From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Social workers in the West will tell you that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion for their mental health, because otherwise they will be confused and their self-esteem destroyed. This is untrue.

  The idea that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion promotes the perception of them as victim groups requiring special accommodation, an industry of special facilities and assistance. If people should conform to their ancestral culture, it therefore follows that they should also be helped to maintain it, with their own schools, their own government-subsidized community groups, and even their own system of legal arbitration. This is the kind of romantic primitivism that the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall calls “designer tribalism.” Non-Western cultures are automatically assumed to live in harmony with animals and plants according to the deeper dictates of humanity and to practice an elemental spirituality.

  Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.

  In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

  Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.

  No doubt there was once poetry in Somali clan culture; people dressed in colorful garments; they had a dark and biting sense of humor; they knew strategies for surviving a harsh desert environment that perhaps the world could have learned from. But the multiculturalist belief that Somali clan culture should somehow be preserved, even when its products move to Western societies, is a recipe for social failure. Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.

  Instead of affirming the value of tribal lifestyles, people in the West—activists, thinkers, government officials—should be working to dismantle them. At least they should encourage individuals to escape them, perhaps even by providing specific incentives to those who do. Liberals should be engaged in an active campaign of civilizing—not by colonizing people, but by vigorously trying to educate them, by making freedom attractive to all, as it was conceived in the Enlightenment.

  In the West, individuals free their imagination from the fear of superstition and direct their energies toward the pursuit of their own happiness. This is a great achievement. Of course there are many complacent followers of habit in the West, but individuals who want to pursue happiness on their own terms may do so. Yet Western governments also practice a racism of low expectations: they presume that people from traditional countries are like toddlers who will freeze in growth, who cannot evolve, who will never be able to let go. But I know that they can, for I have done it myself.

  I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. Yet when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenment thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy. Muhammad says my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?

  Every important freedom that Western individuals possess rests on free expression. We observe what is wrong, and we say what is wrong, in order that it may be corrected. This is the message of the Enlightenment, the rational process that developed today’s Western values: Go. Inquire. Ask. Find out. Dare to know. Don’t be afraid of what you’ll find. Knowledge is better than superstition, blind belief, and dogma.

  If you cannot voice—or even consider—criticism, then you will never see what is wrong. You cannot solve a problem unless you identify its source. And if you cannot look at the root of what is wrong with Islam today, then in a very real sense Islam has already defeated the West.

  The Enlightenment honors life. It is not about honor after death or honor in the hereafter, as Islam is, but honor in individual life, now. It is about development of the individual will, not the submission of the will. Islam, by contrast, is incompatible with the principles of liberty that are at the heart of the Enlightenment’s legacy. Yet more and more people are coming to the West from countries where life is organized according to tribal custom and increasingly subjected to radical Islam. They introduce customs, practices, and dogmas that preceded the Enlightenment and are indeed clearly anti-Enlightenment.

  Some people in Western society—not only multiculturalists but socialists and Christians who feel there is too much freedom in Western society—admire what they see as the innocence of these immigrants from far away, their purity, their seeming commitment to family values and cultural traditions. When the multiculturalists use the word diversity they assume that immigrants will somehow maintain their traditional culture within the Western way of life and the Western value system, like an exotic exhibit of primitive carving in a smart new museum. Unfortunately for the West, radical Islamists reject diversity, for Islam justifies the oppression of women as well as all kinds of violence, including child marriage and marital rape. The West should eliminate such practices from its own societies and condemn them wherever else they occur across the globe. We cannot do so, however, without acknowledging that there is something wrong with the religion that justifies them.

  Besides being accused of blasphemy, I have been accused of bad manners. But good manners should not be confused with free speech. Having good manners means that when I meet a closet Islamist like the Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan, I don’t pour my glass of water on his head and call him names. Exercising free speech means that I can call his book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, a badly written piece of proselytism and say that he doesn’t deserve the title of professor or a university chair from which to propagate his program of medieval brainwashing. All this will no doubt offend Ramadan, but you cannot subject Karl Marx to scrutiny and give the Prophet Muhammad a free ride.

  Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

  The Muslim mind can be opened. Hard-line Islam offers an ideal of martyrdom and a lifestyle of self-denial that is difficult to maintain. Many people, perhaps especially girls, feel trapped in the web of rules and strictures that extreme Islam demands. It is difficult to pray five times a day, to marry a man you have not chosen, and to live a life of continual self-denial. Over the long term it becomes unbearable.

