Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  When Malik asked his friend what on earth he was doing at the Bradford Council of Mosques, Hassan replied that he was involved in the campaign “to silence the blasphemer.” Malik could no longer recognize his old comrade, whom he remembered as a good-time type who used to enjoy chasing girls, drinking, and watching the Arsenal football club. “No need to look so shocked,” said Hassan. “I’ve had it with the white Left. I’d lost my sense of who I am and where I came from. So I came back to Bradford to rediscover it. We need to defend our dignity as Muslims, to defend our values and beliefs, and not allow anyone—racist or Rushdie—to trample over them.”17 Malik followed the other path, of leftists who joined the Kulturkampf against multiculturalism.

  What Hassan’s story illustrates is that the pull of religious ideology is not usually a theological one but has everything to do with political rage. To explain the Rushdie case in terms of the Koran, or the Muslim tradition, is misleading. The turn to religion to forge a sense of self, of community, of strength is akin to what happened in the United States in the 1960s, when a political movement in which black and white activists had stood together did not produce the desired results. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Malcolm X was assassinated. Black Power, and The Nation of Islam, asserting black identity, and rejecting white society, became the new politics. This was the kind of choice made by Hassan but also by Mohammad Sidique Khan. The killings on the London underground began with the burning of Rushdie’s book. Both acts were perpetrated in the name of Islam, not the traditional Islam of rural Pakistan but a new purist, reinvention of Islam. Politics and faith had converged in a fatal mix.

  Black Power was regarded by many white liberals as a betrayal. Was this their reward for having braved the police dogs and guns of Birmingham and Selma together with the Negroes? In his famous essay, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,”18 the New York intellectual Norman Podhoretz described his bitter experiences with blacks in his native Brooklyn in the 1940s. Coming from a socialist Jewish family, he was always taught to see the Negro as weak and underprivileged, a figure to be protected against injustice and discrimination. In fact, the Negroes he knew in Brooklyn were not weak at all but tough enough to beat him up in the schoolyard. He envied their toughness and began to despise “the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize the Negroes, and pander to them,” and “all the white liberals who permit the Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment.”19

  Former leftists, like Podhoretz, who turned into neo-conservatives in the 1960s felt betrayed by Negroes who refused to be grateful for white solidarity; and they felt betrayed by white liberals who “pandered” to the Negroes, criticized the Vietnam War, and attacked Israel. They, too, like Hassan, though for different reasons, had had it with the white Left.

  When twelve young Muslims in Bradford stood trial in 1982 for having made petrol bombs to defend themselves against white racist gangs, most liberals supported them. In the event “the Bradford 12” were acquitted. When Bradford Muslims burned Rushdie’s book just seven years later, the sense of betrayal was keen.

  The British playwright David Edgar described the feelings of former leftists, who once joined far Left organizations to support the poor and the oppressed. When their causes collapsed in violence and corruption, rage was turned not just against the parties but against the poor themselves: “The discovery that the poor do not necessarily respond to their victimhood with uncomplaining resignation is as traumatic as the complementary perception that they don’t always behave in a spirit of selfless heroism.” It is hard enough, he continues, “to be fooled by the party; even harder to accept that you deluded yourself into believing that the poor are, by virtue of their poverty, uniquely saintly or strong. No surprise that this realisation turns into a sense of personal betrayal, which turns outwards into blame.”20

  This explains the harsh tone of the present Kulturkampf—this and the constantly revived memories of fascism and a shrill dogmatic attitude that remains from old leftist positions. David Edgar, himself an old campaigner of the Left, put it well: “As former victims of political delusion, these defectors claim a unique authority. But there is something quite particular about spending the second half of your life taking revenge on the first. Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before.”21

  The debate over Islam in Europe is held less in a spirit of finding the truth through open disagreement than of separating friends from foes and fingering traitors, appeasers, and collaborators. This mimics the worst years of the cold war and deliberately echoes the rhetoric of World War II. Islamist radicalism is worrying enough. But we have to recognize it for what it is. To confuse Islamism (let alone Islam per se) with Hitler’s Nazis or Stalin’s Soviet Empire is not the best way to come to grips with it.

  The second iconic figure in the European debate on Islam, after Salman Rushdie, is the activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her story, which began in her native Somalia and is continuing in Europe and the United States, is, like so many others, one of disillusion and conversion. Growing up in exile in Kenya (her father was an opponent of the Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre), she became a Muslim fundamentalist in a fit of teenage rebellion. She covered her body in a hijab, was sympathetic to the Ayatollah’s regime in Iran, and when she heard of Rushdie’s “blasphemy” she wished him dead.

