Ayan Hirsi Ali and the debate over Islam

Sorry about the delay between posts, but it's been an unusually busy day. Last night, my wife and I watched "Real Time with Bill Maher," and he had invited Ayan Hirsi Ali. On his show, she said what has now become her familiar message, namely that Islam is a fundamentally flawed religion, and that we cannot maintain both that we are fighting terrorists in the Islamic world, but that Islam is also a religion of peace. I then found this piece in defense of Ms. Ali by Anne Applebaum, which in turn referred me to articles (all avaiable either in links from Applebaum's Slate piece, or at signandsight) written by British authors Timothy Garton Ash, Ian Buruma, and Pascal Bruckner, all debating the basic issue of whether the "West" should accept practicing Muslims as a part of a new Western society, or whether Islam is in fact flawed and incompatible with Enlightenment ideals and should be jettisoned. I am not really going to engage that debate on its own terms. Rather, I want to talk about an underlying assumption that all of the participants seem to share that I find troubling, namely that the privilege of individuality only belongs to certain people, and that Muslims are not among those people.

What do I mean by that? Consider the following: Over the course of the past two thousand years, both the most charitable and the most grisly acts have been committed in the name of Christianity. Let me state at the outset that I do not intend to take a view on whether or not Christianity is good, bad, valid, invalid etc. This is simply a fact, that people have used its name to justify all kinds of acts that we deem unacceptable today. Included on this long list is the conquest of the Americas, the colonization of large chunks of Africa and Asia, apartheid in South Africa etc.. Many of the people to whom we are compelled to credit the creation of the modern world as we know it were driven by a sense of Christian superiority to conquer the world. Yet, we do not view those societies as monolithically "Christian." Rather, we think of 1) the national/cultural groups that engaged in these acts, and 2) individuals qua individuals. This latter category, examining individuals as being individuals, shaped by all sorts of forces, is what is so sorely lacking in the discussion of Islam. Instead, we have this focus on the collective identity of Muslims. One party is talking about all Muslims being "fundamentally same," whereas another is stressing the difference between Moroccan and Javanese Muslims. Has someone stopped to think about the notion that two Muslims from Morocco and Java respectively might share the same outlook on things, or that two Javanese Muslims may be completely different? This is not to say that there aren't ways of drawing distinctions between Sudanese and Pakistanis, the same way there were between French and German Christians. But the point is that we shouldn't let ourselves be blinded by group identity when it comes to understanding individuals. To do so is to deny such individuals their identity as human beings. To group them into categories and to ignore the fact that people behave differently, have different ideas, react differently to circumstances, is both to simplify and to belittle, and ultimately if such discrimination among people is drawn along racial, ethnic or religious lines, then those who draw such lines are racists and xenophobes.

Let me be more concrete. Osama bin Laden, the Saudis, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, and other demagogues claim to speak for the Muslim world. The reaction from Western intellectuals is to begin an investigation: What is a Sunni and what is a Shiite? What is the difference between them? Labels are sought, and applied. People are put into boxes. If you are Sunni, you must believe x, if you are Shiite, you must believe y. If you are Anglican, do you oppose the ordaining of gay priests? Clearly, the Anglican church is of two minds on this question. Does this mean all Anglicans are bigots, only some, or is the problem intractable? Are African Anglicans bigots, but American anglicans wonderful? The silliness of such categorization becomes apparent, and we would never engage in such simplistic reasoning about something so familiar, so "non-other" as the Anglican church. But we are perfectly comfortable taking claims made by individual religious leaders as representative of the whole. Why? Because we have an implicit, unspoken notion that there is an "Arab street," or more accurately, since only 12% of the Muslim world is Arab, an "Islamic street," and that they all rally around one of several discrete alternative platforms bearing the names of one or the other of these demagogues. Then, of course, we are very happy when the "moderate" Muslim comes along, our favorite standard-bearer, on whom we shower our gratitude (and our dollars). Thus, we have deprived them of their individual identities, and instead transformed them into followers of one "movement" or another. This allows us to indulge in comfortable abstractions, and narrows down the number of viewpoints from more than a billion to a mere handful. Of course, it also plays into the hands of the demagogues in question who don't want individual Muslims to think for themselves to begin with.

I believe this is the most basic problem that the West has to face in its understanding of the Muslim/Islamic world. If we begin to treat Muslim individuals qua individuals, suddenly all this nonsense about whether Islam is compatible with the West will take on a very different light. Indeed, individuality is central to Islam. One of the most basic elements of Islam is that each person has his or her own unique relationship with God, and a pre-requisite for that relationship is that each person be permitted to form his or her own personality, a characteristic, distinctive self. Unfortunately, rather than acknowledging this basic fact and harnessing it to the benefit of a peaceful world, we are going in the opposite direction. After having badly mangled the war in Iraq, we now hear people talking about letting them be "tribes," the way they always were. We support dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and many other countries that specifically stifle the very idea of individualism, the notion that every man and woman must make his own destiny. If we don't end our support to such collectivistic groups, we are never going to be able to solve the problem of terror. But the work of repairing this problem must begin closer to home, in our own living rooms, blogs, and universities. Stop treating Muslims like little sub-groups governed by group-think, and think of them as human beings. After all, we are all human beings, individuals, first, and members of any group only as a secondary matter.

Let me end by saying that I am indebted to my wife, Shanze, for nearly all the original thoughts that made this post possible.