The Caged Virgin - Ayaan Hirsi Ali [78]
Many girls and women who can’t bear to suffer anymore take their own lives or develop numerous kinds of psychological ailments, including nervous breakdown and psychosis. They are literally driven mad.
A Muslim girl in Europe runs more of a risk than girls of other faiths of being forced into marriage by her parents with a stranger. In such a marriage—which, since it is forced, by definition starts with rape—she conceives child after child. She is an enslaved womb. Many of her children will grow up in a household with parents who are neither bound by love nor interested in the well-being of their children. The daughters will go through life as subjugated as their mothers and the sons become—in Europe—dropouts from school, attracted to pastimes that can vary from loitering in the streets to drug abuse to radical Islamic fundamentalism.
European policy makers have not yet understood the huge potential of liberating Muslim women. They are squandering the single best opportunity they have to make Muslim integration a success within one generation.
Morally, governments need to eradicate violence against women in Europe. This would make clear to fundamentalists that Europeans take their constitutions seriously. Now, most abusers simply think that Western rhetoric about the equality of men and women is cowardly and hypocritical, since Western governments tolerate the abuse of millions of Muslim women when they’re told it’s in the name of freedom of religion.
Muslim women like Samira would make sure to prepare their own children for a life in modern society. These women would plan their family with a chosen partner. This planning reduces the chances for dropouts among their children. They value education and would emphasize its importance for their children. They value work and aspire to make contribution to the economy. They would provide the graying European economy with the human resources it needs instead of adding to its social welfare rolls.
The children of successful Muslim women are more likely to have a positive attitude toward the societies in which they live. They will learn at an early age to appreciate the freedom and prosperity they live in and perhaps even understand how vulnerable these freedoms are and defend them.
WHY ARE EUROPEAN leaders so slow to appreciate the great role Muslim women can play in a successful integration of immigrants in the European Union? Some blame can be attributed to the passivity of universities and nongovernmental organizations in addressing immigrant women’s rights. The academic community unanimously condemns violence against women, whether it is committed by family or the state, but it has been negligent in investigating and providing the necessary legal framework and data to help policy makers make women’s rights a priority. The classic argument of professors that universities are not political arenas seems disingenuous, since many faculties and colleges across Europe indulge in all sorts of ideological and political practices. For instance, Oxford University has just given a chair to Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim ideologist seen by some as a moderate voice propounding the assimilation of Muslims into European society by “psychological integration” and by some Americans and Europeans as a radical. He was hired in the summer of 2005 by the University of Notre Dame in the United States to teach Islamic philosophy and ethics at its Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice, but he was denied entry into the country, his visa revoked just days before he was to begin working there. Ultimately, he resigned from the post, since he could not get there to teach. His hiring by Oxford appears to be not solely because of his outstanding academic record but because he is seen as buffer against radical Islam.
Yet, in spite of having Arab and Islam faculties, most universities in Europe serve as activist centers to further