By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Note: The following
piece is adapted from “Preserving the Values of the West,” the remarks
delivered by Ayaan Hirsi Ali upon accepting the 2016 Philip Merrill Award for
Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education alongside her husband,
Niall Ferguson.
The specific example I would like to address today is the
relationship between men and women. All cultures have strong views on marriage,
family, divorce, promiscuity, and parenting. Not all cultures are similar or
interchangeable, however.
Within Islam today, I believe that we can distinguish
three different groups of Muslims in the world based on how they envision and
practice their faith, with important consequences for women.
The first group is the most problematic — the
fundamentalists who envision a regime based on Shariah, Islamic religious law.
They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original
seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they
impose it on everyone else.
I call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their
religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad when he was based
in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for Shariah law as a
divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have
laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in
jihad. There is no equality between men and women in their eyes, either legally
or in daily practice.
The second group — and the clear majority throughout the
Muslim world — consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship
devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance toward
non-Muslims.
I call this group “Mecca Muslims,” after the first phase
of Islam and the peaceful Qur’anic verses that were revealed in Mecca. In this
group, the position of women is contested.
More recently, and partly in response to the rise of
Islamic terrorism, a third group is emerging within Islam: Muslim reformers —
or, as I call them, “modifying Muslims” — who promote the separation of
religion from politics and other reforms. Although some are apostates, the
majority of dissidents are believers, among them clerics who have come to
realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be
condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence. Reformers generally
favor equality between men and women.
The future of Islam and the world’s relationship with
Muslims will be decided by which of the two minority groups — the Medina
Muslims or the reformers — can win the support of the rather passive Meccan
majority.
In the West, most people of good will are committed to
providing women with equal rights and the opportunity to build a good future
for themselves, to develop into autonomous human beings.
The people I would call “Medina Muslims” — men such as
Sayyid Qutb, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or Osama bin Laden — offer an alternative
vision. They claim that their vision, based on Shariah law, is in all ways
superior to the norms prevailing in the West. Medina Muslims churn out the
statistics — which are of course widely available in the West — of divorce,
single parenting, prostitution, the hook-up culture on American campuses. They
offer crude and simple remedies: segregate the sexes; cover women from head to
toe (the modesty doctrine) to prevent men from losing sexual control; marry
girls off as early as possible on Shariah terms; and a list of other measures.
Medina Muslims claim that, when all of these Shariah
measures toward women have been adopted, the vexing problems of promiscuity,
children born out of wedlock, and the social chaos (fitna) they view in Western
countries will cease. Yet Medina Muslims are uncomfortable when pressed to
explain why Shariah measures implemented in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and to some
extent in Pakistan have not resolved every conceivable social ill. On the
contrary, what we see in those countries is often appalling mistreatment of
women and especially of young girls.
In Saudi Arabia, a woman’s testimony is usually not
accepted in criminal cases and is worth half a man’s testimony in civil cases.
In 2009, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, said “a girl
aged ten or twelve can be married. Those who think she’s too young are wrong
and they are being unfair to her.”
In Iran, married women cannot leave the country without
their husband’s permission. After a child is seven years old, custody of the
child automatically goes to the father (unless the father is severely
disqualified, for example insane). A mother also loses custody of her young
children if she remarries.
In 2016, the chair of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic
Ideology, an important advisory body, sanctioned “light” wife-beating.
Feminist academics in the West might be expected to call
out Medina Muslims, or at least to enable students to think through the
consequences of implementing Shariah measures such as we see in Iran and Saudi
Arabia.
Yet what we see is rather different. It is striking how
many American university professors and students reject any analysis of a real
conflict between enlightened Western values and unreformed Shariah, even as
Western civilization is mocked and its many contributions to human freedom and
gender equality cynically dismissed.
This year, as one indication of the zeitgeist, Duke
University’s Women Center created a new (optional) nine-week seminar that aims
to have young men “critique and analyze their own masculinity and toxic
masculinities.” With reasonable confidence, I predict that the men
participating in these sessions will be well-intentioned, mild-mannered young
American men, who are already inclined toward respect for women. One topic that
will not be examined, I suspect, is Islamic law, or the conflict between
Western notions of women’s equality and Islamic views on the subject.
At many American universities today, any critical
examination pertaining to Islam, including Shariah and the treatment of women
in Islam, is declared to be out of the realm of scrutiny. My thoughts on the
crisis within Islam were so terrifying to Brandeis University — the university
named for a champion of the First Amendment — that it withdrew its invitation
to speak and accept an honorary degree. A strange irony that my story
frightened the university more than the litany of honor killings and wholesale
abuse of women in so many parts of the Islamic world.
This is a world turned upside down. A good education
presupposes a free and open exchange of ideas on the basis of reason and
reputable primary sources. This is why the work of the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni matters: It calls clearly for the freedom to discuss and
study the challenging issues of our times.
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