By Brian Stewart
Monday, April
19, 2021
In the time of the British Raj, a range of
cultural customs in the Indian subcontinent perplexed the colonial power, and a
select number perturbed them. One especially distressing spectacle was the
practice of suttee, an antique tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres
of their husbands.
One British officer, General Sir Charles
Napier, was appalled upon coming across this ghastly scene, but he was
beseeched by village elders to respect the time-honored rite. Napier’s
response was at once sensitive and unsparing: “You say that it is your custom
to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive,
we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre;
beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And
then we will follow ours.”
The gallant Victorian approach toward women,
if that is not too genial a description, is no longer fashionable in the West
today. In spite of the great advances in women’s autonomy and Western
society’s growing recognition of women’s equality with men, it is a sad fact
that the concept of universal women’s rights has lost precious ground in the
commanding heights of Western culture. Even the above retelling of
Napier’s exploits is more liable to disturb contemporary readers than it is to
delight them. “Well,” many people will say, “what were the British doing in
India in the first place?”
In the more “progressive” precincts of the
left, the notion of women’s rights has largely been reduced to sexual
freedom and reproductive rights. And there is often a subliminal
identification of the Muslim faith with the wretched of the earth that inhibits
any criticism of those (even brutish misogynists) with a darker pigmentation
hailing from what was once deemed the Third World. The American right, for
its part, has also turned inward and barely registers how endangered women’s
rights have become in the world beyond our borders. Since the disappointments
of the Iraq War, American conservatives have found less and less to like
about the role of morality in foreign policy, never mind showing solidarity
with the oppressed and the downtrodden.
This manifest betrayal of feminism, and
the jeopardy in which it has placed multitudes of women, is the theme
of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s provocative new book Prey.1 Hirsi
Ali’s subject is (as the subtitle says) “immigration, Islam, and the erosion of
women’s rights,” but the negative reviews of the book and its author in
civic society and the prestige press offer a microcosm of the crisis roiling
the West. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Muslim
groups do not even want the book to be read. In a peevish review of Prey, the New
York Times’ Jill Filipovic chastised Hirsi Ali for her unapologetic defense
of the rights of women in a Europe struggling to cope with mass migration from
societies marked by patriarchy and polygamy.
Most readers will be aware that Hirsi Ali
is a Somali-born women’s-rights activist with impressive bona fides on this
question. After growing up in Muslim communities in Somalia, Saudi Arabia,
Ethiopia, and Kenya (and suffering female genital mutilation), Hirsi Ali
became a refugee and migrant to the Netherlands (in order to escape an arranged
marriage). Having abandoned her faith, she rose to be a Dutch member of
parliament and a prominent voice for the protection and empowerment of
women in migrant communities. She collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo van
Gogh to produce Submission, which criticizes the mistreatment of
women in the name of Islam. After Van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist fanatic,
and Hirsi Ali was pronounced the next target, she began to live under armed
guard. Eventually she fled to the United States and became an American citizen.
Hirsi Ali writes with both evident
sympathy for traumatized refugee populations and an unflinching belief in the
cause of liberal democracy. This uncommon fusion allows Prey to
delve intelligently into a devilish issue that has been marked by a ceaseless
stream of sentimentalism and sanctimony. The predicament is most acute in
Europe, where the connection between large-scale migration from
majority-Muslim lands (which often hold regressive views of women’s place in
society) and the concomitant dwindling of women’s rights and safety
has been unmistakable. The old continent became the cockpit for this story
after the hasty decision in 2015 by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to do
away with restrictions on the number of asylum-seekers who could come to
Germany—and, thanks to the EU’s Schengen Agreement that dissolved internal
borders, much of the rest of Western Europe. The result was a chaotic scramble
for Europe’s frontiers, which quickly produced a spike in sexual harassment and
violence in Europe’s streets and squares. “It is one of the rich ironies of
early-twenty-first-century history,” Hirsi Ali writes, “that the single
decision that has done the most harm to European women in my lifetime was made
by a woman.”
Hirsi Ali freely confesses that compiling
robust data about the sexual menace enveloping certain quarters of multiethnic Europe
is profoundly difficult, but it is essential if a proper moral and
material balance sheet of this decision is ever to be drawn up. Prey doesn’t
fail to note that unscrupulous populist parties in Europe, assisted by Russian
“information warfare,” have a vested interest in exaggerating the negative side
of the ledger, though this hardly means it has been fabricated. Indeed, it
should not escape notice that the ruling parties on the continent have an equal
and opposite interest in downplaying the negative effects, since cultural
segregation and alienation reflect poorly on their governing judgment. A
further challenge is that the official data generally understate the problem of
sexual violence: A host of factors—from difficulty identifying or apprehending
the assailant—deter victims from reporting or successfully prosecuting an
offense.
Without purporting to offer a complete
picture of this complex phenomenon, Prey
nonetheless marshals a wealth of data and presents it to the reader with
considerable care and scruple. Almost 3 million people have arrived illegally
in Europe since 2009, close to 2 million in 2015 alone. Two-thirds are male,
and 80 percent of asylum applicants are under the age of 35. “The
intensification of the Syrian civil war,” Hirsi Ali writes, “was the largest
proximate cause for the migrant influx.”
