Not everyone was pleased Ms Ali came to Scripps.
An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim, and activist for truth
Editor’s note: Early Friday morning, Bryce Gerard, Aditya Bindal, and I met with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ms. Ali was kind enough to grant us an exclusive interview in the restaurant of the hotel in which she was staying. While Ms. Ali’s security guards insisted that we find a quiet, presumably safe conference room, Ms. Ali would have none of it. She insisted upon talking to us in the crowded, hotel restaurant and offered us orange juice and coffee. Unlike members of the Muslim Student Association (MSA), who monopolized the question and answer period, we sought a real dialogue, with one of the most courageous, well-spoken freedom fighters of our time. Happily, she accepted. Here’s what followed.
AB: Ms. Ali, the students that distributed flyers to the audience and spoke out against you were students of the Claremont Colleges. Unlike young Muslim women in the Middle East and around the world, they have the privilege of a Western Education, and yet -- as you pointed out -- their passions and energies are directed towards ‘protecting the image of Islam’ instead of criticizing the oppression of Sharia Law. Why do you think that is?
Is this a failure of Western Education or a type of thinking that is indifferent to any academic or intellectual experience?
AHA: I think it says a lot about Western education. I think educating these kids -- if you look at American and European kids, educated from radical Christian backgrounds, they are taught to think, think critically, and to reason. I think, for Muslim students, everyone took for granted that they are able to do that -- that they’ll get that from home, or from the schools -- and so no special attention was paid to them. So in a way, it says something about Western Education. It also says something about Humanities departments. I’m sure it’s not all of them, but they’re full of very fuzzy thinking -- I call it the Amsterdam School. I don’t want to stigmatize the Amsterdam school, but when I left Leiden and left for Amsterdam, there were all these books and big words about diversity, multiculturalism, and these kids have become victims of that. In Islam, like I explained last night, you can’t think critically. You can only protect its image. You can’t think on your own; the concept of God in Islam is submission. Jewish friends tell me they fight with their God. Christian friends consider their God alive. For Muslims, God is submission. So there’s a combination of all these things. And then most importantly, there’s a world movement, where radical Islam is being pushed and is being propagated. They target prisons, campuses, schools, and Muslim communities. So all of that works together. I invited the girls the other night to think critically, but they just couldn’t.
CJ: While your appeals against the oppressiveness and brutality of Sharia Law have convinced many, many Muslim activists and scholars resent the very idea of dissent within Islam -- and yet, we are told, that Islam is so diverse that it can tolerate internal disagreement. How would you assess your effectiveness in convincing the so-called moderate Muslims to think critically about their religious and cultural institutions?
AHA: Well, there is an academic Islam, which is mostly in Western Universities, where you say -- there is this branch of Shia Islam, and this branch of Sunni, and within this branch, there are so many different thinkers... -- and then there’s Islam as it’s practiced, in real life. If only Muslims would see how it is practiced. Everywhere where Islamic Law, Sharia Law is introduced, you see the same features: abuse of human rights -- returning back to a time of barbarism -- hanging people, singling out homosexuals and going after them, treatment of women. There’s this academic Islam, and they’ll tell you it’s diverse and it’s this and that. And then you see the way it’s practiced. Whether it’s Sunni or Shia, just compare Iran with Saudi Arabia. There is no diverse Islam in practice, but there are diverse Muslim individuals. Some of them really need to get out of it. The battle for their minds has just begun. And you kids, you’re going to be sharing a world with them.
AB: While we rarely see moderate Muslims speak out against the violence within Islam, they always seem to do that from a kind of relativism, cosmopolitanism and it almost seems to be saying that extremism is a problem, radicalism is a problem. They seem to fall into a kind of pacifism. As opposed to your principled stand that says Islam is violating fundamental human rights, why do you think the moderate Muslims go in this direction and how can we get them to see things your way?
