A heretic abroad
Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali a rabble-rouser who’s too cosy with the extreme right, or a serious thinker who’s trying to open the world’s eyes? She speaks with Adam Dudding.
Next month, an American visitor to Auckland will give a speech attacking Islam. The visitor believes the religion is one that leads to poverty and violence and the mistreatment of women, and that Donald Trump is right to insist on describing the atrocities of Isis and similar extremists as ‘‘radical Islamic terrorism’’, a phrase carefully avoided by Presidents Obama and George W Bush for fear of alienating the billion or so Muslims who aren’t terrorists.
In interviews and her books, the visitor has said Islam is ‘‘the new fascism’’; that it’s dangerous and unreformable; that it’s a ‘‘nihilistic cult of death’’; that Islamic faith schools in the UK are a threat to liberal democracy.
Her words would not, as the Guardian put it in 2010, look amiss in a pamphlet from the racist British National Party.
And yet when Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks like this, she wrongfoots commentators who’d swiftly dismiss the same words from anyone else. She has, to put it mildly, a complex background.
She is black, born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969 and raised a Muslim (though she’s atheist now).
She is a victim of female genital mutilation, and claimed she was almost forced into a marriage (something family members dispute).
She entered Holland as an asylum-seeker in her early 20s and became outspoken about the mistreatment of women within Holland’s immigrant Muslim communities.
In 2003, at the age of 33, she became an MP for a party noted for its anti-immigration policies.
The following year, after she and director Theo van Gogh (known for calling Muslims ‘‘goat-f***ers’’) released a short film attacking Qu’ranic justifications for the subjugation of women, van Gogh was murdered by a Dutch-born Muslim, and Hirsi Ali has required security ever since.
Her political career ended after revelations that she’d lied during her asylum application, and she moved to the US in 2006. In 2011 she married the conservative Scottish historian Niall Ferguson.
Hirsi Ali’s harsh words about her ex-religion, and her seemingly paradoxical critique of the liberal immigration policies that allowed her new life in Holland, won her ardent support from the political right and trenchant attack from the liberal left, but it’s not as simple as that; she’s been praised by progressive religion-bashers Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, as well as liberal philosopher Paul Berman, whose Terror and Liberalism compared Islamist terror groups to fascism.
Speaking to Sunday Star-Times from the US this week, Hirsi Ali says the idea that her colour and background make her a useful mouthpiece for the xenophobic right is ‘‘just pure nonsense’’.
She gets support because ‘‘anyone with an iota of commonsense will tell you that the ideology of clerical Islam, of Sharia law, is bad for women, it’s bad for homosexuals; it’s bad for society’’.
‘‘Anywhere where the legal code is applied they’re poor, they’re oppressed, they’re in a state of violence. You don’t need to be a conservative or a liberal; you just need to use your eyes to see what’s before you.’’
Breitbart, the extreme right-wing media outlet formerly run by Trump’s new right-hand-man Steve Bannon, quotes Hirsi Ali approvingly, but some parts of her fan club are seriously vile.
Browse through the hateful forums at stormfront.org, and amid astonishingly racist rants you’ll find statements of grudging admiration for her ‘‘courage and determination’’. Does this give her pause?
‘‘I’m not co-opted by anybody,’’ says Hirsi Ali. ‘‘I’m a free individual and I only do and say and write what I believe in. If I’m saying something, only I’m responsible.’’
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have spent so much money spreading radical Islam in Africa, and in southeast Asia. It’s criminal, and no one is calling them out on that. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Yes, the white supremacy movement is ‘‘a big problem, and maybe a problem that is getting bigger’’, but the question you need to ask is whether it’s being adequately addressed, ‘‘and the answer is yes’’.
‘‘White supremacists have been infiltrated by the law. Our intelligence institutions know what they’re up to.’’
Such groups are awful, but they’re not a serious threat to peace in America or the world. But meanwhile, says Hirsi Ali, returning to her theme, ‘‘radical Islamic movements, that is a big deal’’.
‘‘Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have spent so much money spreading radical Islam in Africa, and in southeast Asia. It’s criminal, and no one is calling them out on that.
‘‘They’re establishing these madrassas, filling the heads of these little boys with this nonsense, and having them kill and be killed.’’
