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MULTICULTURALISM”: CUI
BONO? By
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Excerpts from the book ”Nomad:
From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations”, N.Y. / 2010
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“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of
well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human
beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not.” In plain English and with exemplary candor, Ayaan Hirsi Ali compares the
virtues of Western civilization with the vices of her original homeland in
Somalia, argues that not all cultures or religions are equal, notes the flood
of refugees heading west from the Islamic lands, and points to the dangers to
their hosts as well as the risks to the migrants themselves. Below are short
extracts from her new book Nomad, HarperCollins 2010. Tribal life and modernity Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi is the central figure
in Ukrainian history during the seventeenth century. Some have also
considered him the most important leader in modern Ukrainian history. First
of all, it was during his tenure of less than a decade as hetman (1648-1657)
that the Cossacks, and with them half of Ukraine's territory, changed their
allegiance from Poland to Muscovy. This proved to be the beginning of a
process that was to result in the further acquisition by Muscovy of Ukrainian
territory from Poland until the final disappearance of the Common¬wealth from
the map of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Even more important
for Ukrainian history was the fact that Khmel'nyts'kyi succeeded in bringing
most Ukrainian lands under his control and in ruling the territory as if it
were an independent state The veil In London, on Whitechapel
Road, Ayaan sees immigrant women “wearing every
variety of Muslim covering imaginable”, and reflects on the veil as a mark of
status and submission. The Muslim veil, the different
sorts of masks and beaks and burkas, are all
gradations of mental slavery. You must ask permission to leave the house, and
when you do go out you must always hide yourself behind thick drapery.
Ashamed of your body, suppressing your desires — what small space in your
life can you call your own? The veil deliberately marks
women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women
apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a
body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It
is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a
sex. As we drove down Whitechapel Road I felt anger that this subjugation is
silently tolerated, if not endorsed, not just by the British but by so many
Western societies where the equality of the sexes is legally enshrined. (16) Family conflict and polygamy After many years heroically campaigning for
democracy in Somalia, Ayaan’s father slipped back
into a mixture of religious dogmatism and opportunism, precipitating Ayaan’s disenchantment with his entire view of the world. Just as I had lied about my
identity when I sought asylum in Holland, my father, too, it seemed, had lied
to cheat the asylum system so that he could live in Britain. The tribal hero,
the preserver of the culture of Islam and the clan, took handouts from the
unbelievers on a false pretext, with a fake passport, though, unlike me, he
had nothing but contempt for their values and way of life. Before he died he had even
applied for and received British citizenship, not because he wanted to be a
British subject but because of the instrumental benefits of free housing and
health care. At the same time he continued to lecture me never to be loyal to
a secular state; he repeatedly urged me to return to the true faith. If I had stayed with him for a
week he would have asked me to reunite with the family — his wives, their
daughters, some of whom probably think I should be put to death and who
certainly consider me a whore. We who are born into Islam
don’t talk much about the pain, the tensions and ambiguities of polygamy.
(Polygamy, of course, predates Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad elevated it
and sanctioned it into law, just as he did child marriage.) It is in fact
very difficult for all the wives and children of one man to pretend to live
happily, in union. Polygamy creates a context of
uncertainty, distrust, envy, and jealousy. There are plots. How much is the
other wife getting? Who is the favored child? Who will he marry next, and how
can we manipulate him most efficiently? Rival wives and their children plot
and are often said to cast spells on each other. If security, safety, and
predictability are the recipe for a healthy and happy family, then polygamy
is everything a happy family is not. It is about conflict, uncertainty, and
the constant struggle for power. (24)
Education and cultural tradition In Holland Ayaan worked
with Somali refugees, becoming concerned about the prospects for their
children, many of whom consistently failed their tests at school. Somali
mothers in Holland, she writes - Were all focused backward, to a
mythical past of life as nomads in the Somali desert. They would tell their
little children about Somalia’s heroes, about milking camels, and to hate
other clans. They would emotionally blackmail their children not to become
“too Dutch,” to speak Somali instead of Dutch and not give up their culture. These children performed poorly
in school. As part of their evaluations they were given puzzles to work out;
they were required to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and to behave properly at
the dinner table. In Holland these are important indicators that children are
well-adjusted. But all the Somali children I
translated for, who in their homes certainly ate on the floor, with their
hands, flatly failed these tests. That meant they would not go to a normal
school; they would go to a ‘special school’ for ’remedial learning.’ The
Dutch government would spend a lot of money on coaching them to catch up… I was amazed that officials in
so many different institutions — social workers, schoolteachers, the police,
child protection services, domestic violence agencies — all assumed that
there was some deep cultural puzzle that they did not understand. In itself
that was not a bad assumption, but then they proceeded to protect
these puzzling cultural norms. This was the advice they
received from anthropologists, Arabists, Islamologists, cultural experts, and ethnic
organizations, all of whom insisted that these behaviors were something
special and unique and worth preserving in these homes. (66) Islam in America Moving to the United States, Ayaan
finds troubling signs of the radicalization of Muslim youth. Again one sees
the conflict between citizenship, on the one hand, and a primary loyalty to
country of origin, to religion, and to tribe. Can you be a Muslim and an
American patriot? You can if you don’t care very much about being a Muslim.