AHA: I want to say this: there is no moderate Islam. So talking about the moderate Muslim doesn’t help in any way. You have Islam and you can practice it in varying degrees. You can say that this is someone who calls himself a Muslim but doesn’t practice at all and thinks like a Western person. This is what I did from 1992, when I went to Holland, until 2001. I called myself a Muslim, but lived the life of a liberal Dutch. I didn’t pray or fast. Compare this to the other extreme, where we find an individual struggling to obey all the rules of Islam. Those are the one’s we call fundamentalists, radicals, and extremists, and so on. In between, we have people you just pray, who fast only in the month of Ramadan, and people who become more political. So there’s no moderate Islam. There are practicing Muslims, there are non-practicing Muslims, and there are those who practice a little bit.
AB: There is an extension of the moderate Muslim -- that no one really ought to have strong beliefs and that is the problem, at least on campus by Muslim students.
AHA: So the hidden agenda throughout -- and sometimes they don’t even know they have a hidden agenda -- is that as long as you protect the image of Islam, as long as you criticize the terrorist activity, but you will not criticize the verse from the Koran that is used to justify the activity. If you look at all these terrorist organizations, they pray using prayers that the prophets used; following in the example of the prophet, who was a warrior. When they behead people -- it is just terrible -- they shout ‘Allah ho Akbar.’ These are Muslim slogans, Islamic scriptures, and they’re following it like a cookbook. The ones that watch these atrocities then say that this has nothing to do with Islam. They don’t discuss the text.
BG: So in a way, the radicals are right?
AHA: Yeah, they are right. They obey their God, they don’t like Western thinkers, and unfortunately, they make all the arguments.
CJ: We see that you are currently at work on a book, titled, Shortcut to Enlightenment and if you could tell us what that’s about and whether or not you see yourself as a student of the Enlightenment and what that means for you.
AHA: Shortcut to Enlightenment is a book, which is a dialogue between the Prophet Muhammad as a philosopher, and as the most important philosopher of Islam, with John Stuart Mill, with Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper.
CJ: That sounds like all of your religious teachers, Aditya.
AB: (Jokes) That’s my fundamentalism.
AHA: That’s my fundamentalism, too! These are some of my favorite thinkers. I want Hayek and Muhammad to talk about the position of the individual in society. Mill and Muhammad to talk about the position of women in society and Carl Popper will defend the open society and will criticize the tribal society. He’s happy that we left the tribal order behind us. Muhammad defends the tribal order in the dialogue in the three chapters.
CJ: Now your autobiography, Infidel, isn’t technically accurate, is it? You’re an apostate. Just what does sharia law call for with respect to apostates?
AHA: To be killed. The Hadiths, the traditions of the prophet Mohammed, are pretty clear.
So the Prophet said, ‘Give the person who leaves the faith three chances’: The three chances go like this. Allah says, get back to the faith and you say no, you better get back to faith if you don’t get back to the faith, I’ll kill you.
CJ(Jokes) It’s kind of like California’s three strike law then.
AHA: (jokes) Well, at least you get due process! In Islam, you get three warnings and then you’re killed. I’ve gotten several warnings. I’ve exhausted my credit.
AB: So that our readers know, please describe your intellectual journey from Mogadishu to the American Enterprise Institute.
AHA: I think my journey starts when my father insists that I go to school. That’s part 1 of the journey. I think part 2 of the journey is that I was lucky enough to live in different places and come into contact with non-Muslims as early as when we went to Ethiopia. Then I was in Kenya, and I met Christians and animists. At a young age, the idea that people can have a different religion - it opens up your mind. The fact that Kenya was a British colony and they left British infrastructure behind -- it’s not that I want to go on a campaign to re-colonize people -- it’s just that I benefited from the good side of British colonialism and what they left behind. I got to read English literature because that’s the curriculum they left behind. And I think that applies to people who live in India as well. They benefited greatly from that influence.
