A clash of civilisations

[ZombieHorde]

EMMA BROCKES
June 18, 2010 - 11:39PM

Death threats have failed to intimidate an outspoken critic of Islam as she campaigns for a new feminist drive to liberate non-Western women.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali enters an apartment in New York followed by a bodyguard. The 40-year-old, who for the past six years has been unable to turn up at a venue without it being checked by security, is a writer, polemicist and critic of Islam. She is also a Somali immigrant, a former Muslim, a survivor of child genital mutilation, an exile many times over, a former Dutch MP, a black woman whose language would not, in places, look amiss in a far-right pamphlet, a remarked-upon beauty and a lady-in-peril, identities that lend her as a figurehead to disparate causes and confuse the people she meets.

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It was after fleeing an arranged marriage and settling as an asylum-seeker in the Netherlands that Hirsi Ali converted from Islam to atheism with the kind of zeal that usually powers journeys going the other way. She can, she has said, make statements that a white person simply could not: on the "dangers" posed to the West not just by radical but by regular Islam; on the "backward" nature of the religion; on how "terrible" the Koran is; and, in the most startling argument of her new book, Nomad (a follow-up to her best-selling memoir Infidel), how Muslims would do well to learn from Christianity. She is aware of the liberal twitching she causes – what if accusing her of racism is in itself racist? What if her experience trumps all other arguments?

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The accusation that most irritates her – that the events of her life have left her "traumatised" and an easy pawn for right-wing politicians – is, as she says, a sexist presumption. And yet the suspicion remains: that those convictions one arrives at – and fights hardest for – via fraught personal experience are emotional, not rational, and as such beyond reach of most useful debate.

"I'm not being right-wing," she says. "The people who believe themselves to be on the left, and who defend the agents of Islam in the name of tolerance and culture, are being right-wing. Not just right-wing. Extreme right-wing. I don't understand how you can be so upset about the Christian right and just ignore the Islamic right. I'm talking about equality." (She is seeing the right-wing historian Niall Ferguson, whom, she wrote recently in a Dutch magazine, she is "enormously in love with", but won't comment on it today, nor smile at the suggestion that in most people's minds this will instantly reposition her on the political scale.)

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/a-clash-of-civilisations-20100618-ym9d.html

[burnsei sensei]

1. Ms. Ali, your fine.

To critique Islam is to be a Westerner.
One need not be a conservative to question the motives, structure, doctrine, dogma and practices of religion, or the content of any religion.
Ethics and morality have as many secular sources as religious ones.
This is not the anti-individualistic Middle East, this is the West.
All people are not basically the same; they are entitled to the individual space.
We will have to work very hard to preserve the individualism of Western culture in the next few centuries.