Robert Fulford:
The threatening honesty of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
By Robert Fulford June 12, 2010
Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes before the West as a messenger bearing terrifying news: We are in a struggle with Islam that threatens our civilization and our most crucial principles.
Photo from salon.com
She resembles the refugee dissidents who arrived here carrying a similar message from the Soviet empire long ago, except that she’s escaped from an oppressive state of mind rather than a barbed-wire nation state. Born into fundamentalist Islam, she rebelled against its tyranny and eventually set out to tell the West what we face. Her new book,
Nomad, helps to spread the alarm to sleepy, prosperous countries, such as Canada.
Even now, after many Islamist atrocities, Canadians prefer to ignore what she has to say. After all, she threatens our religion of multiculturalism and casts grave doubt on our immigration policy. She undermines our anxious hope that Islam is mainly harmless
.
On Tuesday, at a Donner Foundation lecture in Toronto, she defined the conflict as a war of ideas. That raised, by implication, some urgent questions. Is this a war Canadians (or others in the West) can fight? Have we the intellectual equipment? Do we feel strongly enough to commit ourselves to it? Are there any leaders for such a war?
Judging by the typical reactions so far to her warnings, the answer in each case is No. As with refugees from communism, she’s received equivocal and uncomprehending responses. In the Soviet era, smug and condescending journalists in the West habitually instructed exiles on the complexities within communism, which liberals in the West could understand but East Europeans couldn’t.
In just this way, the
New Yorker magazine carried a review of
Nomad by Pankaj Mishra, complaining that Hirsi Ali’s “life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history.” When she praises Voltaire and the Enlightenment, Mishra correctly points out that he was a virulent anti-Semite.
Similarly, when Hirsi Ali indicates approval of Oriana Fallaci’s criticism of Islam, Mishra recalls that Fallaci once claimed that Muslims in Europe “breed like rats,” which apparently ends that argument. Writing in a flagrantly liberal magazine, Mishra does his best to label Hirsi Ali a conservative, noting that the Brookings Institution (liberal) declined to hire her but the American Enterprise Institute (conservative) took her on staff — although, within Islam, she is as far from a conservative as it is possible to be.
More important, Mishra (a well-travelled Indian-born professor and fierce critic of Hinduism) suggests that Hirsi Ali simply doesn’t understand the many varieties of Islam. They, too, are multilayered, like the Enlightenment, their identities “usually” influenced less by the Koran or Sharia than by politics, culture and economics. Those who know little about the issues would be left with the impression that she just isn’t bright enough to see reality as he does.
When Hirsi Ali reached Toronto this week, she ran into another kind of condescension. Jian Ghomeshi, a British-born Iranian-Canadian, staged the interview with her on his CBC radio program, Q, as a kind of tutorial, a way to point out her errors. He was concerned with her tactics.
In
Nomad, she said that from the standpoint of those seeking a good life (prosperity, peace, individual freedom), the West does a better job than the Islamic states, such as her homeland, Somalia. This indicated that the morals of the “infidels” in the West are superior to those of Muslims. So Ghomeshi asked, “Ayaan, do you not worry that statements like this might alienate the Muslims that you want to engage?”
No, she said. Reasonable individuals can see that the West is mainly successful whereas Somalia (and other Islamic states) are miserable failures. Ghomeshi expressed more concern: She was setting up a hierarchy, calling one set of principles better than another. He obviously considered that a mistake but it was her main point: Ideas must be judged on their merits. “There are good ideas and bad ideas.” What a concept for Canada! It was nearly radical enough to blow out the CBC transmitters.
She had more: “If you compare a society that is built on liberalism with a society built on what Mohamed left behind, the results speak for themselves.” Sharia, she said, has failed everywhere it has been tried.
“Surely this is subjective,” Ghomeshi said. There must be people in those countries who like the system. Then why, Hirsi Ali asked, are so many trying so hard to get to the West? Ghomeshi, perhaps a little desperate, played the conservative card. She must be a conservative, he said, since she’s in a right-wing think tank. Hirsi Ali was ready for that one: “What is ‘right-wing’ about fighting for the equality of men and women?”
Ghomeshi tried to convince her she’s a conservative. She tried to educate him in liberal principles. Finally, he asked whether she believed there was anything Islam could teach the West. She said she couldn’t think of a thing.
This woman displays a level of honesty that shames the entire media industry. She means what she says and she risks her life to say it. No wonder so many find her so threatening.
National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
