You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (12 page)

As the old Christian punishments withered, Islamists pushed the West into accepting a new blasphemy law. It was not a law debated by congresses or parliaments. No legitimate authority spelt out its limits in a statute book. No judge protected defendants’ rights to a fair trial. No jury said that it must find the accused guilty beyond reasonable doubt before conviction. The accused could break the law without knowing it, and be condemned without appeal. It was sufficient that someone, somewhere, deemed that the defendant had failed to show proper respect, and had the means to threaten retribution.

When I spoke to Flemming Rose he made a direct link between the modern acceptance that an ‘insult’ to a religion justified punishment, and the ideologies of the twentieth-century dictatorships. Rose had worked as a foreign correspondent in the old Soviet Union, and had learned to despise ‘the trick of labelling any critique as an anti-Soviet insult to the state. You can catch anyone that way: Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak … the regime accused them all of anti-Soviet propaganda, and many in the West went along with that.’

His comparison was not as far-fetched as it seemed.

It is time to extend our solidarity to all the rebels of the Islamic world, non-believers, atheist libertines, dissenters, sentinels of liberty, as we supported Eastern European dissidents in former times. Europe should encourage these diverse voices and give them financial, moral and political support. Today there is no cause more sacred, more serious, or more pressing for the harmony of future generations. Yet our continent kneels before God’s madmen, muzzling and libelling free-thinkers with suicidal heedlessness.

PASCAL BRUCKNER
, 2007

Affectation had no place in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s writing. She did not play the coy dissident and smuggle coded messages past the censors, or imitate the magical realists by wrapping a critique inside a spinning narrative. She wrote plainly, in a precise voice of restrained outrage, and behaved as if she were a free woman with no reason to fear those who would silence her permanently – although she had reasons aplenty.

You needed to spend just five minutes in her company, or read a few pages of her work, to realise that indignation about the oppression of women drove her forward. The baby-boomer cliché that ‘The personal is political’ ignored the reality that in most of the world, and for most of history, the personal could not be political for women, because the power of religious and cultural authority prevented a political response to personal oppression. For a moment when Hirsi Ali was young, that power seemed to be breaking. Her father was a Somali socialist involved in revolutionary politics. But revolution in Somalia, like revolutions everywhere, turned to dictatorship. The local strongman threw her father in jail. The family fled into exile, and found a haven in Kenya, where Hirsi Ali learned that, revolution or no revolution, her sex determined her fate. When she and her sisters went to pray in a mosque, her father explained to the confused girl that she must stand behind him and the rest of the men. At school, she saw her friends dreaming of marrying a husband they loved, but then being forced to marry old men by their parents. Her grandmother arranged for what euphemists call ‘female circumcision’ – that is, for an amateur surgeon to cut away a girl’s clitoris and her outer and inner labia, and scrape the vaginal walls. Hirsi Ali learned the hard way that she ‘was a Somali woman and therefore my sexuality belonged to the owner of my family: my father or my uncles. It was obvious that I absolutely had to be a virgin on marriage, because to do otherwise would damage the honour of my family and whole clan – uncles, brothers, male cousins – forever and irretrievably. The place between my legs was sewn up to prevent it. It would be broken only by my husband.’

The retreat of poor-world radicals from the dying creed of socialism and into religious and tribal fanaticisms was well underway in Kenya by the time Hirsi Ali was a teenager. In Europe and America as well as Africa and the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood was the vehicle for religious reaction. Although conceived in Egypt as a totalitarian movement, which would impose a theocratic caliphate on the whole of humanity, the Brothers were not always agents of dictatorial revolution. In the West, they sought to ‘engage’ with liberal establishments to ensure that their sectarian version of Islam received state funds, and that they were allowed to define who was and was not an authentic Muslim among immigrant populations. Elsewhere, they could be plotting to seize control of Arab states or lying low. The Brotherhood followed the tactics of twentieth-century Marxists-Leninists. It could adopt an entryist strategy of infiltrating existing power structures or try insurrection depending on circumstances.

The Brotherhood’s willingness to play along with Western governments should not disguise its extremism. It was the world’s largest anti-Semitic organisation. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian scholar the Brotherhood most admired, declared that throughout history, God had imposed upon the Jews avengers who would punish them for their corruption. ‘The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.’ His combination of partial Holocaust denial – ‘even though they exaggerated it’ – with genocidal fantasy – divine punishment awaits the Jews – marked him as a religious counterpart of Europe’s neo-Nazis, whose fantasies allowed them to pretend that Auschwitz wasn’t a death camp while dreaming of the death of the Jews.

