It was time for general debate in the audience. Most people seemed to agree with the speakers who had criticized the West in some aspect or other. I decided to speak. I raised my hand for the microphone and said, “Look at how many Voltaires the West has. Don’t deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly living in the Dark Ages.”
When I finished, the room was full of raised hands, many of them Muslim. This was Amsterdam; lots of people attend these talks, so their presence at this debate was natural. But almost all of them seemed very angry with me and Afshin Ellian. They went on about Averroes and saving Aristotle, and how Islam discovered the zero, and so on. It was irritating. So what has happened in Islamic civilization since the year 1200? But I couldn’t just take charge of the microphone; I could only roll my eyes and curl my lip.
When the debate ended, Afshin came up to me and said, “You’re a little Voltaire yourself. Where did you spring from?”
I said, “I’m from Somalia,” and Afshin said, “I just know our Muslim civilization will be saved by a woman.” He was very nice. He was a refugee himself.
While we were talking, Chris Rutenfrans, one of the editors of the Trouw supplement, came up to us. He introduced himself and said to me, “Why don’t you write us an article about these ideas, just as you said them here?”
I said I would be delighted, and in the next few days I worked furiously. But I was not allowed to publish articles without showing them to my boss at the Wiardi Beckman office, because the newspaper would identify me as a researcher there. A few days later, I showed my draft of the article to my director, Paul Kalma. He was annoyed. We were a think tank, we were paid to think, and of course he was in favor of freedom of expression, he told me; but I couldn’t possibly say such things. It would harm the Labor Party. Even if I signed it with just my name, no affiliation to the Institute at all, the minute a Muslim published such an article, all the racists and Islamophobes would seize on it.
I told Paul, “That’s not relevant, because when something is true, it is true.” But it was a sensitive time in Dutch politics. Pim Fortuyn, a complete unknown in Dutch politics, had begun a meteoric rise in popularity on the basis of his accurate observation that ethnic minorities didn’t sufficiently espouse Dutch values. Fortuyn pointed out that Muslims would soon be the majority in most of Holland’s major cities; he said they mostly failed to accept the rights of women and homosexuals, as well as the basic principles that underlie democracy. Rather than dealing forthrightly with the issues that Fortuyn raised, the Labor Party had basically decided to avoid them.
Paul Kalma was honest, and a good person; there was a lot of affection between us. He was seeking to protect me, to prevent me from pandering to racists by voicing right-wing views. So he edited my article until he was comfortable that potential racists would not be able to abuse it.
In those days, especially in Labor Party circles, people were always positive about Islam. If Muslims wanted mosques and separate graveyards and ritual slaughterhouses, such things were built. Community centers were provided. Islamic fundamentalist ideas were swelling in such centers, but Labor Party people usually dismissed this as a natural reaction. These immigrants had been uprooted, they said; they were clinging, temporarily, to traditional ideas, which would gradually fade away. They forgot how long it had taken Europe to shake off obscurantism and intolerance, and how difficult that struggle was.
When Somalis told me they didn’t want to live in gaalo neighborhoods, I knew they wanted to avoid contact with the ungodliness of Holland. But Dutch officials always saw it as a natural desire to form a community. When Muslims wanted their own school, I saw it as forcing children to obey ideas unquestioningly; the Dutch saw no harm in funding them. When satellite dishes began bristling from every apartment in municipal housing projects, tuned to Moroccan and Turkish TV, my Labor Party colleagues saw this as a natural desire to maintain contact with home.
But with the dishes came preaching, indoctrination. There were door-to-door preachers passing out cassettes in most Dutch cities, just like Boqol Sawm did in Eastleigh. Most migrant neighborhoods had shops selling traditional clothes and carpets and tapes, DVDs, and books on how to be a good Muslim in infidel territory. When the number of women wearing headscarves on the street became impossible to ignore, my Labor Party colleagues thought it was only recent immigrants, who would soon abandon the practice. They failed to realize that it was the second generation, who were rediscovering their “roots,” brainwashed by jargon I recognized: tawheed, kufr, the evil Jews.
