In recent months, one woman has come to be the most prominent defender of the spirit of the Enlightenment against the Islamist threat. That woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is a former Muslim who adopted the spirit of the West, only to be condemned as an "infidel" by Muslims and as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" by the Western left.
I have read most of Hirsi Ali's 2006 book
The Caged Virgin, though I have not yet read her new book, the aptly titled
Infidel. My impression so far is that, while I wish her analysis of the nature of the Enlightenment were a little deeper and more philosophically sophisticated (she has too great an admiration, for example, for John Stuart Mill), she gets the basic issues eloquently, beautifully right. Her virtues are nicely captured in a Wall Street Journal article's summary:
Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu—into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative…. But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."
Hirsi Ali sums it up best herself: she describes herself as having "moved from the world of faith to the world of reason." She was a daughter of Somalia, and she is now a daughter of the Enlightenment.
How has she been received in America and Europe, in the geographic homeland of the Enlightenment?
On the right, the reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been glowingly positive. Today's National Review Online, for example, carries an
article by Clifford May that is a largely descriptive summary of Hirsi Ali's message in Infidel—but one that is obviously admiring.
Far better was a recent
column by Mona Charen, also carried at NRO, whose theme was that "It is appropriate that Hirsi Ali was singled out along with the United States, Holland, and Europe [as an object of Muslim threats]…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."
Then there is that Wall Street Journal
profile I quoted from earlier, which is one of the best, most informative articles on Hirsi Ali and what she stands for. In the middle of this essay, however, author Joseph Rago inserts a note of conservative confusion:
Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous."
But Rago still can't help but admire Hirsi Ali. He concludes with a somewhat reticent compliment.
All of this is profoundly politically incorrect. But for this remarkable woman, ideas are not abstractions. She forces us back to first principles, and she punctures complacencies. These ought to be seen as virtues, even by those who find some of Ms. Hirsi Ali's ideas disturbing or objectionable. Society, after all, sometimes needs to be roused from its slumbers by agitators who go too far so that others will go far enough.
That pretty much sums up the reaction of the conservatives: they are uncomfortable following her "first principles" to the point of questioning religion as such—but they find Hirsi Ali's "politically incorrect" defense of Western Civilization invigorating.
So what about the American left? The moderate, mainstream left has been generally polite to Hirsi Ali, partly because she has one attribute that allows her to penetrate their "politically correct" defenses: she is black and a woman—and better yet, she is a black woman from the Third World. If a white American male denounces Islam as a religious of tyranny and oppression, a standard New York Times liberal is primed to dismiss him as a bigot whose views are racist and "Islamophobic." (The New York Times recently published a revealing
overview of exactly this kind of reaction.) But it's harder for the left to dismiss a Somali-born woman who appeals to their "feminist" pretensions by exposing Islam's unspeakable oppression of women.
Thus, for example, the New York Times published a relatively friendly
interview with Hirsi Ali which begins with the admiring question: "What do you think it was about you that made you grab the reins of your own life?" A New York Times
review of her most recent book concludes with a somewhat bland sympathy.
Death threats have since driven Ms. Hirsi Ali to the United States, where she has accepted a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group.
This is a pity. As a politician, she focused Dutch minds on a subject they steadfastly ignored. In her brief career, she forced the government to keep statistics on honor killings, in which enraged family members murder sisters or daughters believed to have brought shame on the family or clan. Much to the surprise of the Dutch, it turned out that there were a lot of them. Unfortunately, Ms. Hirsi Ali is no longer in the Netherlands to point out these things.
That is pretty much as far as the left's sympathy for Hirsi Ali goes.
Newsweek, for example, chose to give a Muslim apologist space to attack Hirsi Ali's book. This reviewer
complains that
In describing the 9/11 hijackers, she comes up with an inflammatory conclusion tailor-made for her right-wing constituency: "It was not a lunatic fringe who felt this way about America and the West. I knew that a vast majority of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam."
The article concludes by declaring: "It's ironic that this would-be 'infidel' often sounds as single-minded and reactionary as the zealots she's worked so hard to oppose."