The young Hirsi Ali was briefly attracted to the Brotherhood, but it was no place for an independent-minded woman. Qaradawi permitted husbands to beat disobedient wives, and allowed genital mutilation – ‘Whoever finds it serving the interest of his daughters should do it, and I personally support this under the current circumstances in the modern world’ – while the Brotherhood recommended a lifetime of submission. She got enough of that at home, and drifted away.

More useful to her was an altogether less holy tradition. At her Kenyan school, she read the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier. Outside class, she and her friends swapped trashy paperback romances. Not a particularly radical education, you might think. But romance contains an idea more subversive than half the political philosophies devised by men. Hirsi Ali’s heroines fell in love and defied their families to marry the husbands of their choice. In East Africa, and in much of the world, this was then, and remains now, a thrillingly revolutionary idea.

Her father arranged for her to marry a distant cousin from Canada she had never met. En route to Canada, she turned romance into rebellion. The plane touched down in Germany. She made a dash from the airport, and crossed the Dutch border. Realising that in refugee law the personal was not political, and that no country would grant her asylum so that she could escape an arranged marriage, she claimed to be a victim of political persecution in Somalia. Once she had secured asylum, her intelligence and determination ensured that she could build a new life. She helped fellow refugees find work, went to university, became a Dutch and therefore a European citizen, and began to publish her thoughts on her new homeland.

I can think of no better antidote to Western ennui than the writings of poor-world liberals. Hirsi Ali came to Europe, and was liberated and inspired. The notion that the world could be explained without reference to the ‘fairy tales’ of monotheism enchanted her. Secularism, stability, peace, prosperity and rights for women were wonders. ‘The very shape of Holland seemed like a challenge to Allah,’ she said at one point. ‘Reclaiming land from the sea, controlling flooding with canals – it was like defying God.’ At university in Holland, she embraced the liberal tradition of free speech and religious tolerance, and studied, Locke, Mill, Russell, Popper and Baruch Spinoza, whom Amsterdam Jews excommunicated for his free-thinking in the 1650s, and whose works Catholic and Protestant divines banned for their blasphemy. Given her sufferings and her intellectual self-confidence, it was always likely that she would abandon her religion.

She found a ready supply of Western moralists willing to denounce her as a ‘new atheist’. Their label was self-evidently foolish – the ‘new atheists’ of the twenty-first century were not so different from the old atheists of the twentieth (they still did not believe in God, to mention the most prominent continuity). The newness of the ‘new atheists’ lay solely in their determination after 9/11 to state their beliefs without embarrassment. The dangers of religious extremism were clear, even to those who had not wanted to see. The new atheists thought that the best argument against Islamist terror, or Christian fundamentalism, or Hindu or Jewish nationalism, was to say bluntly that there is no God, and we should grow up. Fear of religious violence also drove the backlash against atheism from those who felt that appeasement of psychopathic believers was the safest policy; that if we were nice to them, perhaps they would calm down. Prim mainstream commentators decried the insensitivity and downright rudeness with which the new atheists treated the religious. The complaints boiled down to a simple and piteous cry: ‘Why can’t you stop upsetting them?’

You cannot, if like Ayaan Hirsi Ali you are confronting clerical oppression. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
stood alongside the pamphlets of the French revolutionaries as a founding feminist text. Wollstonecraft was alert to the danger that religion could suffocate her belief that ‘It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.’ Although a radical dissenter from the English non-conformist tradition rather than an atheist, she took on the myths Judaism and Christianity had thrust on humanity: that God made Eve from Adam’s rib to be his helpmate, and that Eve damned women by taking the apple from the tree of knowledge.

Suppose, Wollstonecraft wondered in the liberated intellectual climate after the French Revolution, that the conservative clerics of the 1790s were right, and God had formed women from Adam’s rib to please men. The conclusion that ‘she ought to sacrifice every other consideration to render herself agreeable to him: and let this brutal desire of self-preservation be the grand spring of all her actions’ would be just, and women must submit to being stretched on the ‘iron bed of fate’. But Wollstonecraft thought that dependence made an ‘ignoble base’ for human society – unworthy of a supreme being. So she begged leave to doubt whether God had created woman to please man. ‘Though the cry of irreligion, or even atheism, be raised against me, I will simply declare, that were an angel from heaven to tell me that Moses’s beautiful, poetical cosmogony, and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, I could not believe what my reason told me was derogatory to the character of the Supreme Being.’

