The enlightenment driven away
Well exactly. Just what I’ve been thinking, and fuming at, for weeks.
“The enlightenment driven away…” This very strong and bitter line [of Auden’s – OB] came back to me when I saw the hostile, sneaky reviews that have been dogging the success of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s best seller Infidel…Two of our leading intellectual commentators, Timothy Garton Ash (in the New York Review of Books) and Ian Buruma, described Hirsi Ali, or those who defend her, as “Enlightenment fundamentalist[s].” In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Buruma made a further borrowing from the language of tyranny and intolerance and described her view as an “absolutist” one…In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?
What, indeed? What, what, what? I would really like to know. I read that nasty, ‘hostile, sneaky’ review of Buruma’s in the Sunday NY Times, and was thoroughly and profoundly irritated by it – as well as a little frightened. If he thinks that, he’d be willing to compromise on my rights as well as Hirsi Ali’s (not, be it noted, his own). I don’t want the Ian Burumas doing that. I find it alarming that they seem to be willing to consider it (and also, frankly, that they don’t even pause to notice that it’s other people’s rights that are in danger much more than their own, and to worry that that might make their own views look a little suspect).
The Feb. 26 edition of Newsweek takes up where Garton Ash and Buruma leave off and says, in an article by Lorraine Ali, that, “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.”…Accompanying the article is a typically superficial Newsweek Q&A sidebar, which is almost unbelievably headed: “A Bombthrower’s Life.” The subject of this absurd headline is a woman who has been threatened with horrific violence…She has never used or advocated violence. Yet to whom does Newsweek refer as the “Bombthrower”? It’s always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it’s the victim of violence who is “really” inciting it.
The Bombthrower. Staggering, isn’t it.
Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People’s Republic of China of “heating up the Cold War” if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam…?…Is it because Islam is a “faith”? Or is it because it is the faith – in Europe at least – of some ethnic minorities? In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these “minorities,” there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders…This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally “fundamentalist,” is of no help here. And notice what happens when Newsweek takes up the cry: The enemy of fundamentalism is defined as someone on the fringe while, before you have had time to notice the sleight of hand, the aggrieved, self-pitying Muslim has become the uncontested tenant of the middle ground.
Right. Hirsi Ali is the ‘bombthrower’ while people who are offended by dissent from Islam are her victims. Very strange.
Either they are frightened (and rightly so) of daring to criticize the the religion that so appropriately calls itself “submission” – submit or we’ll kill you!
Or they really cannot see that “faith” is different, in that it is considerably more toxic than almost any politcal philosophy.
What has happened to their brains?
Interesting article by Phyllis Chesler.
First sentence: “Once I was held captive in Kabul.”
http://tinyurl.com/2kx3fg
Reading the TGA piece, as I recall his line, somewhat smugly put, was that it was all very well being Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but that governments with hundreds of thousands or millions of Muslim citizens/residents couldn’t afford to be so openly antagonistic to their faith-system. Which is, whatever its merits or demerits as a moral position, pragmatically pretty strong – if we suppose the avoidance of open violence to be a duty of a civilised govt.
It is a problem that we B&Wers [if I may] don’t like to face up to – if you don’t want to be a mullah-hugger like Ken Livingstone, how far down the line do you go before you become one of the people who thinks that a shooting-war with Eurabia would be an unalloyed Good Thing? Huntingdonism creeps up over your right shoulder very quickly as soon as you start contemplating following through Hirsi Ali’s individual heroism at a policy level. Which I think is what TGA was getting at.
No, we can’t do a Huntingdon and invade the islamic countries to “free” them ( oops, did I say something about Iraq there? ) but we can, and must do something about preventing these medieval “standards” appearing in our own countries, and stamping hard on any attempts to set them up.
One could make a start at Clare College, and with the islamic student’s representative.
Unfortunately, we won’t or not here, for a very simple reason.
islam is an organised blackmail system, and its’ proponents, when they talk about “a religion of peace” and “the valued place of women in islamic society” are quite simply, not telling the truth, and doing so deliberately.
And, sooner or later, everyone is going to have to say so, until the message gets across, that we are not going to put up with it.
But it isn’t going to happen in here, is it?
Openly confronting deeply held cultural and ‘faith’ positions – even if done for the purest of enlightened motives, does indeed make you a zealot in the eyes of those you are opposing. Who in this day and age have as much access to a media obsessed with ‘controversy’ as you do, and a finely-honed victim discourse. And lots of young men willing to do stupid things to prove that they are tough.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that strict secularism in the public realm, and absolute enforcement of women’s rights to equality, are fine goals. But, speaking as a hypothetical govt minister, I ask, what are they worth? What multiplication-factor of inter-ethnic and inter-religious hostility is justified as a blowback from pursuing such a policy? A doubling of violence, a tenfold increase?
To create a secular society, from where we stand now, you are going to have to force millions of people to give up cherished beliefs. And when I say force, I mean force. The way Civil Rights had to be forced on the American South, only more so, because it isn’t just about how a group of people are treated by others, its about how people are allowed to behave inside their own families, on issues which challenge their very ideas of who they are.
Do we fine offenders, imprison them? In what numbers, for how long? What do we do with the demonstrations outside the prisons, the hunger-strikes, the images of riot police and screaming children, the bombs….
Now, as a valiant B&Wer, I’m up for this fight. But I’m all talk. Put me in a suit and ask me to sign off on a plan to actively piss off millions of Muslims – and everyone else who puts religion at the heart of their family life – and watch me shrivel.
Ophelia, for the life of me, I cannot see why you describe Buruma’s review of Hirsi Ali’s ‘Infidel’ as “nasty, hostile, sneaky”. It seems to me to be quite the opposite.
I suppose those who have the stomach for it, especially in the USA could do worse than start with the nutjobs on “Vox Popoli” ….
Or writing to the Alsaka Penisula Clarion, pointing out the errors of their contibutor, who was asking for an ethnic cleansing of atheists from the US ……