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The Infidel Europeans Love To HateAyaan Hirsi Ali should be a role model for Muslim immigrants.
By Anne ApplebaumPosted Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007, at 7:47 AM ET
Clearly, there is something about Ayaan Hirsi Ali that annoys, rankles, and irritates. I am speaking here not as one who knows Hirsi Ali—the outspoken Dutch-Somali critic of Islam—but as one who, while living in Europe, cannot seem to avoid meeting her detractors. Most recently, I met a Dutch diplomat who positively glowered when her name was mentioned. As a member of the Dutch parliament, Hirsi Ali had, he complained, switched parties, talked out of turn, and refused to toe whatever was the proper political line. Above all, it irritated him that she did not share his Dutch faith in political consensus.
For those who haven't encountered her name yet, suffice to say that Hirsi Ali is a European of African descent with an almost American rags-to-riches life story. As a young woman, she escaped from her Somali family while en route to an arranged marriage in Canada, made her way to Holland, learned Dutch, attended university, and eventually won a seat in the Dutch parliament. Along the way, she also made an intellectual journey—beautifully described in her new book, Infidel—from tribal Somalia, through fundamentalism, and into Western liberalism. After Sept. 11, 2001, horrified by some of the things Osama Bin Laden was saying, she reached for the Quran to confirm a hunch: "I hated to do it," she wrote, "because I knew that I would find bin Laden's quotations in there."
Partly as a result, she lost her faith, concluding that the Quran spreads a culture that is "brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war," and that should not be tolerated by European liberals. That conclusion led her into a series of controversies—and to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker with whom she had co-produced a film about the mistreatment of Islamic women. The murderer was born in Holland, the son of Moroccan immigrants; he pinned a letter threatening Hirsi Ali onto his victim's chest. Ultimately, she left Holland for Washington, where she remains, ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute.
Yet even from that distance, she continues to provoke Europeans, sometimes without saying anything at all. Following a somewhat patronizing review of her first book—in which British writer Timothy Garton Ash called her a "brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist"—French philosopher Pascal Bruckner came galloping to the defense of Hirsi Ali and the Enlightenment. Garton Ash counterattacked, and others joined what turned quickly into a wide-ranging debate (read the whole thing here) about reason, faith, multiculturalism, and the integration of millions of Muslim immigrants into European culture.
Curiously, what seems to rankle Europeans most is the enthusiasm with which Hirsi Ali has adopted their own secularism, and the fervor with which she has embraced their own Western values. Though this is a continent whose intellectuals routinely disparage the pope as an irrelevant dinosaur, Hirsi Ali's rejection of religion in favor of reason, intellect, and emancipation seems to make everyone nervous. Typical is the British feminist who complained that not only does Hirsi Ali paint "the whole of the Islamic world with one black brush," she also "paints the whole of the western world with rosy tints," which is of course far more objectionable. Others have compared her unfavorably to Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, who argues that religious Islam can be made compatible with modern European democracy. He, it is said, offers a way forward for millions of pious European Muslims. By contrast, her rejection of religion in favor of Western secularism is said to be a form of integration that works for no one but herself.
I suppose this latter charge might be true. On the other hand, it might not be: Maybe Infidel will inspire a generation of Muslim teenagers to study, work hard, join the mainstream—and then say what they think and spoil the political consensus. Either way, I'm not sure that the impulse to dismiss Hirsi Ali for her lack of utilitarian value reflects very well on those who do it. Nor does the underlying assumption—namely, that religious faith must be respected and defended on behalf of the dark-skinned immigrants who live among us, even though we natives no longer seem to require it.
But perhaps it is just a question of time. In America, the phenomenon of the flag-waving first-generation immigrant is a familiar one. In Europe, such a thing is unknown. Maybe once Europe gets used to the idea—a Muslim immigrant who embraces Western culture with the excitement of the convert—they'll like Hirsi Ali better. And, if they're lucky, others will follow in her footsteps.
The Infidel Europeans Love To Hate: Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be a role model for Muslim immigrants.
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book isGulag: A History.
Andreas Fischer/AFP/Getty Images.
COMMENTS
Remarks from the Fray:
While Hirsi certainly does provide a different perspective, the article glosses over some of the more important issues surrounding her --and her immigration to the U.S.
To begin with, Hirsi doesn't just believe Islam is wrong. She is an atheist. Contrary to what the author seems to imply, Europe has not entirely rejected religion. For example, a large portion of Dutch schools are religious schools which get government support. Hirsi spoke out against this, alienating a lot of people. She worried about Islamists using state supported schools to spread the less savory aspects of their faith, but her solution "threw the baby out with the bathwater" and showed her general disregard for the importance of religion. Hmmm, how many *avowedly* athiestic U.S. congress members can you name?
