Ayaan
Hirsi Ali's "Islamic Reformation." Can It Work?
Reviewed by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
June 30, 2015
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 It is
cocktail hour on an April afternoon in 2004.. The sun is hot on Amsterdam's
canals, and I am sitting at Café den Leeuw on the Herengracht with Ayaan
Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali is still a member of the Dutch Parliament, and we talk
about Islam. Specifically, we talk about the concept of "moderate
Islam," or what she calls "liberal Islam." And she has one
word for it.
"It's absurd," she says. "It's complete nonsense. There
is no 'liberal Islam.'"
Things change.
In her latest book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now
(Harper Collins, 2015), Hirsi Ali offers her vision of a "reformed
Islam" – a re-imagining of the religion in contemporary terms, a
forging of a path to that very same liberal Islam. As she states,
"When I wrote my last book, Nomad, I believed that Islam was
beyond reform, that perhaps the best thing for religious believers in Islam
to do was to pick another god. I was certain of it.... Seven months after I
published Nomad came the start of the Arab Spring, and I thought
simply: I was wrong."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is perhaps best known as the writer of "Submission," a highly controversial film about the
oppression of women under Islam, which was produced by Dutch filmmaker Theo
van Gogh. The film aired less than four months after she and I had the
conversation at Café den Leeuw. That same November, a Muslim extremist shot and stabbed Van Gogh as he bicycled to work. The
killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's lifeless body
with the promise that Hirsi Ali would be next.
At the time, the Somali-born Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, was an
outspoken critic of Islam. Now a bestselling author and activist, she lives
in the U.K. and the U.S., where she teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass. She
established the AHA Foundation in 2007, to work to end honor violence
worldwide.
Unlike her previous two books, Infidel
and Nomad, which were essentially autobiographical, Heretic
offers a manifesto of sorts: a program for freeing Islam from what she
calls "a host of anachronistic and at times deadly beliefs and
practices." She presents her case with the careful and deliberate
skill of a philosopher. In clear, readable language, she provides a basic
history of Islam and citations from the Koran and the hadiths before laying
out her blueprint for change.
Heretic begins with a historical overview of Islam aimed at
distinguishing what she calls "Mecca Muslims," or those who
follow Mohammed's early teachings and the first section of the Koran, from
"Medina Muslims," such as members of al-Qaida, al Nusra,
al-Shabaab, and other Muslim extremist and terrorist groups. For
Medina Muslims, she explains, "true" Islam is found in the latter
phase of Mohammed's life, after his flight from Mecca to Medina in 622. It
was then, with the establishment of the first Caliphate, that Islam's more
militant, violent and political ideologies emerged. It is largely because
of these two distinct phases in the history – and holy texts – of Islam
that so much debate still takes place about the nature of the religion and
its practice.
But it is also because its adherents claim the Medina texts are the
"last word" on Islam, the final incarnation of Allah's vision for
humanity, that Hirsi Ali states early in the book: "Let me make my
point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of
peace."
This distinguishing between Mecca and Medina Islam (or Mecca and Medina
Muslims, as Hirsi Ali puts it), is not new: the author's own mentor, Afshin
Ellian, did just this in defining Islam as a political religion in a 2009
publication. But Hirsi Ali may be the first to explain this to a general
public, and certainly her popularity as an author and celebrity figure are
useful in informing a wider audience.
She does, both eloquently and persuasively, in the first half of the
book, which virtually anyone, including (or perhaps especially) Hirsi Ali's
ideological opponents, would benefit from reading. In fact, one could
almost call it "irresponsible" for those who attempt to speak out
on the problems of radical Islam to do so without reading these pages.
Unfortunately, she does less well in the second half of the book. No
doubt Hirsi Ali's hope for a Muslim reformation is earnest; but her
argument suffers under what is either an unwillingness to look religious
fundamentalism itself head-on, or – quite possibly – her own naiveté, a
general unawareness of, say, fundamentalist Christian views, and of the
history of secular Muslim countries such as Turkey.
To be sure, she neatly and powerfully lays out the facts about radical
Islam in the West and the failure of Western governments and communities to
face the threat in the name of "tolerance" or "religious
freedom." She re-issues her frequent, yet-unheeded plea for more
action against honor crimes in the West. She cites important studies on the
popularity of sharia law and interviews (by others) with jihadists. She
points repeatedly to the Islamic vision of an afterlife, in Hell and
Paradise, as the fomenter of death wishes and martyrdom, the driving force
behind violent jihad.
