The Born-Again Enlightenment

As someone who's a great admirer of Ibn Warraq's scholarship on Islam — though he tends, as he freely admits, to be more of a bibliographer than an original thinker — I was fascinated by the essay in the New York Review of Books entitled, "How to Understand Islam." The first part is a lucid critique of the politically correct history of Islam, the one that maintains the faith was not spread by the sword or by coercive materialist means — like the taxation benefits recently lauded by Osama bin Laden — or that it is intrinsically a religion of peace. (For one thing, I doubt very much that the Prophet would have accepted such a homilistic depiction of some of the most stunning military campaigns waged in the post-Hellenic period.) But the second part of the essay is a kind of in-house rebuke of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. The author, Malise Ruthven, rejects Buruma and Garton Ash's ludicrous term "Enlightenment fundamentalist" — which they promulgated in the pages of the New York Review — as a fair or adequate assessment of the brave Islamic apostate and fearless atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

It might be more appropriate, however, to describe Ali as a "born-again" believer in Enlightenment values. Infidel has the hallmarks of a spiritual autobiography in which she progresses through various stages of illumination, from childhood trauma in Somalia (entailing genital mutilation inflicted by her own grandmother), through an adolescence in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, where a brief espousal of the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood empowers her to question her family's tribal values within the frame of the movement's stultifying, still patriarchal religiosity, toward eventual enlightenment and emancipation in Holland, aided by encounters with Dutch fellow students and readings from Spinoza, Voltaire, Darwin, Durkheim, and Freud. This remarkable spiritual journey is interlaced with a classic story of personal courage in the face of a parochial and misogynistic social system that systematically brutalizes women in the name of God, and in which women routinely submit to neglect and violence. Told with a rare combination of passion and detachment, it is a Seven Storey Mountain in reverse: a pilgrimage from belief to skepticism.

Yet for all Hirsi Ali's questioning, there is a spiritual quality about her rebellion. The final break with her family occurs when senior members of her clan arrive in Holland to persuade her to rejoin the husband chosen by her father, in order to save the family's honor. Her refusal seems divinely mandated. "I paused for a moment, and then the words just came out of my mouth. 'It is the will of the soul,' I said. 'The soul cannot be coerced.'" The clan leaders, and her husband, accept the verdict. The soul cannot lie.

"Born-again atheist, practicing troublemaker" is a Morrissey lyric by way of Gore Vidal. But I don't know if I'd call this rebellion "spiritual" so much as moral and intellectual. For instance, "soul" can easily be used as a synecdoche or metaphor for human will by an evolutionary psychologist who rejects the mind-body dichotomy but also, say, appreciates the novels of Dostoevsky. However, it is true that Hirsi Ali displays reverence and awe for some of the finer manifestations of the religion she deplores.

"Enlightenment fundamentalist" wasn't only a smirking and stupid term to coin with respect to her, it was also a profoundly ungenerous one. As I wrote a few months ago in my capsule review of Infidel, published on Commentary's contentions blog:

Right-thinking intellectuals may choose to ignore or rationalize Koranic injunctions like “Your wives are your tillage, go in unto your tillage in what manner so ever you will,” arguing that these are only interpreted literally in a few third-world countries. Yet Hirsi Ali, who grew up in Somalia and traveled with her divided family to Saudi Arabia and Kenya, stands as a living reply: these literalists really get around. They are now, in fact, comfortably ensconced in cosmopolitan cities like London and Amsterdam, where Theo van Gogh, her friend and collaborator on the film Submission, was pulled off his bicycle and shot to death by Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004.

What best refutes Garton Ash’s charge of fundamentalism is the demonstrable fact that, even in her newfound atheism, Hirsi Ali can still pay homage to the rituals of faith. She writes in Infidel: “People were patient with each other in the Grand Mosque, and communal—everyone washing his or her feet in the same fountain, with no shoving or prejudice. We were all Muslims in God’s house, and it was beautiful. It had a quality of timelessness. I think this is one reasons Muslims believe that Islam means peace: because in a large, cool place full of kindness you do feel peaceful.”

Now show me bin Laden’s public acknowledgment that the Bill of Rights has its charms, too.

So can we now please have done with the animadversion that suggests Spinoza is in any way the inverse mirror image of Sayyid Qutb or Hassan al-Banna?