This is territory she’s visited in her books, including autobiographies Infidel and Nomad and a 2015 manifesto Heretic (subtitle: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now).
She used to say Islam must be confronted head-on, but in Heretic she softened her stance slightly, calling instead for moderate Muslims to reform Islam from within, much as Christianity did in the 16th century, and advising them to abandon literalist readings of the Qu’ran.
She softened that earlier harder line after ‘‘realising that a philosophy that’s been around for 1400 years that’s adhered to by a fifth of humanity – it’s not an open and shut process’’. Well, quite. In her Auckland event – organised by an Australian organisation that’s brought Steve Wozniak, Ben Goldacre and Sam Harris downunder before her – she’ll talk about ‘‘why I speak against radical Islam’’.
Some 40% of New Zealanders have no religion, and just 1% of us are Muslim. There’s never been an act of Islamist terrorism here, and mention of Kiwi ‘‘jihadi brides’’ by John Key was misleading.
Anti-immigration sentiment here tends more toward house-price angst rather than fears of Sharia law in Tokoroa. What do Hirsi Ali’s fearful warnings about Islam have to do with us?
‘‘Well,’’ says Hirsi Ali, ‘‘I was told there are about 46,000 Muslims living in New Zealand. And you are party to the Geneva Convention so the people of New Zealand are committed to resettling refugees.’’ (For the record, our annual refugee quota will rise from 750 to 1000 from 2018, minuscule even per capita.)
New Zealand is far away from everyone, says Hirsi Ali, but ‘‘you can see the developments in other free societies – in Europe, in the US, in Australia – so you’ve got to be interested in knowing if you have the programmes of assimilation’’.
Of course, even with little skin in the game, New Zealanders follow the international debate about the future Islam because we care about what happens abroad, especially as Trump, and events such as Brexit, upend what we thought we knew.
Hirsi Ali says Trump’s Muslim travel ban was ‘‘clumsy’’ and ‘‘badly done’’, but she endorses much of the sentiment behind it.
She admired Trump’s speech last August where he discussed ‘‘extreme vetting’’ and pointed to the San Bernardino and Orlando shootings as examples of failed immigration policies.
When he spoke of the threat from ‘‘the hateful ideology of radical Islam’’ it could have been a line borrowed from Hirsi Ali herself.
Yet the evils Hirsi Ali rails against aren’t necessarily related to Islam. Toxic patriarchy, genital mutilation, forced marriages, political violence, domestic violence – these are alien to most Muslims and they happen in cultures with no Islamic heritage.
Why blame Islam for complex, multi-factorial problems?
Well, says Hirsi Ali, consider domestic violence.
‘‘In New Zealand, I’m sure there are a lot of men who are not Muslim who are violent to women and their children. It happens.
‘‘But the main difference is in liberal societies, domestic violence is condemned. It’s against the law and against good morality.
‘‘But what Islam does is it justifies it. You have the Qu’ran saying if a wife is disobedient, beat her […] In countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran – it’s not a theoretical kind of thing.’’
Hirsi Ali’s critics are legion. She’s been accused of being simplistic, patronising, Islamophobic, an ‘‘Uncle Tom’’. Fundamentalist Muslims have condemned her as an ‘‘apostate’’ (which, it must be said, rather proves a point about religious intolerance).
Anjum Rahman, of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, says Hirsi Ali’s analysis of the woes of Muslim countries is too simplistic.
‘‘She fails to bring into her analysis issues such as colonisation and the resulting loss of resources and self-determination. It’s difficult to combat extremism, for example, in an environment like Iraq where people have suffered a decade of crippling sanctions, two (illegal) invasions, a missing three trillion dollars and a lack of global investment to replace the huge loss of infrastructure caused by sustained bombing by foreign governments. Any analysis that doesn’t address these kinds of issues, along with issues of marginalisation, is far from complete.’’
Hirsi Ali isn’t sure what kind of audience she’ll pull in Auckland, but she’s hoping for people who’re ‘‘interested in civic discussion and debate’’.
‘‘I speak out against Islamic law as a moral code and a legal code. I think it’s very important to have this discussion and not be inhibited by fears of violence and bigotry.’’