And then she offers a five-part solution:
"Muslim clerics need to acknowledge that the Koran is not the
ultimate repository of revealed truth. They need to make explicit that what
we do in this life is more important than anything that could conceivably
happen to us after we die. It is just a book. They need to make clear that
sharia law occupies a circumscribed role and is clearly subordinate to the
laws of the nation-states where Muslims live. They need to put an end to
the practice of delegated coercion that inflicts conformity at the expense
of creativity. And they need to disavow completely the concept of jihad as
a literal call to arms against non-Muslims and those Muslims they deem
apostates or heretics."
If only it were that simple. If only we could take a chorus of 1,000
imams, place them before the charismatic Ayaan Hirsi Ali and have them
repeat after her, in harmony, these very edicts. If only this were enough
to change the desperate and passionate beliefs of hundreds of millions
across the world.
Alas...
Alas, indeed. No sooner has Hirsi Ali prescribed her remedy than she
tells us of various predecessors, poets and philosophers mostly, who made
similar efforts – and were executed as heretics. It is hard to
understand why things would be different today – even in the face of the (now
failed) Arab Spring. One has only to look at the current state of affairs
in Turkey, that great, secular, democratic republic founded less than 100
years ago by a Muslim who claimed to despise religion, who called for
"sane reason," and which is now Islamizing by the day. One has
only to remember the elegant Iranian women, dressed in Western couture, and
the magnificent collections of art by Picasso and Kandinsky, by
Lichtenstein and Warhol, at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art – and to
look now at the country's brigades of "morality police."
"There were such times," I found myself wanting to say to her
as I read. "Yet look what happened next."
Yet Hirsi Ali insists that the Arab Spring revealed a growing and
unquenchable longing for liberation, for the reform of Islam itself, and
not just for the end of dictatorships. Even if true, one has to wonder:
which were the majority voices? And does it matter if the Medina Muslims
are the minority, when they are willing to fight to the death to win? Isn't
that already the case?
In fact, the thousands of men and women raised in the West who have now
joined the Islamic jihad tell a different story. It is easy enough to say
"stop glamourizing death and heaven" as Hirsi Ali does throughout
this book. But one needs only a passing familiarity with Freud's Future
of an Illusion to know how unlikely this is, and certainly in our own
time.
Despite her certainty that Christians do not make heaven appear
preferable to life on earth, for many evangelical Christians, this is not
the case. I recall one 10-year-old girl telling me not long ago that she
looks forward to every birthday because each one brings her closer to
heaven and to Jesus. The difference, however – as Hirsi Ali does note – is
that Christians don't usually go about killing themselves and others to get
there.
There are other problems with her arguments, not the least of which is
the question of who her audience actually is. Radical Muslims are hardly
going to listen to her. And because of her often harsh rhetoric over the
years, Hirsi Ali has alienated herself so greatly from even
"moderate" Muslims that few of them are likely to be eager to
follow her direction.
At the same time, there are millions of "moderate" Muslims.
There are even atheist Muslims. (Yes, really.) In that sense, the
"reformation" already exists. But it will not move everyone, and
it is not moving the extremists any more than it moves extreme,
fundamentalists Christians who bomb abortion clinics and Orthodox Jews who
abuse women. (Not to mention the fact that I find it unlikely that any
priest or rabbi would refer to the Bible as "just a book," let
alone an imam speak this of the Quran. But I could be wrong.)
And it seems to me that it is especially in Islam that such a global
reformation is unlikely: the notions of world domination in a Caliphate and
of power over women is too seductive, winning over the heart and mind of
the common man. The narcissist who sees himself a hero, the sinner
yearning for redemption, the youth raised with convictions of right and
wrong that differ from our own but are equally as strong – these men will
not let go of this Islam. They will fight to preserve and to empower it
across the earth. They are the Islamic State.
All this said, Heretic remains an important book, not only for
its explication of Islam but because, most of all, it confronts its readers
with facts about jihad, about terrorism, about the abuse of Muslim women –
and, too, about the good that lies within the roots of the Islamic faith.
Many of the stories Hirsi Ali tells are ones most Americans either never
knew, or have forgotten. And we need to know. This, too, is part of what
will help create change.
Which is why, although I cannot agree with Ayaan Hirsi Ali's strategies
(I would choose a remolding of minds through education in the arts and
sciences); and although I'm not sure I agree that such reform is even
possible, I commend her deeply for this book. Clearly one thing has not
changed about the Hirsi Ali I knew over a decade ago in Amsterdam: She has
started the discussion. Now it is time for the rest of us to join her.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands.
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