Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Criticism of Islam Angers Western Liberals
http://observer.com/2016/04/why-ayaan-hirsi-alis-criticism-of-islam-angers-western-liberals/...
Ms. Hirsi Ali warns against use of the words “extreme” and “radical” to describe as peripheral an ideology which, she argues, is in fact quite prevalent in Muslim communities around the globe, and which leads easily to violence—whether in the form of female genital mutilation or honor killings or wife-beating or suicide bombings. She views the reliance on those words as self-delusion, a soothing, self-administered palliative whose effect is to mask evidence that violence is the largely natural extension of fundamentalist values sternly dictated and widely embraced in Muslim communities—values that encourage harsh treatment of women and strict, even brutal, punishment of non-believers. Her warnings, and those of others who risk their reputations and lives to criticize Islamic institutions, are distinctly unwelcome in many Western quarters, where they are regarded as grievously politically incorrect, and where the “few-bad-apples” narrative of Islamic extremism is vastly preferred.
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More perplexing to Ms. Hirsi Ali is the hostility leveled at her by some on the left for her efforts to challenge Islamic law and teachings. These critics profess to care about women’s rights but cannot bring themselves to criticize those who trample on them as long as the misogynist possesses an address in the Muslim world. At a recent panel held at the Women in the World summit in New York, the moderator accused Ms. Hirsi Ali of “picking only on Islam.” She countered: “I embrace Muslims but I reject Islamic law … because it’s totalitarian, because it’s bigoted and especially bigoted against women.” The anger she stirs on the left confounds her. “You have to ask yourself why anyone would align with proponents of Islamic law,” she says with wonder.
Ms. Hirsi Ali has no good answer to this question, and she is not the only one. “How do I get liberals to understand that we are the liberals in this debate?” television host Bill Maher asked her about the subjugation of women in Muslim communities around the world and the indulgence in violence that is taught there. Ms. Hirsi Ali is doing her best. What is terribly unclear is whether the left is prepared to listen.
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Islam is no more a monolith than Christianity, or Muslims than Christians.
There are Rudolphs and Spongs among Muslims. There are analogs to the US and to Uganda in Islamic societies (sadly I can think of no analogs to, say, Norway at a national level at least. Turkey seems to be about as sane as it gets for nation states). It's further complicated by distinctions between demographic and socioeconomic classes. For example as a middle class American in the suburbs the Muslims I personally encounter will not be the same as in St Paul's heavily poor Somali neighborhoods, let alone those in rural Afghanistan.
Much of the defensiveness among western liberals, along with the reflexive desire to give anyone non-white who was ever in conflict with a western imperial power several miles of leeway and protection from criticism, is because naturally enough most of them are far more likely to meet the kinds of Muslims I do. We see the engineers and the doctors and the entrepreneurs who emigrated to the west more than the date sellers and shepherds who didn't. Generally these folks are more secular, more open to integration, and far better educated than the norm. It's natural to think of Muslims then in those terms, forgetting the millions we've never met and the huge range of how much superstitious claptrap they will swallow up to and including genocidal terrorism. To be honest the same propinquity bias is true with attitudes towards Christians from Christians. Some touchy feely kumbaya milquetoast thinks Christians are mostly like him and his congregation. The problem is so does the fire and brimstone theocratic loon.
I'm sure the usual race to claim street cred that permeates DU will turn up a bunch of folks who hang out with the poorest and least educated and integrated Muslim immigrants in large numbers and are privy to their innermost thoughts on Islam. Hell it may even be true in a case or two. But even they only see the ones who wanted to, and were able to, make it to the west, hardly a representative sample. Folks who have travelled widely in Islamic nations (I know there's one guy in A&A but I don't track names well) would have an even better viewpoint but even there a bit limited to how much his hosts were willing to honestly share and who they were.
Secular folks who live in a heavily religious society, be it the US or Iran, are best placed to assess how dangerous and extreme that religious influence really is. Those of us who are separate from Islamic societies are really only able to filter their impact from our limited dealings with their expats. In short I'll take her word over most, even though yes I confess some discomfort at her claims. I know that reliable polls show alarming opinions are not rare in Islamic countries, and no rational observer could say it's just a few bad apples, but I can't quite shake the disturbing notion that things would be a lot worse if she were completely right. Let's assume say, just 10% of Muslims, a small but sizeable minority, are potentially violent theocrats. That's well over 150 million people more than twice the entire population of the UK. Why then isn't the world both Islamic and not aflame with multiple bombings and attacks every single day? Why do the extremist groups need, and try, to recruit foreign jihadis if one in 10 (and that would still be nowhere near "widely embraced"
is willing to go for the "...violence that is the natural extension of their fundamentalist values?"