In the later 1790s, as the reaction against the French Revolution swept Britain, anti-Jacobin writers denounced women’s emancipation as the doctrine of ‘hyenas in petticoats’. They seized on the miseries of Wollstonecraft’s private life, and held them up as a terrible example to other women of the dangers of rebelling against God and nature. After her death in childbirth, her husband, the silly radical philosopher William Godwin, supplied her critics with the ammunition they needed. He stripped ‘his dead wife naked’ in the words of Robert Southey, by publishing frank accounts of her love affairs, illegitimate child and suicide attempt. Conservatives could not have been more grateful. Challenge traditional society and you will end up like her, they said – deprived of feminine charm, cursed with bastard children, betrayed, dejected and suicidal. But Wollstonecraft won a posthumous victory. Not even Tories and bishops can bring themselves to read the anti-Jacobin attacks on her now, while her work survives to enthuse succeeding generations. The triumph of her ideas did not happen by some benign process of osmosis. The opponents of the subjugation of women had to fight for their ideas, and endure abuse and hatred.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali reacted to life in Holland with a feminist revulsion Wollstonecraft would have recognised. Freedom was everywhere except in the lives of refugee women, who were still tied to the ‘iron beds’ fate had prescribed for them. As an interpreter, she visited Somali wives whose husbands beat them. Alongside the bruises and broken bones, she found Vitamin D deficiency. Dutch social workers thought it was the result of a poor diet caused by poverty. Hirsi Ali had to explain that the women were sick because their husbands would not let them leave their homes and walk in sunlit streets. The women did not complain, because they believed that in ‘accepting systematic merciless abuse, they were serving Allah and earning a place in heaven’.

Hirsi Ali protested against the white society which tolerated such abuses as much as she did against the abuse itself. She came to believe that guilt crippled Europe: guilt about imperialism, guilt about Nazism, guilt about the Holocaust; guilt about the past but never about the present. Like many others, Hirsi Ali noticed that in the name of anti-racism European liberals were following a racist policy. When mass immigration began, they resolved to emphasise what divided rather than what united people, and to show their compassion by respecting the culture of ‘the other’. Compassion sounds a fine virtue, which ordinarily leads the compassionate to help those less fortunate than themselves. In Europe, it produced indolence and indifference: a squishy liberal version of apartheid in which the authorities downplayed the genital mutilation of girls on kitchen tables and the murder of women who refused to accept arranged marriages because the women on the receiving end of the abuse were not white.

The appeal of respectable reasons for doing nothing should not be underestimated. Nor should the readiness of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to confront the double standard.

The first thing that strikes you when you meet her is her extraordinary calm. She is chatty and funny, but when the conversation turns to politics, stillness envelops her, as if her life had brought her to one unshakeable conclusion: the oppression of women by whatever authority must be fought. Blasphemous though her simple idea may be to some, she reasoned that Holland was a land where sex and drugs were openly on sale, and where comedians could fire at Christianity at will. Surely there would be no repercussions if she asserted the obvious? She campaigned against male violence, and renounced Islam on national television. By 2000, she was active in politics, an achievement worth mentioning for a black immigrant who arrived in Holland unable to speak Dutch in 1992. She marched under the banner of the Labour Party, before the left’s hypocrisies pushed her into joining the centre-right liberals. I would be being unfair if I suggested that the whole of the Dutch left was too frightened to support her. Hirsi Ali’s memoirs record the camaraderie of individual social democratic politicians. She joined the centre-right because as a collective the European left remained stuck in the identity politics of the 1968 generation. They were interested in group rights – the rights of blocs of immigrants not to be penalised for their colour or creed – rather than rights of individuals not to be persecuted by their own ‘community’.

If the historians of the future have one ounce of morality, they will damn the European left for its inability to oppose racism and support individual liberty simultaneously. Hirsi Ali was not prepared to wait for posterity’s judgement, and forced the Dutch police to recognise the extent of ‘honour’ killings of women in her country. After she renounced her religion and criticised the abuse of women, she learned that the descendants of the clerics who had banned Spinoza’s books remained at large in Amsterdam. The police sent bodyguards to protect her. Her fellow MPs wondered if they needed to ‘protect her from herself’, a true example of white condescension towards ‘the other’ which she rejected with disdain.