by Ian Buruma
Marco was not a believer in any religion. When he gave her a copy of a book called The Atheist Manifesto, written by a Dutch philosophy professor named Herman Philipse, she refused to read it. Such a document had to be the devil’s work, she thought. Four years later, when she was sharing rooms with a young Christian woman from Ede, she asked Marco to send her the manifesto again. This was one year after 9/11. Doubts in Ayaan’s mind had provoked arguments with her roommate, who stuck to her faith. On holiday in Greece, Ayaan finally read the manifesto. It posed all the questions she had been asking herself. “I was ready for it now,” she wrote later. “I saw that God was a fiction and that submission to his will is surrendering to the will of the strongest.”5
No longer an anchor (or chain) of security, Islam, for Ayaan, had become “the problem.” She wrote: “We must face the facts and give migrants what they lack in their own culture: individual dignity. Young Muslim girls in the Netherlands, who still have a spark in their eyes, need not go through what I did.”
Holland is a small country. Herman Philipse and I had played in the same sandpit at a kindergarten in The Hague. I remembered him as a somewhat pompous child who spoke with great conviction even then. Tall and handsome, with a taste for bow ties and French phrases, he cuts a rather quaint figure, a kind of nineteenth-century gentleman, the sort of man who likes to personify the high European civilization of the French Enlightenment, equally at home in drawing rooms of The Hague and the high tables of Oxford, where he also teaches.
It was, in its way, a perfect match: the rebellious daughter of a Somali democrat, with the elegant bearing of an aristocrat, and the smooth Dutch professor of philosophy, who could hold forth most eloquently about all the values that she aspired to: Reason, Order, and Freedom—of conscience, speech, and enterprise. That they had a rather public love affair would not be worthy of mention were it not that intellectual, political, and sexual liberty were intimately linked in Ayaan’s mind. Her encounter with Philipse’s words and person offered her a membership in that self-appointed elite, the public defenders of the Enlightenment. Like all converts, she did not take her membership lightly. As did her comrade-in-arms, Afshin Ellian, she soon felt as though she were surrounded in her adopted land by men and women who had fallen so deeply into the pit of moral decadence that they could never be counted on in the war against the forces of darkness.
8.
It was of the Enlightenment that she spoke when we first met in Paris, moving from café to café, infuriating her Dutch bodyguards. She began by admonishing me for having written in a magazine article about her harsh experiences, as though they explained anything about her views. Her arguments, she said, not without reason, had to be judged on their own merits. They were based on her reading of Karl Popper, she explained, and Spinoza, and Hayek, and Norbert Elias. She was in her element at the Café de Flore, basking in the early summer sunshine, watching the young men and women go by in their thin summer clothes, holding hands, kissing, and generally carrying on in pursuit of private pleasures. “Coming from a tribal world,” she said, “it was so good to read books about individuals as social beings.”
Islam was the problem, but there was hope, she believed, even for the women in Saudi Arabia, where they can’t even drive cars. For there were “shortcuts” to the Enlightenment. It didn’t have to take hundreds of years. All you needed to do was “free yourself intellectually.” The great thing about the Enlightenment, she said, with a spark of almost religious fervor in her eyes, was that “it strips away culture, and leaves only the human individual.”
It takes courage for an African immigrant in Europe to say that, even if she is from a privileged class. For a man like Herman Philipse, secure of his rightful place at the high table of European civilization, it is easier to dismiss culture in this way, for there is much that he can take for granted. There is no need for shortcuts if you are educated to believe in universality and individualism; they are products of the civilization to which Philipse was born. Not that this idea of civilization is universally shared in the West. Ayaan’s individualism made the social-democratic PVDA an odd party to choose as the platform for her political career. She was attracted to the Social Democrats because of their “social conscience,” but culture, for them, was all-important; the “identity” of immigrants in a multicultural society had to be protected, even encouraged. To Ayaan this was nothing less than a trahison des clercs.