Secondly, she was widely viewed as a political opportunist who had a "I'm here, now close the doors" mentality. It did not help that she professed strict immigration limits and enforcement of immigration laws -- and then had to deal with the fact that she had lied about a few things (her age, her name, the country she had been living in) in order to get into the country. If she pulled that stuff in the U.S. the ICE folks would have had her on the first bus out of here. She claimed she was fleeing Somalia when in reality she hadn't lived there in years.
It makes me wonder how well she'll fit in at the AEI in the long run. She can trash Muhhamad all she wants, of course, but the first time she applies her caustic atheistic philosophy to Christ I think she will be out the door. I get the feeling that certain parties would like to "cherry pick" her ideas.
Hirsi is a "radicalized" European. Nothing inherently wrong with that. Her personal history has aimed her animus at Islam, which makes her handy at the moment, but I think that she will be quickly dumped if she 'bites the hand that feeds'. Which is unfortunate, IMHO, because her views on politics are at least different. When speaking, I am told, she used to point out that Israel had a very real problem with the Orthodox/Ultra-orthodox and compared them to Islamists. Such AEI heresy has apparently been dropped from her repertoire.
The Dutch got over the Noble Ms. Ali when it turned out that her heroic vita contained more than a little fiction. It wasn't, in fact, a completely arranged, as in coerced marriage she fled; Ms. Ali had had numerous chances to reject the marriage of her own free will, and had gone along anyway. Most importantly, she was living not in fundamentalist Somalia amongst tribesmen, nor was she locked away in the hold of some skanky immigrant transport ship on the North Atlantic trying to slip into some cold forbidding Canadian harbor in a desperate bid for "freedom"; no, she was safely residing in relatively liberal Nairobi, with her relatively liberal, well-off family. She got to Europe as part of a well-planned educational career and only came up with the exaggerated narrative of her childhood persecution to pad her situation there.
And that, mind you, is truly offensive. Why quibble about the victimhood of others? Are we petty to raise objections? Here's why not, indeed: when someone who is not a victim claims martyrdom, they take time and attention and resources and sympathy away from those who truly are victims. No one doubts that there are young women and girls who are oppressed by the practices of Islam in some areas of Africa. None of them, however, are getting the assistance that a European welfare state has to offer offically verified "victims" that Ali did when she arrived in Holland. And now she turns around and badmouths that very same system that launched her on her now storied career. She badmouths welfare and victims' rights and women's rights and the whole lot, having blithely and with an almost precisely symmetrical hypocrisy joined in the catcalls of the neoconservative movement against everything "liberal."
Reactionary conversions are inherently suspect. No one hates quite like the deprogrammed. Every tiny iniquity becomes grounds for the destruction of their former faith. This is true of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and it's unfortunate because it gives her opponents a cover under which to comfortably dismiss all of her ideas. Her failure in Dutch politics can best be described as one of discomfort. Her vigorous, goal oriented style of politics was bound to unsettle the very deeply settled, one might even say embedded, asses of the Dutch parliament. She doesn't respect the establishment, and so the establishment spewed her out.
Nor do I expect her relationship with the AEI will long survive her unrestrained tongue. Already she's rolling over the toes of Catholics
All to the good in my book. Atheism needs more charismatic, brash, energetic proponents. Dawkin's very polite, very British dismissal of religious crackpots is entertaining, but ultimately not engaging. I'm in the camp that sees religion as a primarily positive force in the world, a pleasant little white lie blackmailing and berating far more people to behave than to burn their neighbors. A lie, however, is a lie, and seeing a beautiful, wounded, angry African woman loudly declaim it as such stirs my heart.
Looking back over recent history, I think angry, if a bit misguided, women (Ayn Rand, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and now Ayaan Hirsi Ali) have done more to raise the public profile of atheism than all the well intentioned old men's books in my library. If the price of being heard is having staid old men and their institutions think her unfashionable and short sighted, I imagine it's a price Hirsi Ali pays happily.
Clearly, there is something about Ayaan Hirsi Ali that annoys, rankles, and irritates. I am speaking here not as one who knows Hirsi Ali—the outspoken Dutch-Somali critic of Islam—but as one who, while living in Europe, cannot seem to avoid meeting her detractors. Most recently, I met a Dutch diplomat who positively glowered when her name was mentioned. As a member of the Dutch parliament, Hirsi Ali had, he complained, switched parties, talked out of turn, and refused to toe whatever was the proper political line. Above all, it irritated him that she did not share his Dutch faith in political consensus. 