Then I came to the Netherlands, and at the University of Leiden, I took Political Science with a lot of Political Philosophy. That’s where, intellectually, my mind was shaped and I learned to think systematically about things, about different theories of government and different religions. Just reading a theory, thinking about what it’s trying to be an answer to, seeing its weak points is what they try and educated us as much as possible. I don’t know if they make you do that at Scripps. You were required to improve upon an existing theory, that was the whole exercise. The think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, is for me, the first time, I had a continuation of my time at Leiden. I left Leiden and I went to the think tanks in Amsterdam -- they emphasized multiculturalism, diversity, cosmopolitanism -- and found them to be useless.
AB: Could you speak about some of the books that influenced you?
AHA: Spinoza -- which was required reading --, John Stuart Mill -- On Liberty, Freedom for Women, who wrote of course, why freedom of expression is important -- Popper, and Hayek, I’ve already mentioned that, but The Road to Serfdom wasn’t even required reading. My law professor loves Hayek and he gave me The Road to Serfdom. That was the book that wasn’t on the curriculum, somehow I got my hands on it! Popper’s Open Society.
CJ: You once quipped that ‘When a Life of Brian comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of van Gogh, it will be a huge step.’
AHA: I think then we are done. We’ll have nothing to fear.
CJ: It would seem that Islam has a big problem with humor -- with the Danish cartoons. What’s preventing someone -- either an outsider or an insider -- from criticizing Islam in a more humorous way?
AHA: Muslims have a great sense of humor. Somalis, Egyptians, I remember just getting the giggles and not stopping. We can poke fun at each other and poke fun at ourselves, but not at the Prophet, not at the Koran. It’s the only place where humor doesn’t go. That’s the great failure. It just shows you how totalitarian the whole religion is, really just how bad. A god that demands you cannot laugh at him is no god worth following. He’s a grouchy God. (laughs). I think that’s the issue. It’s not that Muslims don’t have a sense of humor, but that they aren’t allowed to laugh at their God.
AB: Do you believe President Obama is being naïve in his assessment of and responses to the Islamic world? What do you make of his interview with Arab TV where he apologized for relations between the West and Islam?
AHA: He’s been the president for what three weeks? He still has the benefit of the doubt, but what he has going for him is a huge opportunity. It’s easy for people to say, there’s President Bush and he speaks Texan and Texans carry guns. But Obama’s middle name is Hussein, he is a black man, Christian, all the arguments of the diversity people, all of them have been met. He took his oath to defend the Constitution of the American people and in the name of Islam, war has been declared on America and it’s Constitution. What he has going for him is that there is really no war on terror -- we tried to call it different things, we tried to be sensitive to Islam -- but there comes a point when we can’t do this anymore. I am going to do whatever it takes to protect the United States and its Constitution. It is Islam, the burden of proof lies on the Muslims’ side to stop attacking us. Otherwise, we’ll respond appropriately. I think if he does that, he’ll really make huge impressions and that he’ll have world support.
CJ: Since your departure from Dutch politics, there have been very few people who criticize Islam. With the recent prosecution of Geert Wilders for inciting hate -- we have student speech codes on campus as well where we are guilty before we are innocent -- are you pessimistic about the spread of multicultural, political correctness and how can it be defeated?
AHA: It’s not been defeated. But it’s been beaten up so much that the word multiculturalism has become a bad word. What I find fascinating is that then they find another word -- so right now what’s going for them is cosmopolitanism, then there was another one “transnational identity” -- I mean, you can’t beat them. You knock down one term, they’ll come up with another. And nothing changes, in a way, I feel like people have become aware that this relativist stance is simply committing suicide. I really don’t know why. I really can’t figure out why someone who was educated here, who has all of their freedoms here, doesn’t understand the threat. I don’t understand why various intellectuals in France, the UK, the US see all the weaknesses in Christianity and Christian thinking, but ignore Islam all in the name of protecting a minority, which by the way, is not a minority. 1.5 billion people are not a minority.
AB: Do you think it’s still possible for someone like you to have access to the same great education in the modern academy? Do you think that the modern Academy can have an enlightening effect on Muslim immigrants? And do you think it’s possible for someone to be raised Muslim, not reject the faith, and still have that enlightening experience?
