Ayaan Hirsi Ali's beauty and charisma personalize the
unending atrocities against all-too-often anonymous women in the Muslim world. Hirsi
Ali grew up in Somalia and Saudi Arabia. She escaped from an arranged marriage.
In Holland she was elected to parliament. She is now an American citizen. In
2014, Muslims prevented Hirsi Ali from receiving an honorary degree at Brandeis.
Hirsi Ali's 2006 memoir Infidel is an
essential record of the life of one Muslim woman who chose, no matter the cost,
to live with dignity, courage and integrity. Hirsi Ali's 2015 book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now,
is less successful. Its flaws are representational of the flaws found in much
counter-jihad rhetoric produced by self-identified atheists or atheists-lite including
Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, and Bill Maher.
Hirsi Ali divides Muslims into three groups. She labels
jihad-committed Muslims "Medina Muslims" (15)."Mecca Muslims,"
she says, pledge fealty to Islam but aren't actively violent (16). "Modifying
Muslims" are Muslims who want to change Islam (17). These divisions are
not emic – Muslims themselves do not label themselves as "Mecca Muslims"
or "Medina Muslims." There is no way that non-Muslims can reliably
differentiate between one and the other. Hirsi Ali, had she known him, would
almost certainly categorize Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a non-violent or "Mecca"
Muslim right up to April 18, 2013, the day he was identified as a suspect in
the April 15 Boston Marathon Bombing. Tsarnaev's friends identified him as not
one of "them. He was us. He was Cambridge." His twitter feed seemed
to reflect a man "much more concerned with sport and cheeseburgers than
with religion."
Hirsi Ali cites five features of Islam that must change
(24). The first such feature is "unquestioning reverence" for
Mohammed and the Koran. In fact Muslims cite the Koran and hadith to support
capital punishment for anyone who insults Mohammed or the Koran. Mohammed
ordered the deaths of those who insulted him. Muslims have repeatedly killed
others for insulting Mohammed. Islam's attitude toward the Koran differentiates
the Koran from the sacred scripture of any other world faith. Christians, Jews,
Hindus and Buddhists do not riot when someone burns a Bible, the Vedas or the
Diamond Sutra. The Koran has near divine status: it cannot be translated from
Arabic; the Koran is co-eternal with God, and uncreated; the original copy of
the Koran is in Heaven and has been there eternally.
The second feature Hirsi Ali cites as needing to change
is a "fatal focus" on the afterlife. She mentions Muslim parents who
encourage their own children to be suicide bombers. A third feature of Islam
that must change is sharia. Hirsi Ali says it "keeps Muslims stuck in the
seventh century." A fourth feature of Islam that must change is hisbah, the injunction to command right
and forbid wrong. The chapter devoted to this concept describes life among
Muslims as comparable to life under the East German Stasi. Hirsi Ali describes
Muslim family members turning on each other to keep all obedient to Islamic
dictates. The often fatal fruit of such one-on-one surveillance is honor
killing, in which parents, uncles, or older siblings murder Muslim females and
sometimes males perceived to have strayed. The fifth feature of Islam that
Hirsi Ali says must be reformed is jihad, "the call for holy war"
that "is a charter for terror."
Hirsi Ali briefly recapitulates her autobiography,
material that will be familiar to her loyal readers. Much of "Heretic"
consists of summaries of news stories of Islam-inspired atrocities. Hirsi Ali
revisits the attempted 2010 Times Square car bombing and other terrorist plots
in the US, the honor killings of several Muslim women living in the US and
Canada, the imprisonment of Mariam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, a Christian woman, in
Sudan, and the filmed gang rapes of Egyptian women in Tahrir Square.
In this avalanche of atrocities, of parents murdering
their own children while the surviving brothers of murdered sisters applaud their
infanticidal parents, Pakistanis burned alive by their neighbors, of recipients
of Western welfare bombing their benefactors, one story stands out.
Thirteen-year-old Somali Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was gang raped. She reported it.
Sharia demands four adult male Muslim witnesses for a rape conviction. There
were no witnesses. Duhulow was accused of adultery, buried up to her neck, and
stoned for ten minutes. Her devout Muslim murderers dug her out, found a pulse,
reburied her, and stoned her again. For those who read the news regularly, Heretic's forced march through bombings
and torture murders, a march that provides no new insights or avenues for
action, will merely be redundant and depressing. These accounts don't build to
a larger point. Rather, they proceed episodically, like beads on a string.
