Darling of cultural warriors

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata in many Muslim circles. Fiercely independent and with little concern for the sensibilities of others, she is not afraid to take Muslims out of their comfort zone.

The writer, award-winning human rights activist and former politician openly states that she is an ex-Muslim, and that she does not believe in any divine figure.

Given the suffering she went through as a child in war-torn Somalia and through genital mutilation, I cannot help but admire her to some extent. Suffering generates its own reverence.

Many Muslims have attacked Ayaan for her ignorance of Islam as well as for her links with far-right groups in the Netherlands - which gave her political asylum and where she became a member of Parliament - and now in the United States. She certainly has become a darling of cultural warriors who are fond of her “insider” critique and “exposure” of aspects of Islam and Muslim cultures which Muslims allegedly try to hide.

Whatever one may think of her leaving Islam, Ayaan’s knowledge of the Muslim societies she condemns is certainly lacking. I discovered this during a robust 45-minute discussion with her on June 5 in Sydney. Our discussion covered political, social, cultural and theological issues.

Ayaan was in Australia as a guest of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Although she was chief guest, many in the writers’ establishment were sceptical of her. After being exposed as an immigration fraud (she had used the word “fraud” to describe her asylum application during an interview with Dutch journalist), she left the Netherlands in disgrace.

Some years back, a number of Australian writers’ festivals had made a huge issue of Norma Khoury, the author of Forbidden Love, a book dealing with the “honour killing” of her Jordanian Muslim friend Dalia. Norma claimed to be in hiding in Queensland, allegedly fearing for her life from Dalia’s family members. Her book became a huge bestseller and was used by cultural warriors to attack Muslim cultures and to reinforce the stereotype of violence in Muslim families. Norma was regarded as an untouchable figure in Australia.

However, taking enormous personal risks and following an 18-month investigation in three countries, then literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald Malcolm Knox declared her a literary fraud. The writing establishment and her publishers ended up with egg on their faces. It’s little wonder so many have been cautious about embracing Ayaan.

Doubts about claims

I must say I have my own doubts about her claims. I reviewed her book The Caged Virgin for The Australian in October 2006. The book is a collection of speeches and articles delivered and written mainly during her period as a member of the Dutch Parliament.

In May last year, following the broadcast of an investigative program on Dutch TV, Ayaan admitted to telling lies about her migration status. The Dutch journalists exposed her as a serial liar who made numerous claims about her family, her past, the countries in which she lived and the circumstances of her allegedly forced marriage.

Those revelations led to Ayaan resigning from Parliament and the downfall of the conservative Dutch government. To many of her Dutch former supporters, she was a hypocrite who happily campaigned for other asylum seekers to be forcibly removed for telling less significant untruths than the ones she told.

It’s unclear whether Ayaan will last very long in the lap of conservatives in America, where she is attached to a think-tank. I have many doubts about her knowledge of her ancestral faith, but I have no doubt about her ability to speak her mind. Her views on abortion and creation science will not sit well with an American conservative establishment that builds its support base on conservative protestant Christians.

She openly describes herself as pro-choice, though she doesn’t believe that abortion should be seen as a form of contraception. In this respect, it is ironic that her views are probably close to those of the mainstream position of the Syariah which she so despises.

Furthermore, she believes that creation science should not be taught in schools. She regards creationism as unscientific, an attempt by religious people to impose religion on secular education. Christian conservatives will therefore have two reasons to dislike her.

Ayaan is also insistent on the separation of religion and state, a staunch secularist who openly opposes anything that she believes compromises secularism. In this respect, her opposition to the current government in Turkey is most unusual. She told me that Turkey is a staunchly secular country and that the AK Party wants to re-unite religion and state. She also claimed that the party wants to implement Syariah as the law of the land. Her evidence was that the justice minister allegedly tried to change Turkish law to make adultery a criminal offence.

I’m not sure if her claims are true. Even if they are, how is declaring adultery a “mere” criminal offence an example of implementing Syariah when Islamic law insists that this be treated as a capital offence with a mandatory death penalty? And was the proposed crime one of adultery or one of public indecency (having sexual intercourse in public), regarded as a crime in many Western jurisdictions?

Ayaan’s commentary on Turkey is just one example of a tendency to talk about issues way beyond her league. She suggests Kemalist secularism involves a separation of church and state.

As far back as 1981, Turkish political scientist Dr Binnaz Toprak wrote in Islam And Political Development in Turkey that the “Kemalist version of separating Church and State took a different form from what is generally understood by the term … Mustafa Kemal’s program of secularisation defeated its own purpose. Religious institutions were not separated from the State but rather became subservient to it.”

Sweeping statements

Ayaan’s most unusual claim is that the dominant strand of Islam in Indonesia is wahhabism, and that Saudi Arabia funds the majority of Indonesian religious schools. I asked her if she had been to Indonesia.

She replied: “Do I have to go there to know a self-evident truth? Do I have to have lived in Salem to know of witch hunts?”

When I asked for evidence for her claims about Indonesia, it was clear she was the one conducting the witch hunt of the world’s largest Muslim country. She stated that religious schools in Indonesia are called “madressas”. She looked confused when I used the term pesantran, and even more so when I spoke of an organisation called Nahdatul Ulama which runs Indonesia’s largest network of pesantran.

Her evidence that al-Qaida influence in Indonesia is growing is based on the number of Indonesians who took part in protests against the Danish cartoons on Prophet Mohammed. I’m not sure how protesting against cartoons is evidence of al-Qaida membership.

I cited a report in the Asian media which said some 600 people took part in the protest at the Danish embassy. That’s 600 people in a city of nine million. Could ideas which only galvanise 0.0067 per cent of a community represent evidence of a substantial growth in their popularity?

She then claimed that Muslim extremists in Indonesia are calling for Syariah law to be implemented. I asked whether she had any evidence of this in terms of Indonesia’s electoral politics. She had no idea. I advised her of a speech delivered to conservative Sydney think-tank The Centre for Independent Studies by legal academic and Nahdatul Ulama leader Mohammad Fajrul Falaakh. He said that in each successive Indonesian election since independence, the number of seats held by pro-Syariah parties has actually reduced.

Ayaan is happy to make sweeping statements about a diverse range of societies whose only common feature is some element of Islam. She has not travelled through Muslim countries and met Muslim communities.

One would think that, as a former Dutch MP, she would have had occasion to meet many Indonesians living or studying in the Netherlands. Indonesian and other sources of classical Islam are freely available in universities such as Leiden, also home to the respected International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. The country has no shortage of scholarly material on Islamic cultures and theology, almost none of which is reflected in this book.

Yet none of this appears to have left any impression on Ayaan. I left the interview feeling sympathy - for her, after all the terrible suffering she went through as a child, but more so for all the Islam-haters out there who could not find a more credible “insider” to promote their cause.