Hirsi Ali avoids the routine mistake of
imagining that Syrian nationals were the majority of displaced persons who
entered Europe after Merkel threw open its gates. Relying on internal data
from Frontex (the EU border agency), Frans Timmermans, a left-of-center Dutch
politician who serves as the first vice president of the European Commission,
has claimed that roughly 60 percent of the migrants who arrived in Europe in
2015 were economic migrants rather than refugees. Anyone who has lately spent
any time in Saint-Denis, Malmö, Molenbeek, or Düsseldorf will have no trouble testifying to the ethnic diversity of the
multitudes who’ve recently arrived in Europe. And anyone familiar with the
current state of Europe’s frontiers, from the Italian island of Lampedusa to
the Greek island of Lesbos, can attest to the distinctly multicultural and
polyethnic character of the exodus still headed Europe’s way.
Even if the costs of this vast migrant
wave are hard to quantify, they can be easily discovered by those who are not
determined to miss them. Recall the single worst incident of sexual assault
that occurred one night in Cologne, Germany. On December 31, 2015, hundreds of men
(most of them newly arrived asylum-seekers of Arab and North African origin)
“mobbed together to entrap women” near the city’s grand cathedral during a
celebration of what locals call Silvesternacht. Eventually, 661 women came
forward to report themselves as victims of sexual attacks that night. The
response from the authorities was sluggish, as police and prosecutors did not
wish to appear hostile to migrants and minorities or incur the censure of the
politically correct public. By the spring of 2019, a mere 52 of the
alleged assailants had been indicted, of whom only three were convicted of sex
offenses.
The climate of sexual harassment and
violence has scarcely been confined to occasions of revelry. The diligent
research within the covers of Prey is too various to rehearse
here, but a thumbnail sketch will suffice: There was a 17 percent increase
in rapes in France from 2017 to 2018; in Germany, the number of victims of rape
and “sexual coercion” rose by 41 percent in 2017; and in Sweden, there was a 12
percent increase in reported sex offenses in 2016—alarming trends that may have
abated recently, the author explains, only due to fewer social encounters amid
the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hirsi Ali contends that all this
constitutes strong prima facie evidence “for the view that the surge of
immigration into Europe” after 2015 led to “a significant increase in sexual
violence in the countries that accommodated the largest numbers of migrants.”
This reading does not mistake correlation for causation. Since most European
countries don’t report the ethnic background or religion of criminals,
conclusions can only be tentative. But in countries that do collect and publish
data, a striking causal relationship emerges between increased migration and
increased sexual violence. Since 2009 in Austria, for instance, sex
offenses increased by 11.8 percent. “Of the 936 rape cases reported in 2018,
more than half of the suspects (55 percent) were not Austrian citizens. In
2017, asylum-seekers were suspects in 11 percent of all reported rapes and
sexual-harassment cases in Austria, despite making up less than 1 percent of
the total population.” Danish authorities also input the ethnic background of
criminals in their database. In Denmark, non-Western immigrants and their
descendants account for a high proportion of convictions for sex offenses.
A great number of Muslims and others who
have recently arrived in Europe undoubtedly embarked on the perilous journey
for the same noble purposes that once stirred a young Hirsi Ali—seeking asylum
and the chance for a better life. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they have
bright economic prospects in advanced market democracies, nor does it mean
they are primed to integrate smoothly in the host societies, especially
when so many Europeans lack the will to acculturate newcomers to Western norms
and laws. It doesn’t help matters that the migrants in question are
overwhelmingly drawn from traditional societies with benighted views on the
rights of minorities within minorities: Among these double minorities are
gay Muslims, feminist Muslims, secular Muslims, and ex-Muslims.
And women—the largest minority—are often treated as “commodities.”
The derelict states and illiberal
societies inspiring so much human flight are particularly wrenching environments
for this half of the population. In these lands, women and girls are
exposed to all manner of mistreatment and brutality. Writing with firsthand
knowledge of some of these torments, Hirsi Ali explains that across the
southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, it is not out of the ordinary
for women to be “killed, raped, enslaved, beaten, confined, and debased.” She
goes on: “Female fetuses are aborted and baby girls abandoned. Girls are
denied education or have their genitals cut and sewn. Girls and young women are
forced into marriage with men they hardly know.”
Of course, upon reaching European soil,
many migrants have a decided preference, as Hirsi Ali once did, to adapt to
local customs and become productive members of their new society. Although
she fully acknowledges this in Prey, the number isn’t presumed to
constitute a majority. In fact, a not insignificant percentage
of the predominantly male migrant population tends to regard Western
doctrines of gender equality and sexual liberalism as an affront to their
religion and way of life. Some are given to anti-social behaviors, open
anti-Semitism, and in extreme cases may be vulnerable to recruitment by jihad.