  Hirsi Ali changed after being forced to marry a distant relative in Canada. Although a democrat in politics, her father was a conservative in family matters. En route to Canada, she decided to bolt across the Dutch border, where she applied for political asylum, claiming that she was fleeing the Somalian civil war. Still religious, though no longer in a radical way, she learned Dutch, worked to help fellow refugees, studied political science at Leyden University, and read the Atheist Manifesto, written by a Dutch professor of philosophy. Western life, for her, came as a liberation. Bit by bit, religious constraints fell away. She lived with a Dutch boyfriend, drank alcohol, and gradually became a convinced atheist.

  Since Hirsi Ali was concerned with the lot of immigrant women, oppressed by their husbands and fathers in the name of tradition or Islam, the liberal-Left Dutch Labor Party seemed to be her natural home. She did some research for the party’s think tank. But her conclusions could not have been less congenial to the multicultural party line. Islamic schools should be closed, she argued, immigration limited, and state subsidy for religious education, guaranteed by Article 23 of the Dutch constitutions, stopped. Leftists are in fact not the main supporters of Article 23; the Christian parties are. Nonetheless, her views on Islam and immigration were not considered helpful, especially when she called the Prophet “a pervert” and a “tyrant.” Several Muslims tried to take her to court, without success, for insulting people on the grounds of their faith.

  If Hassan, in Bradford, was fed up with the white Left, so was Hirsi Ali. But she turned not to radical Islam but to the conservative Liberal Party, whose leaders had been warning for some time against the dangers of Islam to the Western way of life. She became more and more outspoken on talk shows and TV programs, and was offered a seat in the Dutch parliament partly as a way to get government protection against Islamist extremists who were threatening to kill her. She spoke out against “honor killings” of women, a cause she described as her “holy mission.”22 She wrote the script for a short film, titled Submission, in which Koranic texts about female oppression were projected onto the naked bodies of veiled women. Theo van Gogh directed the film and was murdered soon after it was shown on television. Calling himself the “village idiot,” he had refused to seek protection and as a private citizen was not offered any.

  That violent Islamism is dangerous is not really in dispute. The question is whether the main cause of this violence is theological or political. Hirsi Ali takes the former view. As a convert to atheism, she finds little favor with any religion, but has a special bone to pick with Islam. The justification
for 9/11, she wrote, was “the core of Islam,” and the “inhuman act of those nineteen hijackers” its “logical outcome.”23 Islam, therefore, must be reformed and the Koran reinterpreted—and even, where necessary, edited or censured. Only then can the threat of radical Islamism be countered.

  There is something to be said for this position. Whether she, as an atheist, is best placed to be a religious reformer is another matter. But there is little room for nuance in the Kulturkampf of contemporary Europe. Ayaan Hirsi Ali became a polarizing figure in the Netherlands: you were either for her or against her. Denunciations flew both ways. Those who promoted her cause were accused of being right-wing Islamophobes, seduced by her dark female beauty. Critics were called, at best, patronizing (because she is a woman) or naïve—the “useful idiots” of our time—but more commonly condemned as appeasers, traitors, or enemies of Enlightenment values.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali had plans to move to the United States even before events in her adopted country made her into an international cause célèbre. First, she was given notice to leave her secured apartment in The Hague after neighbors, anxious about security risks and declining property values, had successfully taken the government to court. Then, Hirsi Ali’s friend and ally in the conservative Liberal Party, the hard-line minister of immigration Rita Verdonk, decided, while running for the party leadership, to get tough on refugees who had applied for asylum under false pretenses. When Hirsi Ali told an interviewer that she, too, had lied, Verdonk threatened to revoke her citizenship, a threat that was swiftly withdrawn after a furious all-night debate in parliament, which left Verdonk a diminished figure.

  By the time Hirsi Ali had moved to the United States to join the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the Kulturkampf had gone global. A petition was drawn up, and was signed by such prominent critics of political Islam as the Canadian activist Irshad Manji, stating that the Dutch treatment of Hirsi Ali exposed “the political agenda of the Dutch government which is to threaten and silence all opponents of Political Islam and defenders of secularism.”24

  Buried under all the posturing, petition writing, and misinformation was a reasoned debate on the merits of Hirsi Ali’s arguments. Instead, Americans wrote smug articles about European cowardice and the superiority of the land of the free (where visas were becoming increasingly difficult to come by for people unfortunate enough to be born in Muslim countries or to just have a Muslim name). When the Dutch government decided, without much tact or grace, that it would no longer pay for Hirsi Ali’s security when she became a permanent resident of the United States, a new round of denunciations and breast-beating ensued. Not that the Dutch policy was any different from Britain’s or France’s, let alone that of the United States, which does not even pay for the security of its own private citizens at home. But “Ayaan” had become so much more than a person; she was a symbol around whom the adversaries in the Kulturkampf clashed.