After my article was published I received dozens of letters from readers applauding me: “How wonderful that someone like you exists. Have you heard of Spinoza?” I received an invitation to speak at a symposium on Spinoza at the Thomas Mann Institute. I went back to my Enlightenment textbooks and read about Spinoza and figured people were probably connecting us because we were both refugees. (Spinoza’s family emigrated to Holland in the 1600s to flee the Inquisition in Portugal.)
I received several other invitations to speak, one of which was in the little Dutch city of Hengelo; they invited me to give their fiftieth annual freedom and human rights speech in December. The title of the evening was “Should We Fear Islam?” I told Paul Kalma about it, and he said, “What is your answer?” I said, “Well, it’s yes and no,” and he said Fine, I should attend.
I was nervous. I had never written a speech before. I showed what I had written to Chris Rutenfrans from Trouw. He wanted to publish it; I asked him to let me give the speech first. But when I asked Paul for permission, and showed him what I’d said, he went scarlet. He told me I was personally attacking the minister for integration, and even the mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, who was prominent in our own Labor Party. (Actually, my intent was more like teasing them for being so silly as to think that Muslims would integrate best if the Dutch indulged every kind of Muslim self-segregation.) Paul said he had a duty to protect me from writing this right-wing stuff.
Everything I wrote about Islam turned out to be much more sensitive than any other topic I could have chosen to write about. I changed a couple of terms: I was learning that in these extremely civilized circles, conflict is dealt with in a very ornate and hypocritical manner.
When I told Chris Rutenfrans I had another draft, he realized right away that my boss had advised me to tone it down. He called Paul, and they had a shouting match. The next weekend, the revised article appeared in Trouw. But a week later Jaffe Vink, Rutenfrans’s coeditor at the supplement, wrote an article about the quarrel. He quoted all the material that Paul made me remove, such as comparing Job Cohen to an ayatollah.
Two days later there was a board meeting at the Wiardi Beckman Institute, with Job Cohen himself, and my article—and Vink’s piece in Trouw—was on the agenda. I just kept quiet. Paul Kalma told the board, “Ayaan is just starting out. She’s sharp, but she shouldn’t have gone so far.” Cohen asked him, “This description of your quarrel in Trouw, is it true?” Paul said, “Of course I didn’t want her to write this sort of personal attack. We’re members of the same party. A conflict of opinion should be solved behind closed doors, not in a newspaper.”
Cohen snapped, “If she wants to write it she should write it. I don’t mind in the least being called an ayatollah; what I mind is censorship.” He looked at me and said, “I’ve read what you said, and I want the opportunity to say I don’t agree with you. This is an institute for thought. As long as it’s well argued, you should be able to write what you want.” He blew me away with his open-mindedness.
Cohen went on to say that the Labor Party needed more thinking about these subjects. He had been the junior minister for migration policy, and he said immigration wasn’t so much the issue: people should be focusing now on the shocking deficit in integrating the children and
grandchildren of immigrants into Dutch society. He said, “Ayaan, why don’t you look into that for us?” I thought he was a hero.
I began reading everything I could lay my hands on about immigration and integration. Basically, I saw the problem as similar to those of the miyé—the rural, poor lands—being brought to the city. European societies, with their thrilling technology, easy money, and bright lights, were decadent and tempting and unassailable, their codes a cipher. The question was how to adapt.
In February I attended a conference on Islam in Europe held by the European Social Democrat Parties in Granada, Spain. All present seemed to think that it would be easy to set up the institutions for a European Islam in peace and harmony. They seemed clouded by wishful thinking rather than operating with rigorous analysis. A tiny community of so-called experts on immigration in Europe had been quoting each other for decades, it appeared: they shared an approach that was essentially socioeconomic. I thought we also needed a broader, cultural analysis of immigrant integration. In the past, Dutch social democrats had blamed the Catholic Church for keeping people poor and ignorant. I was only a junior researcher, but I thought to myself, “When are they going to look at Islam?”