  Many Muslims recognize the weaknesses in Islam. For example, a significant proportion of the mail forwarded to me is written by Muslims who agree with what I say. But they will not join me in atheism, because they still believe there must be a God. This is not easy for an atheist like me to admit, but it appears that the painstaking construction of a personal ethic is not enough for many peo
ple.

  An Afghani living in California wrote me recently, “I support you and your mission. The only difference between you and me is that I covertly fight the religion of Islam and you, openly…. Please know that you are not alone. There is a silent crowd who agree with you and who are fighting Islam. I have my family to look after, but you’re giving me the courage to speak up openly.”

  A Muslim woman in Canada wrote, “I have struggled with the belief system of my people for some time now, yet I am so afraid of speaking out. Speaking out comes at a price, doesn’t it? I wish I was able to just disbelieve in silence and shut out the xenophobia, the homophobia and the irrationality of my people, but the hypocrisy of it all is a pain that eats away at me daily. Surely you were informed, the price one loses for disowning Islam is grave.”

  A woman from Sudan living in Virginia e-mailed me, “I felt what was required of me as a Muslim woman was to hate your book but then I read it and I identified with you. Every emotion that you tried to bring to words in the book, I have felt. Every mental conflict that you had within yourself I have felt…. I find myself wanting to understand Islam but not being able to do so. What is it that makes Islam so enticing and perfect to my parents but so flawed to me?…. I don’t denounce Islam because I believe there is some truth to it—and if I were to renounce Islam, where would I go?” She continues, “Am I destined to hell because I did not accept what my parents destined for me?” And yet she concludes, “I don’t think I have the courage to do what you have done, to question Islam as you have.”

  Such letters show that I am not the only Muslim woman who has dared to challenge her upbringing and faith. But there has never been a clear-cut attempt to win the hearts and minds of Muslims to the idea of critical thinking. Close textual analysis of the Quran is a start, because it will feed doubt, but it is only a start. Novels, musicals, comedies, short stories, comics, cartoons, and movies that are critical of Islamic dogma can be made. But hardly any are actually being made because of the fear of sparking violence. Take the case of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who drew the cartoon of Muhammad wearing a bomb in his turban. Since the cartoon was published in the fall of 2005 he has survived two attempts on his life. In the most recent one, a Somali man carrying an axe and a knife broke into his home. Scooping up his five-year-old granddaughter, Westergaard ran into a bathroom that had been transformed into a secure area and alerted the police, who came in time to catch the perpetrator. This incident, like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the assassination of his Japanese translator, and the attempted murder of his Norwegian publisher, is bound to discourage Muslims with doubts about Islam and Westerners who want to take on the principles and icons of Islam. Terror is effective.

  In recent years the persecution of people in Western societies for their ideas has become a part of our mental landscape. Salman Rushdie has lived under a sentence of death by fatwa for twenty years. Taslima Nasreen, who was brave enough to say that Islam doesn’t permit democracy and violates human rights, now lives in hiding, without even an apartment to call her own. Irshad Manji in Canada and Wafa Sultan in the United States, women who have dared to criticize Islam in public, now require protection, as I do, and an intellectual like Ibn Warraq, the author of Quest for the Historical Muhammad and the impressive Why I Am Not a Muslim, must publish under pseudonyms.

  It is not a trivial thing to know that, even in the West, if you criticize or even analyze a particular religion you may require protection for the rest of your life, that if you speak out about Islam you may start a riot or a massive international campaign, and that perhaps you yourself will become a target, stalked, ostracized, even murdered. It is an unpleasant option. Most people, consciously or not, seek to avoid it. Fear has an effect.

  Thus slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, people begin to get used to not saying certain things, or they say them but certainly won’t write them. The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing or questioning certain practices, certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their own values. Once they have done that, their society is lost.

  CHAPTER 15

  Dishonor, Death,

  and Feminists

  On New Year’s Eve 2007, in a suburb of Dallas, an Egyptian man, Yaser Said, shot his nineteen- and seventeen-year-old daughters in the back of his taxi. He then parked in the driveway of a hotel and absconded, leaving their bodies in the cab.

  Amina, the older girl, had been awarded a $20,000 scholarship for college; she had dreamed of becoming a doctor. She told her friends that her dad was angry because she had refused to marry the man whom he had chosen for her, who lived in Egypt. Her father, who came to America in 1983, was enraged to learn that both his daughters secretly dated American boys, Eddie and Eric, whom they had met in school.