One of the flaws in Hirsi Ali's book, and in atheist
discourse on Islam in general, is the tacit acceptance, as an almost religious
dogma, of human progress. At least since nineteenth century thinkers August
Comte and Herbert Spencer, some have believed that as time moves forward, an
unseen hand evolves people into a smarter, more ethical, less religious
species. In this belief system, the word "modern" is virtually a
synonym for "ethical," while the word "medieval" or "from
the middle ages" is the ultimate insult. This worldview informs prominent
atheists Michael Shermer's and Steven Pinker's recent books, The Moral Arc and The Better Angels of Our Nature. In this worldview, we don't need
the Judeo-Christian tradition to inform our ethics, because human progress is
making us better people every day.
In the progress worldview, Islam is a problem because its
roots are in the past. Islam will inevitably improve with time as other
religions have. When Islam is "modern," it will be good. "Other
religions have undergone a process of reform," Hirsi Ali writes, "modifying
core beliefs and adopting more tolerant and flexible attitudes compatible with
modern, pluralistic societies" (25). "The Muslim world" is
struggling to come to terms with "modernity" (26). Modernizing "revolutions"
liberated Europeans from "priestly authority" (58). Islam is
problematical because it has "frozen into place" "tribal norms"
(88). The Old Testament contains harsh verses, but "no one invokes these
passages in modern-day jurisprudence" (135). Westerners "have come
very far from the days when public executions were the norm and religious
offenses were punishable by death" (137). Sharia amputations may be seen
as "antiquated practices that, like witch-burning in Massachusetts, will
die out" (138-9). Sharia harms Muslim women; it is a surviving remnant of "patriarchal
tribal culture" (143). Persecution in contemporary Islam is "an odd
echo of the religious persecutions of the European middles ages" (148). "In
the twenty-first century, I believe that all decent human beings can agree that
barbarous acts should not be tolerated" (152). "The early history of
New England" confirms that "some Protestant sects" policed their
members. "Modern" cities and regions "allow the clock to be
turned back" when they become more Islamic (163).
During the March 23, 2015 broadcast of The Daily Show, both host Jon Stewart
and guest Hirsi Ali voiced the human progress worldview. Hirsi Ali, prompted by
Stewart, said, "Christianity went through that process of Reformation and
Enlightenment and came to a place where the mass of Christians, at least in the
Western world have accepted tolerance, the secular state – separation of Church
and State, respect for women, respect for gays … There were Christians, I mean,
within Christianity, who came out and said hey, we need to change things, we
need to reform." Islam, though, Hirsi Ali reports, is a problem, because
it has not yet progressed, not yet evolved. The Koran "was written by a
man a long time ago and the morality of the 7th century doesn't apply in the
21st century and they have to pick that up … the morality of God-knows-when
doesn't apply now."
There are problems with the human progress worldview. The
biggest problem is that not a single one of the features Hirsi Ali would like
to change in Islam is representational of the seventh century.
It is open to question whether Islam's gender apartheid
is a time capsule of pre-Islamic Arab culture. In 1986, in the journal Signs, Lelia Ahmed, Harvard's Victor S.
Thomas Professor of Divinity, published "Women and the Advent of Islam."
Ahmed argues that Arab women enjoyed more freedom and power before Islam than after,
and that taking freedom and power away from women was a large part of the early
mission of Islam. Ahmed cites the biography of Khadija, Mohammed's first wife. Forty-year-old
Khadija, who lived most of her life before the founding of Islam, was a
businesswoman who hired twenty-five-year-old Mohammed, proposed marriage to
him, and enjoyed him as her sole spouse – he was allowed no other wives while
married to her. Before Mohammed, Ahmed writes, Arab women "had been
remarkably active and independent" in a variety of roles including as the
commanders of armies. Ahmed also cites Islam's written record. "Perhaps 80
percent of Koranic rulings" Ahmed says, were "devoted to regulating
marital relations and the conduct of women … the establishment of Islam was
marked by the institution of new sociosexual norms." Based on available
evidence, "it becomes difficult not to conclude that the absolute
empowerment of men in relation to women in all matters relating to sexuality
and offspring and the disempowerment of women and thus the complete
transformation of [contemporaneous Arab] society's mores in the area of the
relation between the sexes was itself one of Mohamad's prime objectives."
Ahmed concludes with a tale from Islam's early days. Two of Mohammed's great
granddaughters are chatting. One is happy; one is sad. Why? The happy girl was
named after an ancestress who had lived before the founding of Islam; the sad
girl had a Muslim name.
One can go farther back in time than Ahmed does. Thousands
of years ago, ancient, Pagan Egypt was among the friendliest to women of all
Mediterranean civilizations. Ancient Egyptian women could testify in court, own
property, and initiate divorce. Recently, a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey
rated today's Muslim Egypt as one of the worst countries for women.
Jihad, Islam's most problematical feature, in no way is
representational of the seventh century. Jihad is articulated in this hadith,
inter alia, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None
has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' and whoever says, 'None has the
right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me."