This idea—that a principled defender of Western Civilization and the Enlightenment is just as dogmatic and dangerous as a Muslim terrorist—is a theme that, as we shall see, has been taken up by the secular Western left. In the same issue of Newsweek, a short, painfully superficial
interview with Hirsi Ali is titled: "A Bombthrower's Life." Who is it who is throwing the bombs here? Given that Hirsi Ali lives under the constant threat of death and was run out of Holland after her friend Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic fanatic, this is inexcusable.
Similarly, the Washington Post published a snide
profile whose subtitle refers, with an apparent note of alarm, to Hirsi Ali's "incendiary views on Islam." The snide aspect of the review is the humorously dismissive attitude with which it describes her fascinating and dramatic life story.
So now, ladies and gentlemen, live from Somalia and the Netherlands! Give it up for new-to-Washington Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslim heretic, self-proclaimed "Infidel," whose memoir by that name is at No. 7 on the New York Times bestseller list!
It's a popping good story, fascinating, with lots of forward lean to the narrative. She's got guts, brains, looks, talent. She's called the prophet Muhammad a pervert. She says, "Islam is a culture that has been outlived." She has lost her faith, ditched two husbands and been disowned by her family.
Even more disgusting is the author's snide contempt for the ideas Hirsi Ali stands for.
But Hirsi Ali sees herself standing in the long light cast by the Western Enlightenment thinkers: Voltaire, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and maybe Thomas Jefferson. The stifling clergy, the sackcloth-and-ashes drag of faith and superstition—all rinsed away by the ablutions of personal freedom, reason, logic.
How heady! How liberating!
The not-so-subtle message is that Hirsi Ali's vaunted idealism is just a flamboyant act, a kind of garish intellectual carnival side show. I recommend this article, incidentally, because it has enough quotes from Hirsi Ali, from her books and from an interview, that her actual personality and ideas come through, despite the Post reporter's best efforts. But what comes through just as strongly is the fact that what motivates this reporter is exactly the kind of Western self-loathing that Hirsi Ali warns about. To take seriously the ideas of Voltaire, Locke, and Jefferson is, this reporter implies, to be a naïve and easily impressed rube.
The article concludes: "[S]omewhere in the chord of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, there is a note as discordant and troubling as it is compelling. Smart, angry, tough, vulnerable: she'll be a big hit in this country." Notice the natural connection: the author dislikes Ayaan Hirsi Ali because he recognizes that she "fits in" here in America—and he has contempt for America.
This, as we shall see, is a recurring theme, and it is captured very nicely in a review of the European reaction to Hirsi Ali, as recounted by one of her few liberal defenders, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. Applebaum is a particular favorite of mine, not because I always agree with her, not by a long shot, but because she is one of the last examples of a dying breed: a real, genuine, old-fashioned liberal. Notice that I refer to today's left as "the left" and rarely as "liberals," because the day has long passed when intellectuals on the left took seriously the idea that they were supposed to be for "freedom." The modern left is militantly illiberal—but not Applebaum.
Applebaum recently wrote a perceptive
column on the reaction to Hirsi Ali, which concluded with this observation:
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 continent's 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.
Applebaum's column was in response to a
description of Hirsi Ali as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" by British leftist Timothy Garton Ash, and an attack on her by Dutch-born author Ian Burama, comments that touched off a fierce debate among European intellectuals. (The whole exchange is catalogued
here.)
The flavor of Burama's comments are captured in his subsequent March 4 Sunday New York Times
review of Infidel:
This uplifting story of liberation is entirely plausible, but it gives Hirsi Ali’s descriptions of life in the West an idealized, almost comic-book quality that sounds as naïve as those romantic novels she consumed as a young girl. Whereas the picture of Hirsi Ali’s childhood is full of nuance and variation, the images of the Netherlands could have been lifted from some patriotic Dutch children’s book: “so well-kept, so well-planned, so smoothly run and attractive.” And: Holland was “the capital of the European Enlightenment…the center of free thought.” Comparing the lack of aggression in a Dutch school with her own childhood experiences, she concludes that “this is why Somalia is having a civil war and Holland isn’t.”
