matter; I could easily have put it under "Library" instead, and maybe I should have done. I simply wanted to recommend the book. I'd never recommend this book to a Moslem as a way to get him/her to re-examine the tenets of his/her faith; it's not suited to that purpose. It is, however, a fascinating book.

Judith

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

First of all, you're assuming that the book is "anti-Islam rhetoric", which it actually isn't. You've decided what it is based on the reviews. My own take on the book is that it isn't that at all. Read it for yourself and decide what you think.

Secondly, who's talking about shoving anything down anyone's throat? When did this discussion become one of using this book to convince Moslems of the incorrectness of their faith? I put the discussion of this book here because of its subject matter; I could easily have put it under "Library" instead, and maybe I should have done. I simply wanted to recommend the book. I'd never recommend this book to a Moslem as a way to get him/her to re-examine the tenets of his/her faith; it's not suited to that purpose. It is, however, a fascinating book.

Judith,

I must not have been clear. I did not assume that the book was anti-Islam rhetoric. I merely said that without proper preparation, the run-of-the-mill Muslim would see it that way. Being negative against Islam with grounding in knowledge and experience is a far cry from anti-Islam rhetoric. I see Ali's book in this manner (negative against Islam with grounding in knowledge and experience).

Of course, I don't think you wish to shove anything down anyone's throat. I was merely mentioning more about how to use the book, if one should be interested in outreach to Muslims. You mentioned outreach, so I assumed it was on the table for discussion with you. All I tried to do was elaborate on outreach within the context of this book. And, unfortunately for our side, there are far too many vocal ones who would shove it down a Muslim's throat and want to bomb him to death if he did not say it was good. (That's almost metaphorical, but I think you know what I mean.)

Michael

[Judith]

I must not have been clear. I did not assume that the book was anti-Islam rhetoric. I merely said that without proper preparation, the run-of-the-mill Muslim would see it that way. Being negative against Islam with grounding in knowledge and experience is a far cry from anti-Islam rhetoric. I see Ali's book in this manner (negative against Islam with grounding in knowledge and experience).

I don't want to seem like I'm picking on you when you're obviously taking a conciliatory note but I can't let that statement stand. How can you say that she isn't grounded in knowledge and experience? She was raised in Islam. She studied the Koran from childhood. She studied advanced classes in Islam as a young adult and was taking her religion seriously.

Judith

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't want to seem like I'm picking on you when you're obviously taking a conciliatory note but I can't let that statement stand. How can you say that she isn't grounded in knowledge and experience? She was raised in Islam. She studied the Koran from childhood. She studied advanced classes in Islam as a young adult and was taking her religion seriously.

Judith,

You're not picking on me. You are completely misunderstanding me. I said the exact opposite. I said that Ms. Ali had grounding in knowledge and experience, so her book was not anti-Islam rhetoric.

I don't know how to say it any clearer.

Michael

[Judith]

Michael --

If you're trying to confuse me, you've succeeded.

Judith

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Judith,

Let me try again.

1. Something needs to be done about the terrorism in the world. Ideally, we all should help.

2. Islamist fanatics are responsible for a good portion of the world's terrorism (but not all by a long shot).

3. Many in the West presently are getting it wrong—either appeasing Islamist fanatics (much mainstream press and academy) or scapegoating the entire Muslims community or Islamic culture (especially orthodox Objectivists).

4. Islamist fanatics need to be fought with military intelligence, guns and bombs.

5. Muslims of good will need to be persuaded through reason.

6. Ms. Ali wrote a good book (from what I can tell). It is based on knowledge and experience. However, it harshly criticizes Islam, so it is not a good tool for getting the entire picture or persuading average Muslims to incorporate reason, individual rights, etc., in their thinking. But it is a good source of information, so it is valuable to read (taking into account its negative perspective) and it is probably valuable for the end-part of persuading some Muslims to reexamine their values.

7. If approached with only negative views of Islamic culture, average Muslims will dismiss ALL attempts as anti-Islam rhetoric, regardless of how objective they are. They simply won't read or listen to what you have to say.

8. Many people in the West are so afraid or hate-driven that they will distort Ms. Ali's message and take it to bigotry. On Objectivist forums, I have often seen a recommendation for reading a book/article turn into a soapbox for ranting against Islam/Muslims in a bigoted manner. (They do this with Christianity, too.)

9. I have a goal of interacting with Muslims and trying to persuade them of a few specific things, including introducing them to Rand's works, but especially trying to get them to shun and repudiate violent Islamist fanatics. This is how I see doing my part in combating terrorism.

10. This entails first study, then action and actually meeting and discussing issues with Muslims—discussing them objectively.

11. Part of the study is learning about both good and bad in Islamic communities, what the differences are between denominations of Islam, the history of the Middle East, etc. This demands strict objectivity, more so than normal given the explosive nature of people's reactions regarding this topic.

12. Part of the persuasion is getting average Muslims to reexamine the role of women, the government and some other issues, comparing traditional Islamic roles with Western ones.

12. If and where possible, make money doing this (like a good capitalist).

That's roughly it. All this presumes that reason is a powerful weapon and that people—most all the people in different cultures of the world—are essentially good and open to reason.

Michael

[Judith]

Okay.

Don't assume that anything anyone posts related to Islam is relevant to your mission of outreach, okay? Some of us just want to talk about stuff, not necessarily to diss Islam, but not necessarily with the outreach issue in mind, either.

One thing I learned from Ali's book that I never realized before is that Ramadan is apparently a very family-oriented holiday, much like Thanksgiving and Christmas are in the West.

Judith

[studiodekadent]

I agree that we have to be open-minded and deal with Muslims and other Faithists in a benevolent way. I for one know a Christian whom I have talked to and I am convinced he is rational, if mistaken (he has had several experiences he considers to be empirical proof of his faith, so technically speaking he doesnt have faith per se). I would expect some Muslims are like that as well. Generally speaking, getting someone to give up religion is a long and difficult process, but shouting at them how evil they are is not effective.... it makes them think that all atheists are driven by hate, for one.

Islam, the doctrine, if practiced consistently by Muslims, is dangerous. But most Muslims are not perfectly consistent (i.e. fundamentalists). This is what Ms Ali is getting at with "seperating Islam from Muslims." Islam holds dangerous ideas and values but there are Muslims that can understand historical context. If Christians can do it, so can Muslims.