Her dream of liberation for the Muslims in the West is sabotaged, she believes, “by the Western cultural relativists with their anti-racism offices, who say: ‘If you’re critical of Islam, you’re a racist, or an Islamophobe, or an Enlightenment fundamentalist.’ Or: ‘It’s part of their culture, so you musn’t take it away.’ This way, the cage will never be broken. Westerners who live off dispensing public welfare, or development aid, or representing minority interests, have made a satanic pact with Muslims who have an interest in preserving the cage.”6
What makes Ayaan Hirsi Ali such a fascinating and controversial figure is her role in a European civil war that has raged, intellectually and sometimes bloodily, for many centuries, the war between collectivism and individualism, the ideal of universal rights and values versus the pull of the tribal soil, the Enlightenment versus the Counter-Enlightenment, spirit of faith versus enlightened self-interest, the hero versus the merchant. Hearing Ayaan talk reminded me sometimes of Margaret Thatcher: the same unyielding intelligence, the same impatience with those from a similar background who lack the wherewithal to “make it,” and the same fascination with America. When refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria fled to Britain in the late 1930s, the more conservative ones, who admired the dense network of English traditions, settled there, while the radicals usually moved on to the more rugged terrain of the U.S. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is clearly a radical.
“Ah, yes,” she said at the Café de Flore, when I asked her about America, “I feel at home in New York, where you see people of all colors. Some are so black they’re almost blue. And there are a lot of people of color who do very well, which simply confirms that there is nothing genetic about success.”
It was only to be expected, then, that Ayaan would leave the Social Democrats to join the free enterprise party, the VVD. Delighted to have a beautiful black critic of the welfare state and Muslim radicalism in a party that was, overall, very male and very white, she was welcomed as a walking Statue of Liberty. But this move alienated her even further from the progressives on the Left, who saw her now not just as an enemy of multiculturalism, but as a renegade as well. It gave rise to the common slur that Ayaan was the darling of middle-aged conservative white men—professors of Enlightenment philosophy, guardians of European values, advocates for the rights of Dutch “natives” who live in fear of the alien threat.
In fact, she was too radical for the VVD too. The leaders of this typical party of regenten hate nothing more than rocking the boat, and that is precisely what Ayaan was aiming to do. She was always more an activist than a politician, and the compromises and deals that are the bread and butter of politicians were not for her. Like Pim Fortuyn, or Van Gogh, she wanted to stir things up. Her real ambition was to be the Voltaire of Islam, to attack the faith, écraser l’infame. “What Muslim culture needs,” she wrote, are “books, soaps, poems, and songs that show what’s what and mock the religious rules….” What was needed, in her view, was a film like Life of Brian, the British spoof on Jesus Christ. What was needed was a movie about the prophet Mohammed, directed by an Arab Theo van Gogh.
8.
I met Funda Müjde, the Turkish-Dutch actress, cabaret artiste, and newspaper columnist, at a café in Amsterdam-Noord, an old working-class district across the bay from the Central Station. Her father had worked there once, living in makeshift barracks for Turkish guest workers, named the Atatürk Camp. He arrived in the 1960s, in search of a better, more independent life, and education for his children. Before he received his work permit in Ankara, a doctor probed his mouth and anus, a
s though he were a workhorse. Dutch labor recruiters favored illiterate men, who would give less trouble to their new bosses.
Amsterdam-Noord is a district of modest family houses built in the 1920s for workers in the dockyards, now long since defunct. A plaque on one of the houses evokes the renewed hopes of those days, after the mass slaughter of World War I: “The sun of peace had been obscured. The Czar was murdered, the Kaiser deposed. But here we build and work without pause….”
There is a large new mosque in the midst of the neat little row houses. Bearded men in djellabas stand around the entrance, or sit on benches, conversing in Berber. A few minutes’ walk from the mosque is the shelter for abused women, run by Paul Scheerder, a Dutchman who converted to Islam after marrying his Moroccan wife. When I last saw him, he told me how difficult things had been after 9/11, and then again after the murder of Van Gogh, when Muslims were afraid of being spat at or insulted. Officials had become tougher and sometimes abusive, especially, he said, the bureaucrats who were from immigrant families themselves. It was they, the sons of Moroccan or Turkish workers, who deliberately refused to take their shoes off inside people’s homes, who trampled over prayer mats, who made an old Egyptian take off his shirt to show his fresh operation scar to make sure he wasn’t lying about going off on sick leave. They knew, better than any native Dutch person, all the subtle and not so subtle ways to humiliate a fearful allochtoon.