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Remarks from the Fray:
While Hirsi certainly does provide a different perspective, the article glosses over some of the more important issues surrounding her --and her immigration to the U.S.
To begin with, Hirsi doesn't just believe Islam is wrong. She is an atheist. Contrary to what the author seems to imply, Europe has not entirely rejected religion. For example, a large portion of Dutch schools are religious schools which get government support. Hirsi spoke out against this, alienating a lot of people. She worried about Islamists using state supported schools to spread the less savory aspects of their faith, but her solution "threw the baby out with the bathwater" and showed her general disregard for the importance of religion. Hmmm, how many *avowedly* athiestic U.S. congress members can you name?
Secondly, she was widely viewed as a political opportunist who had a "I'm here, now close the doors" mentality. It did not help that she professed strict immigration limits and enforcement of immigration laws -- and then had to deal with the fact that she had lied about a few things (her age, her name, the country she had been living in) in order to get into the country. If she pulled that stuff in the U.S. the ICE folks would have had her on the first bus out of here. She claimed she was fleeing Somalia when in reality she hadn't lived there in years.
It makes me wonder how well she'll fit in at the AEI in the long run. She can trash Muhhamad all she wants, of course, but the first time she applies her caustic atheistic philosophy to Christ I think she will be out the door. I get the feeling that certain parties would like to "cherry pick" her ideas.
Hirsi is a "radicalized" European. Nothing inherently wrong with that. Her personal history has aimed her animus at Islam, which makes her handy at the moment, but I think that she will be quickly dumped if she 'bites the hand that feeds'. Which is unfortunate, IMHO, because her views on politics are at least different. When speaking, I am told, she used to point out that Israel had a very real problem with the Orthodox/Ultra-orthodox and compared them to Islamists. Such AEI heresy has apparently been dropped from her repertoire.
--fozzy
(To reply, click here.)
The Dutch got over the Noble Ms. Ali when it turned out that her heroic vita contained more than a little fiction. It wasn't, in fact, a completely arranged, as in coerced marriage she fled; Ms. Ali had had numerous chances to reject the marriage of her own free will, and had gone along anyway. Most importantly, she was living not in fundamentalist Somalia amongst tribesmen, nor was she locked away in the hold of some skanky immigrant transport ship on the North Atlantic trying to slip into some cold forbidding Canadian harbor in a desperate bid for "freedom"; no, she was safely residing in relatively liberal Nairobi, with her relatively liberal, well-off family. She got to Europe as part of a well-planned educational career and only came up with the exaggerated narrative of her childhood persecution to pad her situation there.
And that, mind you, is truly offensive. Why quibble about the victimhood of others? Are we petty to raise objections? Here's why not, indeed: when someone who is not a victim claims martyrdom, they take time and attention and resources and sympathy away from those who truly are victims. No one doubts that there are young women and girls who are oppressed by the practices of Islam in some areas of Africa. None of them, however, are getting the assistance that a European welfare state has to offer offically verified "victims" that Ali did when she arrived in Holland. And now she turns around and badmouths that very same system that launched her on her now storied career. She badmouths welfare and victims' rights and women's rights and the whole lot, having blithely and with an almost precisely symmetrical hypocrisy joined in the catcalls of the neoconservative movement against everything "liberal."
--MarkEHaag
(To reply, click here.)
Reactionary conversions are inherently suspect. No one hates quite like the deprogrammed. Every tiny iniquity becomes grounds for the destruction of their former faith. This is true of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and it's unfortunate because it gives her opponents a cover under which to comfortably dismiss all of her ideas. Her failure in Dutch politics can best be described as one of discomfort. Her vigorous, goal oriented style of politics was bound to unsettle the very deeply settled, one might even say embedded, asses of the Dutch parliament. She doesn't respect the establishment, and so the establishment spewed her out.
Nor do I expect her relationship with the AEI will long survive her unrestrained tongue. Already she's rolling over the toes of Catholics
All to the good in my book. Atheism needs more charismatic, brash, energetic proponents. Dawkin's very polite, very British dismissal of religious crackpots is entertaining, but ultimately not engaging. I'm in the camp that sees religion as a primarily positive force in the world, a pleasant little white lie blackmailing and berating far more people to behave than to burn their neighbors. A lie, however, is a lie, and seeing a beautiful, wounded, angry African woman loudly declaim it as such stirs my heart.
Looking back over recent history, I think angry, if a bit misguided, women (Ayn Rand, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, and now Ayaan Hirsi Ali) have done more to raise the public profile of atheism than all the well intentioned old men's books in my library. If the price of being heard is having staid old men and their institutions think her unfashionable and short sighted, I imagine it's a price Hirsi Ali pays happily.
--Ramses_II
(To reply, click here.)
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