Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Islam's brutally candid apostate

From The National Post (Canada)



Read the rest here;

http://www.nationalpost.com/Ayaan%20Hirsi%20Islam%20brutally%20candid%20apostate/3129524/story.html

for Ayann Hirsi Ali! I do not believe I have ever read a more true, real, intelligent, and honest auto biography in my life (and I'm almost 60!)

I would recommend ANY book written by this courageous, intelligent and strong woman to anyone!

This article is the first I've heard of her. Your recommendation is well taken.

Thanks.

that she is easy on the eyes.

I was introduced to her by the recent New Yorker article. I didn't get the impression she was an atheist. More of an agnostic with some good things to say about Christianity and other religions.

making a blanket statement about Islam and Muslims in general.

I have several Muslim acquaintances, all male, and have been invited to dinner at their homes several times. They were from Syria and Jordan. Let's just say that the women were definitely NOT oppressed in those homes. It was the women who were in charge of most everything in the households. They were happy and joking around, and I was able to talk to them freely without asking any male's permission. The women often wore pants or ankle-length dresses, but there were no burkas or stifling garb being worn by the women, just hijabs. However it was each woman's choice if she wore a hijab, as several, the younger ones, didn't wear them.

I do agree that the Muslims in Somalia are very extremist, fundamentalist. That sect of Islam is definitely very oppressive towards women.

... not unlike Brigitte Gabriel and her ilk. Hirsi Ali is notorious for making blanket statements about Muslims and conflating Islam as one giant monolith of extremism.

There are plenty of better alternatives like Asma Barlas, Leila Ahmed, and Amina Wadud.

Rigghhhttt.

Finklestein's criticism is of Israeli government policies -- Hirsi Ali conflates all of Islam as one monolith; she constantly paints all Muslims with one broad brush. There is no differentiation between "moderates" and "extremists" with her. Her, Gabriel, and the rest of the professional anti-Muslim bigots should be shunned.

Thing is, there are a lot of blanket statements about Islam and Muslims that would seem to deny that the Muslims she grew up around exist. Or at least that they really are Muslims or what they believe really is Islam.

So her work is a wonderful corrective.

However, I was on one side of an interesting argument many years ago, before I even heard of this writer (still haven't actually read any more of her writings than what's been quoted in a few reviews). The claim hurled at me was that Xianity was inherently militaristic and strove for power while Islam was inherently the opposite. Xianity would naturally form militias; Islam was naturally pacificist. I considered the tenured professor I was arguing with a total loon.

To get Xianity to be militant you wind up having to do two things: First, cite NT "verses" in isolation and rely heavily on OT passages; second, rely crucially on specific Church fathers and theologians. The majority of Xian heresies rooted strongly in NT exegesis over the last millennium have often been pacifist or at least quietist because they favor naive, contextual readings; most of them get scant mention because they're easily disposed of and tend not to spread too widely. It took a couple of centuries to find justification for Xianity as a state religion that sanctions war, and that was only after a lot of syncretism had occurred with pre-existing European or SW Asian religions. (Note that I emphasize naive, contextual readings--not the nutjob exegesis based on how one particular word seems to correlate with the Mayan calendar, a Sankrit word read backwards in the Upanishads, and the numerical system divinely revealed to be spoken on the Xrprit homeworld in the %rkdh4 galaxy.)

To get Islam to be you have to do rather the flip process. There are peaceful and militant Qur'aanic passages, and the militant ones tend to be later. Traditional exegesis says that the later revelation is superior to the earlier; in this case, we have to say that the later revelations were inferior. To achieve peaceful readings of some passages you must narrow the context or remove the context--or, conversely, vastly expand the context so that you can get a highly mystical or metaphorical interpretation. Usually you have to rely on later traditions as authoritative, which is why Salafists tend to be more militant in their Islam--they want to be like the early Muslims, not the later ones. It took virtually no time to find justification for Islam as a state religion that all but mandates enforced submission, aka "pacification," leading to the Fatah or, as we call it in English, the Islamic conquest. The converse only really occurred after there was little opposition in an area or after a lot of syncretism had occurred with pre-existing area religions. (I also insist on naive readings here; it's precisely the naivete of the reading by many anti-Islamic Western pundits that so irks many Muslims, convinced of the supremacy of ijtihad over the text itself, which, to my mind, shows that Islam really learned from Talmudic thought.)

The asymmetry is striking, however it may be masked by later developments in both religions--which in no way mitigates the Somali writer's claim. In fact, many Muslims even deny that the Fath, the "opening" or "victory" or "Islamic conquest" ever really happened, at least when they speak English (few Arabic speakers miss the pun, with PLO's Fatah, the Islamic conquest, and the Qur'aanic chapter concerning the conquest of Mecca all sharing the same name). For them, it's just as when I was in high school--one day there was a corrupt, evil Byzantine Empire, the next day, the enlightened, pacificist Islamic world stretched from Spain to N. India and Central Asia and ran through SE Europe. Spread by the sword? Heaven forbid. Islam is a religion of peace. It's Xianity that's violent, with those nasty Crusades.

good insight

so she has a touch of naive Libertarian about her. And the Right Wingers encourage her entirely justified anger against Islamic male patriarchy to edge into "Clash of Civilizations" us-against-them war talk.

http://www.aei.org/scholar/117

I'd like to see how she'd develop politically if she got a job at, say, Georgetown, where they don't have such an extreme political agenda.

I have absolutely no problem with using wide brush strokes to condemn religion. I do not buy for one minute the idea that there is good religion and bad religion. It's all bad. There are good people and bad people, and some are able to rise above their religion, but the idea that there is a sentient god that rules our lives is against reality, and therefore, harmful in essence.