Surely Islam was some kind of influence in the underperforming segregation of so many immigrants in Holland? As I went on doing research, it became painfully apparent that of all the non-Western immigrants in Holland, the least integrated are Muslims. Among immigrants, unemployment is highest for Moroccans and Turks, the largest Muslim groups, although their average level of skills is roughly the same as all the other immigrant populations. Taken as a whole, Muslims in Holland make disproportionately heavy claims on social welfare and disability benefits and are disproportionately involved in crime.
If Muslim immigrants lagged so far behind even other immigrant groups, then wasn’t it possible that one of the reasons could be Islam? Islam influences every aspect of believers’ lives. Women are denied their social and economic rights in the name of Islam, and ignorant women bring up ignorant children. Sons brought up watching their mother being beaten will use violence. Why was it racist to ask this question? Why was it antiracist to indulge people’s attachment to their old ideas and perpetuate this misery? The passive, Insh’Allah attitude so prevalent in Islam—“if Allah wills it”—couldn’t this also be said to affect people’s energy and their will to change and improve the world? If you believe that Allah predestines all, and life on earth is simply a waiting room for the Hereafter, does that belief have no link to the fatalism that so often reinforces poverty?
I recommended that the think tank organize a body of experts to look more deeply into whether high unemployment, crime, and social problems among migrants were also caused by cultural issues—including Islam. Once we perceived these cultural causes of immigrants’ misery, we could try to shift this mentality through open debate and real education.
Most women in Holland could walk the streets on their own, wear more or less what they liked, work and enjoy their own salaries, and choose the man they wished to marry. They could attend a university, travel, purchase property. And most Muslim women in Holland simply couldn’t. How could you say that Islam had nothing to do with that situation? And how could that situation be in any way acceptable?
When people tell me it is wrong to make this argument—that it is offensive, that it is inopportune at this particular moment—my sense of basic justice is outraged. When, exactly, will it be the right time? Dutch parents breed their daughters to be self-reliant; many, perhaps most, Muslim parents breed them to be docile and submissive. As a result, immigrants’ children and grandchildren don’t perform in the same way as Dutch young people.
I thought about Johanna and how she explained things to her children, showed them how to make good decisions and stand up for themselves. Her husband was involved in their upbringing; Johanna was a self-reliant woman who chose her own partner and how many children they would have, and when. Clearly she was a very different kind of mother from a twenty-year-old Somali woman in a housing project. Why were we not allowed to look into the impact of such factors on children?
The Dutch government urgently needed to stop funding Quranbased schools, I thought. Muslim schools reject the values of universal human rights. All humans are not equal in a Muslim school. Moreover, there can be no freedom of expression or conscience. These schools fail to develop creativity—art, drama, music—and they suppress the critical faculties that can lead children to question their beliefs. They neglect subjects that conflict with Islamic teachings, such as evolution and sexuality. They teach by rote, not question, and they instill subservience in girls. They also fail to socialize children to the wider community.
That raised a dilemma. Holland’s constitution itself permits faith-based schools, in Article 23. If the authorities were to close down only Muslim schools, permitting other forms of private schooling to continue, that would be discrimination. I thought it was time to start a debate on the funding of all faith-based schools. Holland has become an immigrant society, with citizens from all kinds of non-Western backgrounds: Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim. Perhaps everyone, native Dutch children, too, should learn to understand and grow up alongside children from all other backgrounds. Perhaps Article 23 of the Constitution should be abolished. Government funds would be better used setting up schools that are ideologically neutral and encourage kids to question and respect pluralism.