  This time it was the French who boasted of their superior custodianship of liberty. President Sarkozy stated that France would protect oppressed women all over the world, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the celebrity philosopher, made speeches about “Ayaan” being “disowned” by her “spiritual homeland.” The very “soul of Europe” was at stake, and France should grant her citizenship forthwith. Hirsi Ali was duly grateful: “It’s the outrage, expressed by French intellectuals at the decision of the current Dutch administration to stop protecting me, that gives me strength and hope. Strength, to go on fighting injustices to women in the name of Islam. And hope that my life will be protected, if not by the Dutch government, then hopefully by the French government. . . . Je serais honorée d’avoir la possibilité de devenir française. Merci beaucoup. [I would consider it an honour to become a French citizen. Thank you very much.]”25

  In the event, France did not follow up on its offer to pay for her protection, and Hirsi Ali remains a Dutch citizen, living in the United States. And in October 2007, Salman Rushdie himself piled on yet one more layer of hyperbole, once again deliberately invoking memories of another, very different time. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust.”26

  “The words ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect’ have lost their innocence.”27 So a major Dutch daily newspaper informed its readers after Queen Beatrix had pleaded for “diversity” and “tolerance” in her Christmas speech in 2007. Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician with a fierce anti-Muslim agenda, went further: the Queen’s speech made him “vomit.” It was full of “multi-cultural rubbish.”28

  Tolerance was once considered one of the greatest fruits of the Enlightenment.29 John Locke, whose idea of tolerance was not boundless, had this to say: “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”30

  Locke believed that political authority should not be extended to matters of religion. Although he clearly favored Protestant Christianity, he left space for other faiths. The limits of Locke’s tolerance concerned those who did not believe in any God at all, a position still held by some religious believers today.

  However, Locke was far from condemning tolerance as a form of weakness. Yet that is now a popular view with faint echoes of past anti-liberal positions: tolerance as a typical sign of liberal decadence, as a form of “moral relativism,” nihilism, indifference, even contempt, because, in the words of the French writer Pascal Bruckner, “it assumes that certain communities are incapable of modernising.”31 To be tolerant of the views and customs of religious minorities that go against the mainstream of modern opinion (on sexuality, the role of women, and so forth) is an example of tolerating intolerance, of letting people stew in their own juice without caring about their well-being, or indeed the well-being of Western liberal democracy. The Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, in a critical review of my book about the murder of Theo van Gogh,32 quoted Karl Popper’s words from The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”33

  Popper was right, if by “onslaught” he meant more than intolerant opinions. He was a little vague on this point. Suppressing “intolerant philosophies,” he argued, would “certainly be most unwise” as long as “we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion.” But defenders of the open society, he said, should “claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant” if people were “not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument.” For such people might well end up teaching their followers “to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”34

  The question is when suppression should commence: before or after the use of fists and pistols? Most Western democracies have laws against inciting hatred or violence. Interpreting such incitements is not always easy, and the laws are often too vague. The books of more than one religion contain violent passages. These can be used as incitements, but that is not always the intention (or Jews celebrating Passover would be guilty of extraordinarily threatening language). Social intolerance, in the sense of excluding or even despising non-believers, or homosexuals, or adulterous women, or whatnot, is not in itself an invitation to use violence. A democracy, in order to preserve free speech, should err on the side of caution in these matters and suppress opinions only when a direct link to violent behavior can be proven.

  There is something else, however, underlying the calls to stop being so tolerant. It is an old indictment against liberalism—the idea that the liberal state stands for nothing, is, by dint of its neutrality in questions of belief, quite literally unbelievi
ng. When Pascal Bruckner advocates the duty to “modernize” people, he speaks as a radical French republican with a strong conviction that the state must shape the thoughts and behavior of individual citizens. In its most dogmatic form this resulted in the Terror of 1793, with the slogan: “No freedom for the enemies of freedom.” That President George W. Bush, who was neither a noted Francophile nor, one would have thought, a keen defender of the French Revolution, almost revived this phrase is one of the bitter ironies thrown up by his term in office.

  Those who believe that the state has a duty to instill cultural, moral, or religious beliefs are convinced that we are doomed to decadence if it fails to do so. In the true spirit of Kulturkampf, Melanie Phillips cries out that “Britain is currently locked in such a spiral of decadence, self-loathing and sentimentality, that it is incapable of seeing that it is setting itself up for cultural immolation.”35 She, of course, wishes to restore Christianity as the nation’s cultural spine. Bruckner and other believers in the Jacobin state have a different kind of religion in mind, a civic religion called laïcité, or secularism.

  Secularism goes further than separating church from state or treating religious faith as a private affair. This already is the case, more or less, in Western and indeed non-Western democracies. Secularism is an ideology that must be enforced by a strong state. As the French historian of secularism Jean Baubérot said about his country: “Nation, constitution, law, became ‘sacred things.’ ”36 Some patriotic French citizens like to claim that laïcité is a French exception, a unique product of French Enlightenment philosophes and the French Revolution. In fact, forms of laïcité exist in other countries, too, in Turkey and Mexico, for example.