Read Online Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Free Book Online
Authors: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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society, and statecraft within the Islamic world. I have now done this for three years. Its focus is on Islamic political theory. The seminar is geared toward mid-career students ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their forties, but undergraduates can also participate. Our meetings last for ninety minutes, and there is an ample reading list.
As must now be clear, I have been an uncompromising critic of political Islam for more than a decade. But in recent years I had come to feel that rather than simply inveighing against it, I must reengage with Islam—the religion as well as the ideology—not only to deepen my understanding of its complex religious and cultural legacy, but also for the sake of those who find themselves, as I once did, trapped between the demands of a rigid faith and the attractions of a modern society. This book is one of the fruits of that decision. As such it represents a continuation of the personal and intellectual journey I have chronicled in my previous books. The study group was a crucial preliminary step.
From the start, I was curious about the students who signed up for my study group. The first class list that I received from the registrar’s office provided a range of names, some clearly Anglophone, some clearly Arabic. About half were Americans, two of whom were members of the U.S. military, and most of whom had worked or served in Islamic countries. At least three of the Americans were Jewish. The rest of the class were nearly all Muslim: men from Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Senegal, along with a young woman from Niger. In many ways, the class’s Muslim students were a microcosm of the modern Muslim elite: they were educated, mobile, frequently wealthy, and held a variety of views on Islam. However, it quickly became clear that some of the attendees thought that there could be no other view than their own.
On that first afternoon, the students assembled, we made our introductions, and I began to speak. I got as far as the first few sentences when the Qatari student raised his hand and began addressing the rest of the room. He said that he needed to “clarify” what I was saying. Then another—the Pakistani—interrupted. A third and then a fourth chimed in. For any remark that I made involving Islam, one of them had a clarification. And, almost from the first word, they got personal. According to one of them, I was a “traumatized woman projecting my personal experience and brainwashing people.” Another wanted everyone to understand that I was just “an Islamophobe telling lies.”
Most of the other students (including the other Muslim students) were stunned. It was, for a while, a bit of a tennis match—heads swiveled, following their verbal volleys and my efforts to return. But, as the minutes passed, the tension within the class grew greater. It was not necessarily that the other students did not want to speak; it was that they could not get a word in. And it was not just the first session that went like this. It was the same week after week—until the fourth week, when the malcontents ceased to attend.
I have no problem with discussion and debate. That was the point of the course. Yet these days it is too short a journey from preemptively challenging any critic of Islam, to correcting them, implying threats, and silencing them outright. To my mind, nothing could be more “clarifying” of the fundamental problem facing Islam today than those painful early sessions in the seminar room.
I had not designed the course to be a seminar on my personal vision of Islam. I had been careful not to assign my own writings. Instead, I had drawn up a balanced list of scholarly articles and academic books, points and counterpoints around the nature of political theory in Islam. This material was what I had intended to discuss in class. Yet it was as if the objectionable students had not even looked at the syllabus. For them, simply to ask a question about Islam was a
As must now be clear, I have been an uncompromising critic of political Islam for more than a decade. But in recent years I had come to feel that rather than simply inveighing against it, I must reengage with Islam—the religion as well as the ideology—not only to deepen my understanding of its complex religious and cultural legacy, but also for the sake of those who find themselves, as I once did, trapped between the demands of a rigid faith and the attractions of a modern society. This book is one of the fruits of that decision. As such it represents a continuation of the personal and intellectual journey I have chronicled in my previous books. The study group was a crucial preliminary step.
From the start, I was curious about the students who signed up for my study group. The first class list that I received from the registrar’s office provided a range of names, some clearly Anglophone, some clearly Arabic. About half were Americans, two of whom were members of the U.S. military, and most of whom had worked or served in Islamic countries. At least three of the Americans were Jewish. The rest of the class were nearly all Muslim: men from Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Senegal, along with a young woman from Niger. In many ways, the class’s Muslim students were a microcosm of the modern Muslim elite: they were educated, mobile, frequently wealthy, and held a variety of views on Islam. However, it quickly became clear that some of the attendees thought that there could be no other view than their own.
On that first afternoon, the students assembled, we made our introductions, and I began to speak. I got as far as the first few sentences when the Qatari student raised his hand and began addressing the rest of the room. He said that he needed to “clarify” what I was saying. Then another—the Pakistani—interrupted. A third and then a fourth chimed in. For any remark that I made involving Islam, one of them had a clarification. And, almost from the first word, they got personal. According to one of them, I was a “traumatized woman projecting my personal experience and brainwashing people.” Another wanted everyone to understand that I was just “an Islamophobe telling lies.”
Most of the other students (including the other Muslim students) were stunned. It was, for a while, a bit of a tennis match—heads swiveled, following their verbal volleys and my efforts to return. But, as the minutes passed, the tension within the class grew greater. It was not necessarily that the other students did not want to speak; it was that they could not get a word in. And it was not just the first session that went like this. It was the same week after week—until the fourth week, when the malcontents ceased to attend.
I have no problem with discussion and debate. That was the point of the course. Yet these days it is too short a journey from preemptively challenging any critic of Islam, to correcting them, implying threats, and silencing them outright. To my mind, nothing could be more “clarifying” of the fundamental problem facing Islam today than those painful early sessions in the seminar room.
I had not designed the course to be a seminar on my personal vision of Islam. I had been careful not to assign my own writings. Instead, I had drawn up a balanced list of scholarly articles and academic books, points and counterpoints around the nature of political theory in Islam. This material was what I had intended to discuss in class. Yet it was as if the objectionable students had not even looked at the syllabus. For them, simply to ask a question about Islam was a
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