All this warms the cockles of my Dutch heart, of course, but it offers up the West as a caricature of sweetness and light, which is then contrasted not to specific places, like Somalia, Kenya or Saudi Arabia, but to the whole Muslim world. Because of this, Hirsi Ali tends to fly into a rage when the inhabitants of this Garden of Eden fail sufficiently to appreciate their good fortune….
Enlightened reform of religious practices that clash with liberal democratic freedoms is necessary. But much though I respect her courage, I’m not convinced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam offers the best perspective from which to get this done.
From what I can tell, Burama is the left's Dinesh D'Souza, bearing the same message: we caused radical Islam by being too free, too decadent. According to a New York Times
review of Burama's own book, Murder in Amsterdam:
The Dutch, Mr. Buruma writes, savor irony, and perhaps because their political establishment is so dull, enjoy the politics of outrage. This taste is not shared by the country’s Muslim immigrants. “This was the crowning irony of his life,” Mr. Buruma writes. “Van Gogh, more than anyone, had warned about the dangers of violent religious passions, and yet he behaved as though they held no consequences for him.”…
For the products of rigid tribal societies, Dutch freedom has often proved to be oppressive.
Why has the left—which has long paraded as a defender of secularism, persuasion, artistic freedom, and sophisticated intellectualism—turned against the Enlightenment and its defenders? The answer is that the left was always a mere pretender to the liberal legacy of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was about upholding the power of reason—but the left has long rejected reason in favor of subjectivism. And this subjectivism is what they seek to defend by attacking Hirsi Ali. In their view, she has committed the unpardonable sin of thinking that there is a truth and that she is right.
In his book, Burama complains that "It is a characteristic of Calvinism to hold moral principles too rigidly, and this might be considered a vice as well as a virtue of the Dutch.” He then proceeds to equate the religious dogmatism of Calvinism—and of Islam—with Hirsi Ali's "Enlightenment fundamentalism."
That is made clear in one of Burama's
contributions to an exchange with one of Hirsi Ali's European defenders.
I admire the achievements of the Enlightenment as much as Professor Cliteur appears to do, but I also believe that one of its greatest achievements is the rejection of dogmatism, of any kind. It is possible to be dogmatic about ideas that are not in themselves bad…. My objection is not to the Enlightenment as such, but to the ideological zeal of some of those who believe they are acting in its defence. If we wish to isolate and defeat religious extremism, we must must have mainstream European Muslims as our allies. This, readers may notice, is pretty much the same argument put forward by Dinesh D'Souza in The Enemy at Home: that we must temper the zeal with which we champion our freedom, so that we may pursue an alliance with "moderate" Muslim traditionalists. So Dinesh D'Souza has found his sympathetic audience after all—but on the left, not on the right.
True, some on the left have their reservations. The Guardian's Andrew Anthony concludes his
profile of Hirsi Ali by admitting, wistfully, that "it may say something for our incurable self-loathing that it is Hirsi Ali, the most fervent admirer of European liberalism, that we've effectively sent packing." And some old Marxists have mounted a spirited defense of Hirsi Ali, including the redoubtable
Christopher Hitchens—but wait, he isn't really on the left any more, is he? This is perhaps the most revealing fact. In the post-September 11 world, a man who wants to defend the pro-reason, pro-liberty, pro-secularism legacy of the Enlightenment finds that he can only do so by allying himself with the right, not the left.
And that brings me back to the immediate reason for compiling these two reports—a report on the reception for Dinesh D'Souza and a report on the reception for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Our goal is to assess which is the greater domestic threat to liberty and reason, and which is our potential ally: the cultural/political left, broadly considered, or the cultural/political right, broadly considered? Our goal is to assess the fundamental ideological loyalties of these two movements by looking for the proof in intellectual action: their reaction to two actual, concrete advocates who represent opposite attitudes toward the Enlightenment.
The result of these two initial reports is clear. In recent months, intellectuals on the right have been confronted by a monster who tempted them to embrace the worst implications of their ideals—and they almost universally repudiated him. Intellectuals on the left were beckoned by the angel of their better natures, who called upon them to defend the best aspects of their intellectual heritage—and they have largely rejected her.
I say this not to promote the American right as having the best answers. They, too, are philosophically confused and they, too, make attempts to evade the real meaning of the Enlightenment.