Funda Müjde is a handsome woman with short black hair. Her speech and gestures are those of an Amsterdam actress, quick, slangy, a little theatrical, her words tumbling over one another, not always in the right order. In 2003, she took part in a traveling theater show entitled Veiled Monologues. Intimate experiences of Muslim women were retold onstage by a cast of Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch actresses, experiences such as losing one’s virginity or masturbation, not subjects that Muslim women are used to discussing in public. Ayaan once told me this was one of the most surprising things to her, when she first arrived in the West—the way women talked openly about their sex lives.
The Veiled Monologues had been inspired by The Vagina Monologues. Aside from the professional cast, well-known Dutch women were invited to read monologues on stage. Ayaan was one of those well-known women.
“A giga-success!” said Funda, which she found delightful but also disturbing. “When it comes to Islam,” she explained, “all you need to do is fart to get attention.” The other thing that disturbed her was the nature of the audience. Partly because of the high price of a ticket, few Muslim women turned up. The monologues on Muslim lives were performed largely for middle-class non-Muslims. The original idea, to use the stage to start a discussion among Muslims, proved to be an illusion.
Funda admires Ayaan Hirsi Ali, salutes her courage, and yet cannot hide her disapproval, not so much of what she says, but of the way she says it, of her attitude, her style. She tried to explain: “I’ve lived in Holland much longer than Ayaan. I’m more a part of this society than she is. I’ve worked with refugees for fourteen years. And I’ve always resisted the kind of people who cut themselves off from their own kind and then behave arrogantly because they’re ashamed of their own background.” Listening to these accusations, I thought of the rap group in The Hague and their loathing of the “filthy indigenous clone.”
There was an element of one-upmanship here, a kind of competition which Ayaan could not possibly win on the basis of reason. Rivalry among immigrants is not just a matter of age, or birth. One day, on the tram in Amsterdam, I saw a black Surinamese scold an elderly Turkish man who was standing in his way. He berated him for not speaking “proper Dutch like everybody else.” In a kebab joint, near the Central Station, I got into a conversation about the European Union with the owner, an Arab from Nazareth. The Dutch, following the French, had just voted against the proposed EU constitution. How had he voted? “ ‘No,’ of course,” he replied in fluent, accented Dutch. This was the way he saw it: “Soon, those Turks and other foreigners will want to join Europe, but they’re still fifty years behind. We can’t afford to wait for them.”
Funda was aware that Turks in the Netherlands got better press than the Moroccans. This made her feel a bit guilty. But she pointed out that Turks were different from Moroccans. Even among the illiterate Turks, such things as democracy, women’s rights, and education for girls were taken for granted. “Turks,” she said, “feel a strong sense of superiority. We were always independent, while Morocco was under foreign control.”
Although she speaks Turkish and visits Turkey regularly, Funda feels entirely at home in the Netherlands. And yet she has always been aware that “something ugly lurks under the surface.” It comes out in the hate mail she receives, especially after she began writing columns for a popular conservative newspaper. Every time she writes something critical about her own country, Holland, she is told to “fuck off back to where you came from!”
Funda didn’t hide her indignation; indeed, she acted it out in a flourish of angry gestures. Her hate mail was not always the same, however; the tone had changed with time. “In 2000 I was called a ‘filthy Turk.’ After 2001, and the rise of Pim Fortuyn, it was ‘filthy foreigner [allochtoon].’ After Hirsi Ali, it was ‘filthy Muslim.’ ” She doesn’t blame Ayaan for this. “It’s not about her. It’s about the Dutch. What’s being spat out now, was always there.”
