Mick Hartley

Tunku Varadarajan reviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, Nomad:

Contrasting the Western nuclear family with the suffocating family structure in Somalia, she says, “The infidel is loyal to his wife and children; he may take care of his parents but has no use for a memory filled with an endless chain of ancestors.” Elsewhere, she writes that “virginity is the obsession, the neurosis of Islam,” and that “the fundamentalists seem haunted by the female body and neurotically debate which fractions of it should be covered, until they declare the whole thing, from head to toe, a gigantic private part.”

The author laments the self-censorship in the West, driven by a well-meaning, but ultimately corrosive and self-defeating politics of multicultural accommodation. There have been numerous honor killings in the United States, in which Muslim fathers or husbands kill daughters or wives who have “sullied” the family name in some way; and yet, Hirsi Ali observes, not once has the achingly non-judgmental American press used the phrase “honor killing” in its reports on the murders. Writing of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Islamist U.S. Army major who gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood last year, she finds it “astonishing” that the media regarded all explanations for the murders plausible “except the one explicitly stated by the killer, namely his religion.” (She will cease to be astonished, I reckon, once she spends a few more years on the East Coast.)

Hirsi Ali ends her book with some muscular suggestions: “The Muslim mind needs to be opened. Above all, the uncritical Muslim attitude toward the Quran urgently needs to change, for it is a direct threat to world peace.” She proposes an “Enlightenment Project,” in which public education and social policy in the West is “geared toward grooming citizens, not preserving the separateness of tribe, the sanctity of faith…” Western feminists, who too often allow the Muslim suppression of women to go unchallenged, must take it upon themselves to embrace the emancipation (from Muslim men) of Muslim women.

Well, take your pick…Islamophobe…enlightenment fundamentalist…