No other religion in the seventh century followed this precept. Hinduism,
sometimes considered the world's oldest religion, was then and is now largely
confined to the Indian subcontinent. This geographic distribution reflects
Hinduism's lack of a command to proselytize through military campaigns. Judaism,
comparable in age to Hinduism, never announced itself as being under God's
command to world domination by military might. Jews were less than one percent
of the world's population in ancient times, and they are less than one percent
of the world's population today. Jewish population numbers reflect Jews'
disinterest in proselytizing by any means, including military – a disinterest
that has lasted for thousands of years. Islam alone holds up the precept of
jihad. Jihad is about Islam's essence, not the essence of the seventh century.
Similarly, the deification of the Koran, the protection
of Mohammed from any critique, hisbah,
or spying on one's intimates and policing their behavior, and the love of
death, are in no way reflective of the seventh century. All these features of
Islam worked with frightening efficiency in the ancient world, and they work today.
The difference between Islam and other world religions
cannot best be measured with a clock or a calendar. Islam is not problematical
because it was founded 1400 years ago. Islam is problematical because of its
doctrines of jihad and gender apartheid. Time, in the form of a magical unseen
hand called "progress" or "modernity" will not inevitably
work any magic of "reform" on Islam.
It's telling that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other atheist and
atheist-lite critiques of Islam so frequently compare Islam to the
Judeo-Christian tradition, and so rarely compare Islam to Hinduism or Buddhism.
The latter would make more sense. More Muslims, for more time, have lived
cheek-by-jowl with Hindus and Buddhists than with Christians. That Hinduism and
Buddhism are so rarely invoked tells us that there is something going on here.
Two things are going on here. The first is Politically Correct hostility to the
Judeo-Christian tradition. Hirsi Ali is not PC, but PC is the water in which
she is swimming. The second is another PC dogma: cultural relativism. It is
taboo to say that Western Civilization or the Judeo-Christian tradition are in
any way superior to any non-Western culture.
Jon Stewart tried to back Hirsi Ali into a corner: "People
single out Islam as though there is something inherently wrong with it that is
not wrong with other religions … I get the sense you think Islam is different
than other religions … there is something inherently wrong with this religion
that is not wrong with other religions and that's the thing I'm trying to get
at." And Stewart attempted to get Hirsi Ali to sign on to the one true
faith of cultural relativism: "Christianity went through the exact same
process."
As hard as he tried, Stewart could not get Hirsi Ali either
to say, or to refute, that there is something inherently wrong with Islam that
is not wrong with Judaism or Christianity. Hirsi Ali was canny on The Daily Show. She played the
Christophobia, cultural relativism, human progress cards. It is not okay to say
that Christianity is different, and in respect to jihad, better than Islam. It
is okay to say that Christianity is like Islam, and that time improved
Christianity, and that time will similarly improve Islam. Christians do bad
things, Hirsi Ali insisted. "In the name of Catholicism [they] despise and
are homophobic." But progress came along and changed Christians and made
them modern – that is ethical. "Christianity went through that process of
Reformation and Enlightenment and came to a place where the mass of Christians,
at least in the Western world have accepted tolerance, the secular state – separation
of Church and State, respect for women, respect for gays."
Does Hirsi Ali make this case Heretic? No. Hirsi Ali is factually incorrect or merely misleading in
many of her statements about the Judeo-Christian tradition. She misrepresents
the Biblical story of Tamar (102), what Jews worship (77), Christian doctrine
(84), understandings of the Bible and Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac
(116), Christianity and women's suffrage (151), and Pope Urban's speech calling
for the First Crusade (196). All these errors echo themes found in other
atheist works on Christianity: the Bible is incoherent and violent;
Christianity oppresses women; the Crusades are comparable to jihad. Even so, in
the context of Hirsi Ali's larger point, these half-truths are minor. What is
important is this: the title and main thrust of the book is utterly off base.
I have to assume that Hirsi Ali and her publishers felt
they could rely on widespread ignorance of what the Reformation actually was
for the title of this book, and its main thrust, to go over with readers.
Contrary to Hirsi Ali's comments on The
Daily Show, the Reformation was not a "modernization" of Christianity
that included "separation of church and state, respect for women, respect
for gays." Hirsi Ali mentions Luther's 95 theses (57). Luther's theses addressed
the Catholic Church's selling of indulgences in order to fund its building
projects. Not a single one of Luther's 95 theses concerned same-sex marriage.
Jesus Christ was the son of God; he was crucified and
rose from the dead; God commands us to love people regardless of their identity
and to spread his word through speech and good deeds, not violence; we are to render
unto Caesar what is Cesar's and unto God what is God – the concept of
separation of church and state is built in: this was core Christianity two
thousand years ago, it was core Christianity five hundred years ago, and it is
core Christianity today. The Reformation did not budge these ideas, central to
all Christians.
