Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Infidel” KA Dilday – openDemocracy

Sister in spirit: Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Infidel” KA Dilday – openDemocracy
KA Dilday

The Somali-Dutch dissident’s critique of Islam resonates with KA Dilday’s experience of fundamentalist Christianity in the American south. But their distance lies also in the journey beyond.

KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During the period of the fellowship, she is travelling between north Africa and France.

When I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, I felt a sense of recognition and realised why she is so unyielding in her quest to attack Islam head on and in her steadfast insistence that there is no place for tolerance of religious fundamentalism within a nation based on enlightenment principles. Even worse than a sheep, she was a lemming – being led to chattel marriage and a likely early death by Islam. If she, a strong-willed intelligent woman took so long to find her way out of what she’d been taught, what hope do weaker people have? But the paternalism that she bestows on her former religious kin in Europe, those she feels may not find their way out unless they have no other choice, doesn’t seem the right way either.

Free and fundamental

Hirsi Ali is a fan of the French ideal, one that claims to create neutral public spaces in schools and state institutions, although the French have never actually practiced it, she told an interviewer, citing their failure to integrate immigrants from Africa. She is right: the French do not practice the ideal, a lapse that has been on display in Paris since a closely observed trial opened on 7 February 2007. In 2006, two French Muslim groups – Paris’s grand mosque and the Union of Islamic Organisations of France – were joined by the World Council of Muslims in filing a civil lawsuit against the satirical political weekly, Charlie Hebdo, for violating France’s anti-racism/inciting-hatred laws. On 9 February 2006 the paper had reprinted the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed that sparked global protests from Muslims in the middle east, and commissioned more in the same vein from French cartoonists.

The trial, coming as it did in the heat of France’s election season, became the cause of the moment for the caviar gauche. Nearly every commentator who spoke or wrote publicly about the trial sided with Charlie Hebdo. “France has a fine old tradition of satire that must be protected”, Nicolas Sarkozy, the right’s candidate for the presidency wrote in a letter supporting the paper. Francois Hollande, the head of the socialist party – and partner of Sarkozy’s main rival, socialist candidate Ségolène Royal – said on Charlie Hebdo’s behalf that it wasn’t the paper’s fault for printing the cartoons, but the terrorists’ fault for establishing the link between themselves and religion.

It wasn’t the backing for Charlie Hebdo that has disturbed me, but the tone of the debate: “A trial from another age”, Le Monde, France’s main newspaper screamed in the title of an editorial in defence of Charlie Hebdo. The trial – whose judgment falls due on 15 March – became a matter of defending France against the encroachment of an oppressive radical Islam blowing in from the south and east, and not about the place of Islam as it was actually being practiced in France. Few seemed to see, or perhaps rather were willing to see, how French the Muslim groups’ actions were.

There are numerous precedents: recent cases filed by Catholic and Jewish groups against publications, advertisements or people whom they believed had run afoul of the anti-racism/anti-religious-hatred laws that mitigate France’s principle of free speech, and have done so since the early part of the 20th century. The Muslim groups’ lawsuit fell well within these bounds and in fact, in the way it was constructed, it acknowledged two important principles of a liberal democracy.

First, despite the fact that other papers had published the cartoons – the daily France Soir did so in a special issue on the cartoons a week before Charlie Hebdo, leading to the dismissal of editor Jacques Lefranc – the groups sued Charlie Hebdo alone (on the grounds that the weekly did not have a clear news function). Thus, they acknowledged by implication that that there was a legitimate context in which to publish the cartoons. Second, the lawsuit named only the three of the twelve cartoons that the Muslim groups said equated Muslim with terrorists; thus, they acknowledged that Islam’s interdiction against depicting the prophet may upset Muslims, but was not sufficiently offensive to constitute a breach of the law.

Yet because of the global climate, recent terrorist attacks, and the fear of the cultural values of the rising number of Muslims in Europe, Muslims who attempt to practice and defend their faith in accordance with western values are being treated as if they are all closet fundamentalists, that if you give them a veil they’ll take a burqa.

Neither all nor nothing

As readers of this column will know, I am not a great believer in policing speech yet I do see some sense of justice in the way these cases accusing people or entities of violating the laws against religious hatred and racism tend to play out in France. Often after being dragged through the courts by religious groups, the person or entity that made the statement manages to get the case overturned in the name of freedom of expression. It’s an effective if convoluted way of provoking debate on important topics.

Tariq Ramadan, the Muslim scholar who (as well as lecturing Muslims such as Abshir) makes a living interpreting Islam for Europeans, was against the Muslim groups filing the lawsuit because he speculated that the outcome would be public posturing about free speech and publicity for Charlie Hebdo, neither of which would address what he said was the real issue: that Muslims do not receive equitable treatment with other religious groups in France. Even in advance of the court’s decision, he appears to be correct. Ramadan suggested that Muslims in Europe ignore the cartoons which, in fact, most in France did. Representatives of the groups that filed the lawsuit frequently remind the French public that French Muslims did not take to the streets to protest.

But for people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the French warrior-philosophers, it seems that it is only Islam and only Muslims who are dangerously fundamentalist, who oppress their own and who must kept in check. Even at moments like these, such critics can’t see a legitimate domestic action by law-abiding Muslims without placing it in a global context. It addition to being unfair, this knee-jerk tendency is simply imprudent and is bound to breed resentment. A rational state must be rational and equitable in its application of the law.

What’s true on the general level is revealed also in the particular: Hirsi Ali’s phone conversation with Abshir suggests the problem with her all-or-nothing, in-your-face approach. Abshir is an intelligent open-minded Muslim who is trying to find his way: he is precisely the person with whom she should be debating. To simply cut off or crush someone like him, a Muslim who uses rational techniques of question and discussion or the legal structures of the state, is imprudent. If the thoughtful mandarins of western culture don’t engage with them as equals than it is the numerous imported storefront imams who will.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I were born the same year and share many of the same traits, yet while she was having her clitoris snipped and her labia sewn shut by a tribal “doctor”, I was trying to figure out how to get out of violin lessons. It’s easy for me to be tolerant. Nonetheless, while she was memorising the Qur’an, I was memorising Bible verses at camp in Mississippi. I know that Muslim religious fanatics have no particular claim on nasty business: Christian fundamentalists have shut down the last remaining abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, not to mention others who have gone further and murdered the doctors. But I also know that in the midst of a community of the overly devout, there is room in the liberal democracies of the west for people to leave their faith, just as there must be room for reasonable people to practice Islam without condemnation.