I was making Paul Kalma nervous about my views on education. I no longer sounded right-wing to him; I sounded positively communist. “Do you realize what Article 23 of the Constitution means to Holland, and to the feelings of the average Dutch person?” he asked me. “Don’t you know the history of conflict that preceded it? Do you honestly imagine that article will be modified just because of the integration question?”
I said, “Oh, so we are no longer a think tank? Aren’t we supposed to think things through? The arrival of migrants in this country is going to affect the heart of Dutch society, and it’s time to face that.”
I miss those days—those sharp but friendly discussions.
* * *
In May 2002, Ellen and I decided to go on vacation. Perhaps Abshir had been right, I thought: I did need a break. We went to Corfu, and I took along with me a little brown book, The Atheist Manifesto, which Marco had handed me one day during an argument we were having.
When Marco gave it to me, I felt as if he were handing me his holy book, as if I had pressed the Quran on him, and it put me off. But now I wanted to read it. I wanted to think this thing through. My questions were taboo. According to my upbringing, if I was not a follower of God, I must be a follower of Satan. But I couldn’t be spouting answers for Holland’s problems when I still had questions about my own religious faith.
Before we left, I told Ellen, “I have huge doubts about God’s existence, and the Hereafter. I’m planning to read this book while we’re away, and think about it. Are you offended?” Ellen grew quiet. She said, “I’m not offended. I understand completely. I’ll be there for you, like you were there for me when I was asking these questions.”
I read the book, marveling at the clarity and naughtiness of its author. But I really didn’t have to. Just looking at it, just wanting to read it—that already meant I doubted, and I knew that. Before I’d read four pages I already knew my answer. I had left God behind years ago. I was an atheist.
I had no one to talk to about this. One night in that Greek hotel I looked in the mirror and said out loud, “I don’t believe in God.” I said it slowly, enunciating it carefully, in Somali. And I felt relief.
It felt right. There was no pain, but a real clarity. The long process of seeing the flaws in my belief structure and carefully tiptoeing around the frayed edges as parts of it were torn out, piece by piece—that was all over. The angels, watching from my shoulders; the mental tension about having sex without marriage, and drinking alcohol, and not observing any religious obligations—they were gone. The ever-present prosp
ect of hellfire lifted, and my horizon seemed broader. God, Satan, angels: these were all figments of human imagination. From now on I could step firmly on the ground that was under my feet and navigate based on my own reason and self-respect. My moral compass was within myself, not in the pages of a sacred book.
When we got back from Corfu, I began going to museums. I needed to see ruins and mummies and old dead people, to look at the reality of the bones and to absorb the realization that, when I die, I will become just a bunch of bones. I was on a psychological mission to accept living without a God, which means accepting that I give my life its own meaning. I was looking for a deeper sense of morality. In Islam you are Allah’s slave: you submit, and thus, ideally, you are devoid of personal will. You are not a free individual. You behave well because you fear Hell; you have no personal ethic. If God meant only that which is good, and Satan that which is evil, then both were in me. I wanted to develop the good side of me—discipline, generosity, love—and suppress the bad: anger, envy, laziness, cruelty.
I didn’t want any more imaginary guides telling me what to do, but I needed to believe I was still moral. Now I read the works of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Mill, Voltaire—and the modern ones, Russell and Popper, with my full attention, not just as a class assignment. All life is problem solving, Popper says. There are no absolutes; progress comes through critical thought. Popper admired Kant and Spinoza but criticized them when he felt their arguments were weak. I wanted to be like Popper: free of constraint, recognizing greatness but unafraid to detect its flaws.
Three hundred and fifty years ago, when Europe was still steeped in religious dogma and thinkers were persecuted—just as they are today in the Muslim world—Spinoza was clear-minded and fearless. He was the first modern European to state clearly that the world is not ordained by a separate God. Nature created itself, Spinoza said. Reason, not obedience, should guide our lives. Though it took centuries to crumble, the entire ossified cage of European social hierarchy—from kings to serfs, and between men and women, all of it shored up by the Catholic Church—was destroyed by this thought.
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