  Yaser Said was known to be fanatical about his daughters’ virtue. He made them stop working at a local grocery store after months of monitoring their movements; their former coworkers said he had watched the girls clock in and out like a stalker. He had physically hurt both girls before. There were reports by family members that he had threatened to kill them for going out with boys. Their mother, an American woman from a troubled family, who married Said at the age of fifteen, told police that on Christmas Day she and the girls had fled their home in Lewisville because she feared he would kill them. “Me Mina and my Mom r running away!” Sarah Said texted a friend. “My dad found out abt Mina and is goin to kill us.”

  But a few days later their mother relented. She took Amina and Sarah back to Lewisville and persuaded them to go to a restaurant with their father, so the three of them could talk. About an hour later the younger girl, Sarah, called 911 from her cell phone and said she was dying.

  I found all this out on the Internet. The story filled me with pity and rage. These girls were so promising, cut down so senselessly. Both of them were good at sports, popular; their MySpace pages, which I pored over, showed they were striking beauties, bright-eyed, taking funny poses, though I thought I saw a sadness in Amina’s eyes.

  I had had to flee my family, to escape my fate as a Muslim girl. Alone in Europe, I cast aside a destiny of confinement and threats. I severed the bloodline that my grandmother imprinted in my mind. I rejected the notion that I was intended only to serve and honor others all my life, and in time I will cease to feel the pain of being called a traitor. But these teenagers were born in the United States. It should have been easy for them. They had told their friends how frightened they were; they predicted what was going to happen. But nobody took them seriously, because nobody believed it could happen in America.

  I was scheduled to go to Texas in February 2008 to give speeches at the University of North Texas and at a meeting of the World Affairs Council in a Dallas hotel. I thought that I would learn something about the murders; I assumed that people would be talking about them, since they had happened barely ten miles from the hotel where I was staying. Everywhere I went I asked about them. But almost no one seemed even to have heard about the killing of Amina and Sarah Said. To my relief a lone journalist nodded at the mention of it. But others were perplexed. An honor killing? In Dallas? In Texas? In America? They didn’t know. They were earnest, horrified at their ignorance. (Americans, if they don’t know about something, will often just say so, with great innocence and frankness, which still surprises me. As a Somali I was brought up to feel ashamed if I didn’t know something and to try to hide it.)

  The murder of the Said sisters had in fact received very little attention in the local media. Almost all the articles that were written were careful to state that it hadn’t been an honor killing, and that, even if it had, honor killings had nothing at all to do with Islam. Every article quoted Amina and Sarah’s brother, a scrawny nineteen-year-old named Islam Said, who sai
d, “Why is it every time an Arab father kills a daughter, it’s an honor killing? It didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  This was apparently enough for the reporters to dismiss the notion that the girls’ murders represented an honor killing. Even the FBI shied away from the term, at first stating on its website that Yaser Said was wanted for an honor killing, then withdrawing the term after criticism by Muslim groups.

  This, of course, is just how self-censorship works. We do not wish to offend. We fear the perception that we might be acting disrespectfully. And we fear the possibility of retaliation.

  But you will never solve a problem if you don’t look at it clearly. Ignoring the role that honor—and Islam—almost certainly played in the Said sisters’ murders will only allow more murders to happen. If you don’t talk about it, other people won’t be able to spot the signs. Insight into the pattern that eventually leads to murder is an aid to educators, social workers, law enforcement officials, and neighbors and friends of potential victims.

  So what exactly is an honor killing? An honor killing happens when a girl shames her family’s reputation to the point where the only hope for them to restore that honor is to kill her. Her offense almost always relates to sex. She has been alone with a man who is not a relative, or she has resisted a forced marriage, or she has been going out with a boy of her own choice. The offenses can be even more trivial. Possibly she is completely innocent and is simply suspected of having violated the clan’s code of honor. In August 2007, a Saudi man beat and shot his daughter to death for going on Facebook. The event was publicized only seven months later, when a cleric cited it as evidence that the Internet was damaging Islamic morals. (He showed no concern for the victim.) The father is unlikely to receive any significant punishment for murdering his daughter. In July 2008, a Saudi court sentenced a female chemistry student to 350 lashes and eight months in jail because she had a “telephone relationship” with one of her professors.