Further, Hirsi Ali is incorrect when she speaks of
modernization as a magical hand that arises ex nihilo to improve Christianity.
One can see the superficial appeal of the human progress
point of view. Fifty years ago, computers were large and slow. Today computers
are slim and fast. One concludes that time improved computers. Just so, time
will improve humans. Upon reflection one realizes that Aborigines lived in
Australia for tens of thousands of years without producing a modern culture, and
that Ancient Egypt reached great heights and lasted for three thousand years in
a static form. Great ancient civilizations, India and China, did not produce modernity.
Time itself doesn't always move human societies forward.
Hirsi Ali, in the same way as atheist Michael Shermer,
speaks of The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial
Revolution, and the American and French Revolutions (58), as if they were
Athena springing fully formed out of Zeus' head. That is not accurate. The
passage of time alone did not produce these life-improving modernizations. All
these events that Atheists embrace so fervently appeared only in the West.
Without the soil of Ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian tradition, perhaps
none of them would have come to be, or they would be quite different. Modernization,
it has been argued, is the fruit of the Judeo-Christian tradition. See, for
example, Rodney Stark's The Victory of
Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.
Hirsi Ali does not discuss in any serious detail previous
attempts to liberalize Islam, although she does mention in passing the
Mu'tazilites (59) and liberalization followed by oppression (210-11).
Given that modernity arose in the West and not elsewhere,
given that Muslims have tried to liberalize Islam and only been crushed for
their efforts, one must examine whether Islam is not amenable to modernization.
Indeed, given that, as Hirsi Ali acknowledges, capital punishment has been
justified and applied against those who criticize Islam, Mohammed, or the
Koran, one has to ask if Islam has not built-in, unique, failsafe features that
defeat liberalization.
Hirsi Ali struggles to support her case by comparing
Islam to Christianity. "Medina Muslims" are just like pre-Reformation
Christians who were typified by their "fanaticism and violence" (14).
"See," Hirsi Ali says, "just as, in the past, Christianity produced
terrorists and the endless wars of jihad, and Christianity was modernized by
the irresistible forces of time and progress, Islam will also be modernized."
Except that Christianity didn't produce endless wars of jihad, and
pre-Reformation Christians are really not comparable to terrorists.
Some readers will balk at the previous assertion.
"What about the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Witch Craze?"
First, historians acknowledge that the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and
the Witch Craze have been systematically exaggerated. I begin my own class on
the Witch Craze by telling my students, "Ninety percent of what you think
is true about the Witch Craze is actually false." Protestants and
Catholics have been rivals for half a millennium. In that rivalry, Protestants
have often exaggerated wrongs committed by Catholics as part of their
propaganda efforts. More recently, Christophobes have mined this rich vein and
amplified it. One brief and popular yet excellent demonstration of the level of
exaggeration is Dr. Bill Warner's YouTube video, Jihad v Crusades. This
video graphically compares Crusader battles with jihad battles. Second, wrongs
committed by Christians have never been either geographically or chronologically
coterminous with Christianity; rather, they have been local and temporary responses
to local and temporary stimuli. Third, Christians
have always criticized and righted wrongs committed by other Christians.
Christians outside of Spain, for example, produced serious criticisms of the
Spanish Inquisition. Catholic Poland sheltered Jews expelled from Spain. By
comparison, Saudi Arabia is not opening its borders to Christians expelled from
Iraq. Finally, Christians who murdered in the name of their faith were acting
in opposition to explicit scripture forbidding such behavior and enjoining
Christians to spread their faith through charity, preaching, and good works,
and to allow people to reject Christianity if that was their choice (Matthew
10:14). In short, Hirsi Ali's and others' comparisons of Christians and
Christianity to Muslims and Islam obscure rather than clarify.
"The internet has the opportunity to be to the
Muslim Reformation what the printing press was to the Protestant Christian
one" (69). Except that modernity has been exploited by jihadis. Its key
ingredients jet planes, world commerce, and television, no event in history was
more modern than the 9-11 terror attack. ISIS has proven itself to be a master
at social media.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an essential heroine. Her contribution
to counter-jihad is inestimable. Heretic is
not her best book. No one demands that Atheist counter-jihad authors become
Christians; rather, all will benefit when they more accurately compare Islam,
not just with Christianity or Judaism, but with all other world faiths. There
is no unseen hand called "progress" that turned Christianity from its
jihad-like past, that never existed, into its warm and fuzzy present, and no
unseen hand will work that magic on Islam, either. We must confront jihad for
what it is: a timeless and universal threat that requires an equally timeless
and universal response.
This review appears at Front Page Magazine here
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