AHA: Well, there are still great professors at the University of Leiden, but I remember in 1998 or so and that was when multiculturalism was just being put into the curriculum. I went to two of them and I said to myself this one is just a waste of time. I think it’s possible. What I would love for professors to do is to look at the Muslim individual attending their class as being very different from the students, especially those that show off their religion [with the headscarf]. Their minds have been shaped. They haven’t been taught to think critically. They haven’t been taught to reflect. They haven’t been taught to theorize. I can see everyone saying to me, “Are you saying we’re supposed to treat Muslim students differently?” And I would answer, “Yes, you have to.”
As to your last question, I think those girls have already renounced Islam already, deep inside. I don’t know whatever religion you were raised in. Islam is very clear about the hereafter. There’s an angel on your left side and an angel on your right side that keep track of everything good or bad you do.
CJ: Talk about having a chip on your shoulder (Laughter)
BG: Do you think that Christians, too, might not be real practitioners of their faith, ignoring as they do many of the Bible’s hardest tenets?
AHA: Well, yes and no. You see, Christianity went through its reformation where those who were upset with the abuses created their alternative church and that continued until some of the Protestants nowadays are almost atheists. (They reason their way out of Christianity.) Islam hasn’t done that yet. We’re basically saying “Reform” [Ali pushed on the table] towards us and it doesn’t work. With Islam, you’re either in or out.
CJ: Now without revealing too much of your security situation, please explain to our readers what it’s like having armed security 24/7 around you and how that feels hanging over you, why you feel you must live this way and what would take for you to live like a regular, everyday person.
AHA: Begin with the last one. When there is no more jihadis, when there are no more teachings that say when you kill an apostate you go to paradise, I can then live without protection.
BG: Do you think that will ever happen?
AHA: Laughs. Yes, Inshallah (God willing.) So what does it feel like living like this? If you’re being watched constantly, you feel like you are ward, like you are living in your parents’ home. You have to tell someone where you are going, what you are doing all the times. and you don’t really know how hard it is. You lead a free life and then a little bit of your freedom is taken away like in my case. Then you realize, this is hell. And I’m wondering if you all just gave up large amounts of freedom, what would that feel like. I have this protection. [She gestured to the security guard.] I have them doing their job, their best to give me a normal life, so that I can have recreational time, I can work, I can have a social life. There are just so many things you can’t do. You can’t open your door or a window when you feel like it. You can’t leave the house. It’s not easy, but why do I have it? Because I’m worried and I can’t continue doing what I do without it.
BG: So what can we do?
AHA: I joked last night that I would like to see the plight of Muslim girls get the same attention as global warming. The planet doesn’t answer you.
CJ: Though some try to channel it. (Laughs)
AHA: Yes, but you can cook the data. (laughs) Do you realize that when people were trying to abolish the slave trade that there were slaves who were comfortable with their masters because they were treated well? They didn’t want slavery to stop. There were others who were freed but they didn’t want others to be freed. So speaking of these other girls last night, they were freed, but they don’t want the other girls to be freed. That is the normal human reaction to any kind of change. So what would I like you to do? A lot of intellectual change takes place on campuses. Is there any way of finding out the status of Muslim women in California? Go to the abortion clinics, the women’s shelters, and all those places and see what you can find. I am setting up a foundation, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation and this is what I want you to do. Go where there are high concentrations of Muslims and see what you can find. Look at the number of girls who go to school, look into the honor killings, or the forced marriages.
There are many ways to help. I would like to research all of that. And look into the boys, the young men who are taken in and indoctrinated by these mosques.
CJ: Ms. Ali, thank you for coming. It’s been a real privilege.
AHA: Thank you and you’re welcome.
Bryce Gerard CMC ‘11 is a staff writer for the Claremont Independent. Aditya Bindal CMC ‘11 is publisher of the Claremont Independent. Charles Johnson CMC ‘11 is editor of the Claremont Independent and founder of the Claremontconservative.com.
ayaan hirsi ali
