The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [11]
The third task is primarily one that pertains to Western non-Muslims who have already benefited for a long time from the fruits of the Enlightenment. Intellectuals and authorities must assist us in our pursuit of reason. This undertaking holds within it a dilemma: how can the West preserve an open, tolerant society based on the notion of rights and combat rightist extremism and religious intolerance, while helping Muslims with their process of enlightenment? Thus far, politicians and policy makers, as well as intellectuals, have been afraid to confront Muslims about the opinions, customs, and practices arising from their religion that severely damage Muslims themselves and society. At present, the reactionary forces within Islam continue to gain power. Just as the regimes in the Middle East are manipulating the United States in order to consolidate their own power, so too are countless Muslim organizations in the Netherlands managing to maintain their conservative opinions and practices, in particular regarding the position of women in their culture. The Dutch government is among those who pay heed to these reactionary forces in misguided ways. For example, the mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, called on secular people to respect the unifying power of religion. As is typical of so much muzz-headed, empty political rhetoric, it is unclear what he was really asking, but he apparently believed that Islam is primarily a religious practice that provides comfort to immigrant followers by drawing them together in a community. He seemed to be making an appeal to the Dutch people to adopt an unreflective, unexamined tolerance of Islamic communities and their activities. With this “appeal,” however, he blatantly ignored the desperate situation of Muslim women in his own city. And he seemed to believe—mistakenly—that this “benevolent” sentiment and attitude would help the integration of Muslims into Dutch society.
It will not. It does exactly the opposite: it makes a virtual institution of Muslim self-segregation and isolation. The mayor’s misguided, benighted complicity with the Islamists’ agenda has earned him the honorary title of “sheikh” among reactionaries. Similarly, in another example of fuzzy thinking, Roger van Boxtel, the Dutch Minister for Urban Policy and Integration of Ethnic Minorities, stubbornly persists in defending Islamic education, which is precisely what perpetuates the poverty and alienation of Muslim peoples. For his knee-jerk support, van Boxtel earned the title of “mullah” among reactionaries.
Whatever the mayor’s point in his supposed humanistic appeal, he and other Westerners have to understand that we Muslims have religion inculcated in us from birth, and that is one of the very reasons for our falling behind the West in technology, finance, health, and culture. Sheikh Cohen and Mullah van Boxtel should realize that we Muslims are already imbued with faith and superstition. What we need are schools of philosophy and the liberation of our women. Has Sheikh Cohen ever visited a women’s refuge center in his city? If he had, he could not have failed to see some of the chiefly hidden yet omnipresent and undeniable suffering of Muslim women. Neither the Islam and Citizenship Society nor the Muslim community says anything about their women’s suffering, and every one of the 753 subsidized Muslim organizations in the Netherlands also remains silent about it. Only aid organizations such as the Regional Institute for Mental Welfare, the Child Welfare Council, and the Central Registration for Child Abuse recognize the suffering. Muslims report there in large