These men, Hirsi Ali explains, “see no reason to alter their views simply
because they now live in Western Europe.”
***
What’s notable, beyond the bounds of the
book, is the tremendous slander and calumny to which Hirsi Ali has been treated
by the political left for refusing to bite her tongue about the subjection
of women in today’s world. Progressives of various sorts have learned
to shudder at her full-throated denunciation of the miseries inflicted on women
by the violent votaries of a patriarchal faith. Following a tested pattern
of decrying Hirsi Ali’s “Enlightenment fundamentalism,” even self-described
feminists such as Filipovic have rushed to indict Prey for its
“illiberalism” and “absolutism.” Filipovic insists the book promotes
nothing more than a “feminism of reaction.” She even purports to detect elements of “bigotry” in Hirsi Ali’s brief against Europe’s
one-way multiculturalism and its accommodation of old orthodoxies.
This is representative of a growing
tendency on the left to defend nearly any belief or behavior that goes under
the banner of Islam. Since the denizens of an ancient faith centered in the
Arabian Peninsula are widely considered victims of racism and colonialism (even
the perpetrators of sexual or political violence among them), they enjoy
considerable deference from the virtuous elite in the West. The principles of
anti-racism seem to dictate staunch opposition to their critics and foes.
This way of thinking is made more plausible because a large number of those
arguing that there is a dangerous anti-women problem among Muslim immigrants
are openly xenophobic and throw in with the forces of populist nationalism
disfiguring political culture across the West.
Filipovic recycles the cheap slander
pushed by the Southern Poverty Law Center that Hirsi Ali is an anti-Muslim
“extremist” (Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim reformer, successfully sued the SPLC
for defamation after being similarly accused). “She calls herself an
‘infidel,’” Filipovic writes of Hirsi Ali, “while many Muslims say she’s just
an Islamophobe.” In fact, it was the Muslim sadist and fanatic who butchered
Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street, and who told her that she was next on the
list, who deemed Hirsi Ali an “infidel fundamentalist.”
It is true that some Muslims and
non-Muslims who play the dull game of moral equivalence in the West allege that
she is an Islamophobe. But what of it? The facile association of Islam with the
poor and the vulnerable has long been expressed in the stupid neologism
“Islamophobia,” which seeks to promote criticism of Islam to the rank of
special offenses associated with racism. This freighted term obliterates
the distinction between criticism of religious dogma (even heresy or blasphemy)
and anti-Muslim bigotry. A Europe that observed this crucial distinction would,
as Hirsi Ali recommends, devise a new approach to integration that privileged
immigrants who conformed to the values of the societies giving them
sanctuary. A Europe too morally or intellectually enfeebled to do so will
continue to do immeasurable harm to individuals traduced by the most
reactionary elements in the “faith community” of Islam: Both to the minorities
within minorities and other targets of Islamist wrath—Hirsi Ali, here, has the
honor of being counted twice.
The widespread reluctance to address the
crisis of Islam has allowed predatory violence and religious fundamentalism to
become entrenched within many Muslim communities around the world. Raging
against “Islamophobia,” the modern Western dispensation bears the marks
of Islamophilia. The feminists who have taken such a soft and conciliatory line on
the nexus between large-scale migration and reactionary Islam have outdone the
most committed misogynists, because they have insidiously rolled back women’s
rights in ways that would’ve been unimaginable a few decades ago. And these
rights will be hard to recover. Squeamish feminists took what was supposed
to be the crowning glory of modernity—women’s freedom to live by no man’s
leave—and instead of enlarging its circle to lands where the civil rights of
women are radically circumscribed, it emboldened and empowered those promulgating
contempt for Enlightenment values near and far.
This tension forms what Hirsi Ali calls
“the feminist predicament.” In the very recent past, the feminist mission has
been challenged, and undermined, by issues of racism, religion, and
intersectionality. “Liberal feminists today care more about the question of
Palestinian statehood,” she writes, “than the mistreatment of Palestinian women
at the hands of their fathers and husbands. In the battle of the vices, sexism
has been trumped by racism.” This is undoubtedly true and is itself a symptom
of the sloppy equation between the proletarian masses and the Islamic faith.
(That the Palestinians, about 20 percent of whom were Christian until
their numbers began to decline, have become an “Islamic” cause in the Western
mind is only one symptom of such sloppiness.)
It cannot be said too often—indeed, it is
not being said nearly often enough—that human rights are universal, and the
failure to assert this claim is not anti-racist but, on the contrary, gives to
a tyrannical minority such powers as the imperialists of old never dreamed
of. Without renewed vigor among Europeans to secure hard-won liberties and
foster respect for liberal values, the machismo of unassimilated newcomers will
only blur the divide between the Levant or the Mahgreb or the Hindu
Kush and the old and famous capitals of Europe.
Whenever Europe decides to think more
seriously about its duties to the women and girls in its care, it will find it
has little choice but to follow the path Ayaan Hirsi Ali has laid down. Until
then, the most vulnerable among them will be compelled to walk alone in streets
ruled by the customs of others.
1 Harper, 348 pages
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