Ayaan Hirsi Ali is being interviewed on NPR’s Talk of the Nation (in about 5 minutes as I type this). The archive should be available by 6 PM EDT.
Update: Just finished listening to the interview. A.H. Ali was a rather soft-spoken individual, and in 20 minutes she managed to stay on message and remain focused. One, obviously enraged, caller asserted that some individuals (“usually ladies”) have been confused and distorted by their personal history and neglect the reality that true Islam is the most liberating of all religions to women. Another caller, a woman, rather moderate, contended that the problem was not Islam but the cultures. In terms of the first viewpoint, I would assert there is an element of 1 + 1 = 4 in these assertions, obviously they are either denying reality, or redefining the character “1” to be what we would term “2.” Ali responded that if the true Islam is about equal rights, than Muslims and Islam should “prove it” by putting it into practice. On the second point she tried to be careful to distinguish traditional local Muslim traditions from the universalist Islamism that is spreading across borders.
In my post below I contended that mythogies are derived from “public representations.” The problem with representations is that communication of the concepts we have in our mind to other human beings are often only propogated as resemblences, not exact replicas (aside from precise mathematical concepts replicas are very rare indeed). Often public representations are reinforced by visual depiction as well as literary reproduction (consider the visual motifs dominant in Catholicism which supplement the homilies of the priesthood and the text of the Bible). When people try to assert that A is really not the way that someone else is defining A it gets into the problem that both individuals have their own conceptions of what the other person conceives, and both perceptions are almost certainly imperfect (consider the degeneration of comment threads as posters begin to start debating phantoms of their own perception of the other’s argument than the argument at hand). Fixation on axiomatic definitions can help to get around such things, but often the definitions make the term useless in practical application. From a non-religious perspective all this basically means that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s response that Muslims need to “prove” the character of Islam through their deeds is the only practical way to make heads and tails of the problem of Muslim integration into European society. Trying to figure out the basis of “true Islam” won’t get us anywhere.
Addendum: One thing that often happens with religious mythologies is that the fact that those who espouse them strongly believe in their truth tends to also distort the debate. Consider a comment on Sepia Mutiny, a browno-centric American weblog, from a few weeks ago. The commentor states, “Also another subtle fact that you fail to realise is that a lot of the “conservative values” that desi Muslims hold are actually expressed not because of Islamic doctrine but also out of desi values….There is no hadiths or Quranic sura sating this but I beleive this is found in Manusmriti.” There are few points here, the commentor, obviously a believing Muslim is basically trying to fob off some of the behaviors of Muslim brown individuals on the fact that Hinduism has within it some retrograde practices and edicts, and brown Muslims are derived from the same South Asian substrate where Hinduism is ubiquitous (the Manusmriti is a religious code of ethincs and practice devised by the Hindu sage Manu). This is, as far as it goes, not incorrect in that many South Asian Muslims do unwittingly internalize Hindu values and outlooks without thinking about it. The most glaring example for me is that in my experience at mosque the South Asians had the most particular attitude toward what was halal or not, a clear reflection I think of the numerous food taboos within South Asian non-Muslim culture (the higher your social status within Hinduism, the greater the number you food taboos, usually).
Nevertheless, there is a tendency for Muslims of somewhat modernist bent to simply deny that misogyny is any part of Islam, and somehow it seems that Islamic “culture” was derived wholly from retrograde Byzantine, Persian or South Asian sources. It is as if Islam is simply nothing more than the five pillars at the essential Sunnah and Hadith, a plain set of axioms to live one’s life by. This sort of conception of religion is highly sterile, and rathe ahistorical. But, it gives one the option of simply defining away unpleasant historical or social truths. Some evangelical Protestant Christians engage in the same sort of redefinition, they will deny that Christianity is a religion at all, it is simply belief in Christ, a sui generis state totally absent any other implications or complications.
For any discourse to continue this sort of redefinition and ceding the high ground of semantics to true believers needs to stop. In the American context I know that many people of pluralist and tolerant bent are inclined to giving Muslims the pass when it comes to assertions that it is not Islam, but the “culture,” which exhibits retrograde tendencies. In constrast the same liberties are not extended to conservative Christians (whose practices tend to more mild when viewed through a critical socially liberal angle). Nevertheless, conservative Christians engage in the same tendency, they are clear about the difference between True Christianity, and the distortions that plagued the faith after its early period (radical Protestant sects are aided in their denial of the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic period of dominance). Like Muslims I have even heard evangelical Christians simply ascribe negative coercive patterns in medieval faith to the Roman or Greek pagan heritage (making analogies to the Christian persecutions as evidence of the intolerance of those cultures toward dissent).
Culture can not be easily diced and sliced, religion can not be hived off into a separate cognitive cell with an assertion or two. With caution and proper research I do believe various strands of a culture can be teased apart and examined in isolation, but the pattern of the modern debate is far too flippant and tends to be subordinated toward the ideologically biased truth values espoused by the parties concerned.
Posted by razib at 10:24 AM