Not that Theo van Gogh was like that. Funda worked with him once, in a television soap opera, not unlike Najib and Julia, about a Turkish mother (played by Funda) who tries to stop her daughter from seeing a Dutch boyfriend. She adored working with Theo: “He was an absolute sweetie, even though he could say the most terrible things.” Theo, she said, could be persuaded to make the Turkish roles more realistic, less like stereotypes. But he had a silly streak: “One day he told me he had smuggled a line into the script that was broadcast without anyone noticing. The line was: ‘I fucked Allah.’ He was so pleased, just like a child.”
9.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film Submission, directed by Theo van Gogh, is based on the same formula as Veiled Monologues. But it goes a step further. When Veiled Monologues was first performed in Amsterdam, a poster showing a woman in a see-through black burqa was quickly replaced after Muslim activists threatened to smash the windows of the theater. A new poster showed the same woman, fully covered. The first shot in Submission shows a woman about to kneel on a prayer mat. The camera slowly pans from her head down to her toes, revealing her naked body under the diaphanous material of her burqa. Later in the elevenminute film we see texts from the Koran projected onto the skin of several naked women, texts that point to the submission of women, submission to their fathers, brothers, husbands, and to Allah. For many Muslims, this was a deliberate provocation.
Ayaan would not disagree. She meant it to be provocative. She expected “a section of the Muslim world to come down on me.” But “if you want to get a discussion going, and needle people into thinking, you must confront them with dilemmas.” Ayaan believes that “anything short of physical and verbal violence should be permissible.”7 It was fine, then, to show a naked woman writhing on the floor, with livid wounds on her back and thighs, talking about being flogged for making love with her boyfriend. Over her wounds we read the words from the Koran: “The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication—flog each of them with a hundred stripes….”
It was all right to show the naked back of another woman, who tells the story of being raped by her unwanted husband:
Undress, he orders me, and I submit
Not to him, but to You.
Lately, enduring my husband is getting harder and harder.
O, Allah, I pray, give me the strength to endure him
Or I fear
My faith shall weaken.
Or a third woman, her face swollen and disfigured by bruises from being beaten by her tyrannical husband:
Oh, God, most elevated, submission to Your will assures me of a better life in the hereafter,
But I
feel the price I pay for my husband’s protection and maintenance is too high,
I wonder how much longer I will submit.
Or the fourth, raped by her uncle in her own home, and then abandoned when she is pregnant, knowing she will be killed by her father for bringing shame to the family:
Oh, Allah, giver and taker of life.
You admonish all who believe to turn towards You in order to attain bliss.
I have done nothing my whole life but turn to You.
And now that I pray for salvation, under my veil,
You remain silent as the grave I long for.
I wonder how much longer I will be able to submit.
Her closest friends advised her against making this film. They thought nothing good could possibly come of it. But Ayaan had an answer to all doubters and critics, which deserves respect, if nothing else. She wrote: “In the long history of Jews and Christians searching for enlightenment, there are bound to have been people who called the strategy of analyzing sacred texts—to show how ridiculous, cruel, or unjust they were—counterproductive. I copied my strategy from the Judeo-Christian criticism of faith-based absolutism. That is how Submission Part I* must be seen. How effective my chosen strategy is should be clear to anyone who knows the history of Western criticism of religion.”
It is hard to disagree in principle. Whether she was wise is another matter. But wisdom is not always the quickest way to necessary change. Those who dare to challenge the dogmas that justify oppression are not always wise. Resistance is not always wise. But it can be necessary. The problem in the case of Ayaan’s film is the intended target. She wrote it in English, so it must have been meant for an international audience. Theo van Gogh spoke of trying to sell it to the Arabic television station Al Jazeera, a bold but astonishingly naive idea. If the film was intended for the ayatollahs of Iran, or the imams of Saudi Arabia, or the patriarchs in Rif mountain villages, the chances they would ever see it were virtually nil. The film was shown only on a highbrow cultural program on Dutch TV. In this limited context, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was no Voltaire. For Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church, one of the two most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.