The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [21]
What Muslim culture needs instead of this pablum, however, are books, soap operas, poetry, and songs that depict what is really happening and that satirize religious precepts, such as those presented in Customs and Morals in Islam and Guide to Islamic Upbringing, books that have been translated from Arabic into Dutch and distributed in Holland. Satire is a bitter necessity; it has to happen. The book A Glimpse of Hell, which tells us what awaits us in the hereafter, could be beautifully parodied in a film. As soon as something like Monty Python’s The Life of Brian appears with a Muhammad figure as the main lead, directed by an Arabic Theo van Gogh, the controversial late Dutch filmmaker, we will have taken an enormous step forward. I want to see Muhammad, with his nine wives, appear in a film like Ben-Hur. Arabic poets often think that they can write much better than Shakespeare. But if this is the case, where is the Islamic Romeo and Juliet? And where is the Moroccan Madonna who will sing Like a Prayer? Is a director like David Potter, who makes a film in which an Arabic woman’s lipstick ends up on the collar of an Iranian general, even imaginable in the Islamic world?
Steps toward modernization are being taken in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and other countries, but champions of modernization will meet a lot of resistance from those Muslim brothers and sisters who would prefer to spend a few more centuries in the virgins’ cage. Native Westerners themselves have an important task: they must not allow themselves to be tempted to protect the “injured” Muslims. It is in the interest of the Islamic world and of the Western world to promote a flourishing culture of self-criticism among Muslims and to support it wherever possible. The Islamic world is in a great crisis that also constitutes a threat to the West, a threat that consists not only of terrorism but also of streams of migration and of the risk that civil wars will break out in the Middle East—the greatest source of oil for the West. Such a threat can only be lessened when the Muslim world reforms itself from the inside, with assistance from the West. A reform of the Islamic world is in the interests of both.
Four
Let Us Have a Voltaire
Nobody who has been following the debates since September 11—in the newspapers, on television, and in political arena—can have failed to notice the sharp rise in criticism of Islam throughout the West. The main question people ask is whether Islam in its present form is compatible with the system of constitutional democracy. Should Islam embark on a period of enlightenment and modernization? Does Islam need a Voltaire to call Muslims to break free of superstition, to use their minds and not their emotions, to take note, as he did in the 1800s, that “Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.” And, “The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost their power of reasoning.” Is there an enlightened Muslim man or woman who can stand with Voltaire and say, “To think of virginity as a virtue—and not a barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge—is an infantile superstition”? Where is the biting criticism of Islam from within? Or is it the West that should be listening to the critical voice of Voltaire and examining itself and its commitment to its moral principles? As Thomas L. Friedman has written, Westerners should hold Arabs and Muslims to the same high moral standards as Westerners hold for themselves.
In order to answer the question of compatibility between present-day Islam and Western culture, it makes sense to compare the two worlds.
Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam have not suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They needed a breeding ground, where they could take root and grow, before they were transformed into the very dangerous forms that have confronted us since September