Mick Hartley

Ian Buruma has a history when it comes to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Dutch himself, and like Hirsi Ali now resident in the US, Buruma can’t help but patronise her and what he sees as her “absolutist” view of an enlightened West:

Hirsi Ali feels that she was set free, sexually, socially, intellectually, by the West, starting with Danielle Steel.

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. Europeans who argue, for example, that Muslims might feel more at home in the West if we offered a modicum of respect for their religion, instead of insulting them at every turn, are “stupid” or worse, for it is indeed Hirsi Ali’s holy mission to “wake these people up,” to convince us that the justification for 9/11 was “the core of Islam,” and the “inhuman act of those 19 hijackers” its “logical outcome.”

There is no doubt that many Islamic societies, especially in the Middle East, are in deep trouble for many reasons: political, historical, social, economic and religious. Revolutionary Islamism is seen by a growing number of Muslims as the only answer to failed secular dictatorships and corrupt, oil-rich elites, as well as to the economic and military domination of the United States. And European Muslims, often confused and alienated, feel its fatal attraction. Hirsi Ali is quite right that this force must be resisted. 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.

Christopher Hitchens leapt to Hirsi Ali’s defence, as did Pascal Bruckner. Paul Berman subsequently wrote a lengthy essay alluding, amongst much else, to Buruma’s view of Hirsi Ali’s supposed “enlightenment fundamentalism”. I linked to that essay here, but the essay itself doesn’t appear to be online any more. This commentary from Mark Oppenheimer, though, is relevant:

Berman’s piece is not primarily a demolition of [Tariq] Ramadan, even if his New Republic editors billed it that way. It’s many things, but above all, it seems to me, it’s a demolition of Ian Buruma…

I love Ian Buruma’s writing, but I don’t see that I can ignore the case that Berman builds in his New Republic piece. Buruma is the author of a long New York Times Magazine profile of Tariq Ramadan, and he has written about Ramadan in other contexts, most notably comparing him with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali feminist and ex-Muslim. And in such pieces, Berman carefully shows, Buruma tends to be painfully reluctant to describe Ramadan for what he is: a man who is not nearly so liberal as Western liberals would like to believe, and who is particularly calloused on the subject of women’s rights.

Buruma certainly notes the most important charges against Ramadan, citing at some length, for example, the famous debate with Nicolas Sarkozy in which Ramadan refused to denounce the Koranic practice of stoning female adulterers to death. But Buruma ultimately portrays him as a likeable sort, someone whose illiberalism has been trumped up by his detractors. Meanwhile, Buruma has written rather scornfully of Hirsi Ali, a true crusader for human rights. When faced with two people — a decent-seeming, more-moderate-than-most Muslim who is nevertheless hostile to homosexuals and feminism, and a woman raised in Islam who suffered terrible depradations (beatings, female circumcision, death threats for speaking out) but who now fights for women’s dignity — Buruma seems to prefer the former.

So, as I say, Buruma has a history. And now here’s what he’s written, in the course of an article on the rise of nationalist anti-immigrant parties in Belgium Holland and Switzerland, at today’s CiF:

The case of Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the bestselling author of Infidel, best illustrates both the popular resentments and the relative openness that mark contemporary Dutch society. Much criticism and even abuse has been heaped on the Dutch for the way her adopted country has treated her. She has received death threats from Muslim extremists ever since she renounced – indeed, denounced – her Muslim faith, and was forced to live as a virtual fugitive, albeit under the protection of the Dutch state. Before moving to the US, she was forced out of her apartment in The Hague by complaining neighbours, and almost deprived of her passport. Now that she is a permanent US resident, the Dutch government no longer wants to pay for her protection.

Commentators in the US and elsewhere have accused the Dutch of “unacceptable cowardice”. Salman Rushdie called her “the first refugee from western Europe since the Holocaust”. French intellectuals, never shy of public posturing, are campaigning to give her French citizenship.

The way the Dutch government handled the affair was not elegant, to say the least. But I’m not sure how many governments do pay for the protection of private citizens who live permanently abroad. The US doesn’t pay to protect its citizens who are under threat even at home.

It is easy to voice contempt of the Dutch government. But what has been lost in all the commentary is the nature of Hirsi Ali’s rise to prominence. It is hard to imagine many countries where a young African woman could become a famous member of parliament only 10 years after seeking asylum.

But the reasons for her rise are not entirely salubrious. Whatever the merits – and they are considerable – of her arguments against the bigotry of Islamic or African customs, especially those concerning the treatment of women, she lent respectability to bigotry of a different kind: the native resentment of foreigners, and Muslims in particular.

This is particularly shoddy. As with his earlier comments on Hirsi Ali, there’s no attempt to deal with her arguments beyond noting that, yes, OK, they may have considerable merit. Instead – well, she should be grateful: it’s “hard to imagine many countries where a young African woman could become a famous member of parliament only 10 years after seeking asylum”. Nothing to do with Hirsi Ali’s personal qualities, mind you. No acknowledgement of what it might have taken for a young woman in her situation to achieve as much as she did during her years in Holland. And then that nasty little smear, the moment he’s been leading up to – she’s “lent respectability to bigotry”.

What Hirsi Ali has done, with great clarity and courage, is to set out the case against Islam. Despite the dismissive noises of intellectuals like Buruma, or Timothy Garton Ash (who called Hirsi Ali a “slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist”), the case she makes is compelling and comes from personal experience. She might, perhaps, have expected that left-leaning liberals, when confronted with the catalogue of anti-intellectual, misogynist, anti-semitic views that sadly dominate in much of the Islamic world nowadays, would have rallied to her side and leant their support. As we see once again, that hasn’t happened. Instead she’s charged with giving comfort to the xenophobes, as though she should just keep silent – we should all keep silent – in the face of Islamists preaching a return to the Dark Ages. By this logic no Muslim – no immigrant of any description – should ever offer any criticism of their culture, in case it provides ammunition for the Right. Just keep quiet and let the self-selected spokesmen for your community do the talking.

Shoddy indeed.

[For some more Hirsi Ali controversy see here, where Sam Boyd at American Prospect calls her a “dangerous fanatic” [!], and a response here from Jamie Kirchik.]