Don't know if you've been following the dust-up between Pascal Bruckner and Tim Garton Ash and Ian Buruma, but it's a hoot. First, Bruckner wrote a fiery screed against the moderate center-right intellectuals for their tepid endorsements of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Bruckner called Garton Ash and Buruma "armchair philosophers" and multiculti myopics whose own species of "anti-racism" actually amounts to racism — against the hopelessly backward cultures they purport to esteem. (Oui, oui, monsieur. C'est le dialectique.)
Garton Ash's response is worth the price of admission:
Pascal Bruckner is the intellectual equivalent of a drunk meandering down the road, arguing loudly with some imaginary enemies. He calls these enemies "Timothy Garton Ash" and "Ian Buruma" but they have very little to do with the real writers of those names. I list below some of his misrepresentations and inaccuracies, with a few weblinks for the curious.
[…]Truly grotesque, to the point of self-parody, is this passage: "The positions of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash fall in with American and British policies (even if the two disapprove of these policies): the failure of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their wars against terror also result from their focussing on military issues to the detriment of intellectual debate." Never mind that I have been an outspoken serial critic of the Bush (and Blair) approach on precisely this issue. For Bruckner, white is black and words mean what he wants them to mean. Objectively, comrades, TGA agrees with Bush. Izvestia under Stalin would have been proud of his dialectical argumentation.
All good Leavisite fun and whatnot, but then there's this shambolic self-defense:
Having commented in my New York Review essay that "I regard it as a profound shame for Holland and Europe that we could not keep among us someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali" I went on to suggest that her approach "is not showing the way forward for most Muslims in Europe, at least not for many years to come. A policy based on the expectation that millions of Muslims will so suddenly abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers is simply not realistic. If the message they hear from us is that the necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion, then they will choose not to be European." I continue to insist that this is an obvious truth, and an important criticism of the position adopted by both Ali and Bruckner.
If you read that New York Review essay, which sanely advocates economic reforms as a means of pacifying the angry young "Inbetween People" — Muslims living in Europe but culturally unmoored to it — what you find is the following:
Having in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism, under the influence of an inspiring schoolteacher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist. In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone from one extreme to the other, with an emotional energy perfectly summed up by Shakespeare: "As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive." This is precisely why she is a heroine to many secular European intellectuals, who are themselves Enlightenment fundamentalists. They believe that not just Islam but all religion is insulting to the intelligence and crippling to the human spirit. Most of them believe that a Europe based entirely on secular humanism would be a better Europe. Maybe they are right. (Some of my best friends are Enlightenment fundamentalists.) Maybe they are wrong. But let's not pretend this is anything other than a frontal challenge to Islam. In his crazed diatribe, Mohammed Bouyeri was not altogether mistaken to identify as his generic European enemy the "unbelieving fundamentalist."
Forgive me if I don't believe atheism is the diametric opposite of Islamic fundamentalism, one "extreme" between two. Hirsi Ali's is a defensive posture informed by a harsh but rigorous interpretation of an openly aggressive ideology — not just a religion. Also, she is more generous than Garton Ash gives her credit for being.
Listen to this audio interview [link corrected: scroll to the left-hand audio option of the Times piece — ed] recently conducted with her by the New York Times' Laurie Goodstein. Hirsi Ali makes plain that a dogged opposition to Islam and the teachings of the Koran is the right worldview for herself; she would be pharisaic to claim to find any redeemable or progressive motif in religion when she thinks it's all one big sinister fairy-tale. However, she freely acknowledges that other women might get something out of their faith and, provided they use it for the advancement of mutually shared goals (human rights, freedoms that are, or should be, universal rather than the province of any one hemisphere), those women are fine by Hirsi Ali.
Show me an Islamic fundamentalist who is as generous with varying or antagonistic opinions. Then tell me that Shakespeare apercu ("those they did deceive") was fair, since Garton Ash elsewhere concedes that Hirsi Ali's former allegiance to Islam was both genuine and full-throttled.
Of course, Garton Ash is not new to the game of crediting age-old monotheisms with liberalization campaigns. He made his career following the Red dissidents of Eastern Europe, never shying from overstating the effects the Catholic church had on Solidarnosc. (One of these days I'm going to write a monograph titled, "Winners Written Out of the History Books." It'll be all about the anti-Communist left, comprised of many committed and noble Marxists, who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and were then met by a wall of silence when legacies were being handed out.)
My favorite animadversion leveled against the tabernacle conception of history came from Perry Anderson, actually in a brilliant essay on Garton Ash. Citing Stalin's fatuous quip about the supposed clout of Papist anti-Communism –"How many divisions has the pope?" — Anderson asked, "How many masses has the Kremlin?"
Let's put it this way: What encyclicals or priestly tracts can you name that denounced the Soviet Union? Compare to the Volga of secular literature, written by ex-adherents of the cause, that has entered the 20th century canon.
Garton Ash has imported his misplaced enthusiasm for piety to the current crisis within and without Islam. (Funny, given that piety is precisely the problem.) Muslim "moderates" like Tariq Ramadan and Ayatollah Sistani may carry mass appeal, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that, in the choice between opposition and accommodation with reactionary Islamic elements, they're more likely to choose opposition.
If a medieval faith is going to be reformed, it is not the "people of the book" who'll be responsible for doing the thankless and tedious spadework. First comes excavations of ugly truths, and anostics and heretics are the only ones who can do that. They'll be hounded enough by the zealotry they've abandoned; they don't need added grief from a sideline intelligentsia that sneers and squawks about having them for members.
Timothy Garton Ash: Better Pascal than Pascal Bruckner – signandsight