If you squint and look away, you can avoid thinking about the very basic
clashes between the submissive, collectivist values of Islam and the
individualist, libertarian values of the democratic West. In a 2007 poll by the Pew
Center, 63 percent of U.S. Muslims said they saw no conflict between being a
devout Muslim and living in a modern society. But 32 percent conceded that,
yes, there is such a conflict, and almost 50 percent of the Muslim American
questioned in that poll said they think of themselves as Muslims first,
Americans second. Only 28 percent, little more than a quarter, considered
themselves Americans first. Asked whether suicide bombing
can be justified as a measure to defend Islam, 26 percent of American Muslims
age eighteen to twenty-nine said yes. That is one quarter of the adult
American Muslims under the age of thirty, and no matter how you count the
number of Muslims in America (estimates vary from 2 million to 8 million),
that is a lot of people. (139) It is important to remember that Muslim schools are different from
so-called regular Christian or Jewish schools. By ‘regular’ I mean schools
that are Christian or Jewish in identity but have secular curricula. Muslim schools, by contrast,
are more or less like madrassas, which emphasize
religion more than any other subject. Students are taught to distance
themselves from science and the values of freedom, individual responsibility,
and tolerance. The establishment of a Muslim school anywhere in the world,
but especially in the West, gives Wahabis and other
wealthy Muslim extremists an opportunity to isolate and indoctrinate
vulnerable groups of children. (136) Patriarchy and personal freedom In her chapter on ‘School and Sexuality’ Ayaan discusses the constraints placed upon Muslim women
— both within the home and in social life more generally. Women living under Islamic law cannot travel, work,
study, marry, sign most legal documents, or even leave their home without
their father’s permission. They may not be permitted to participate in public
life, and their freedom to make decisions regarding their private life is
severely, often brutally curtailed. They may not choose with whom they have sex nor,
when they are married, when or whether to have sex. They may not choose what
to wear, whether to work or to walk down the street. When well-meaning Westerners, eager to promote
respect for minority religions and cultures, ignore practices like forced
marriage and confinement in order to ‘stop society from stigmatizing
Muslims,’ they deny countless Muslim girls their right to wrest their freedom
from their parents’ culture. They fail to live up to the ideals and values of
our democratic society, and they harm the very same vulnerable minority whom
they seek to protect. (163-164) Money and personal responsibility Unfamiliarity with modern financial arrangements,
saving, and credit, leaves many immigrants of tribal background at risk of
exploitation — including exploitation by members of their clan. In a very slow and painful
process I stumbled back and forth discovering the intricacies of financial
responsibility. What I did not know, I learned. Based on that experience, I believe it would be prudent to teach
refugees a few basic skills before giving them loans and presenting
them with credit cards and furniture catalogs, before they get sucked
into a subculture of borrowing and fraud. In a modern, Western society,
citizens’ financial ethics, like their sexual ethics, are based on individual
responsibility. Within the tribe, ethics are about obedience top clan values,
and because of the ob ligation to assist impecunious family members, those
who are irresponsible with their money get away with it. Loyalty to members of the tribe
in faraway countries requires borrowing money to send to them. This makes it
hard to see the country of your new citizenship as ‘home’; it has a cost too
in terms of your own prosperity. At face value, it may seem very generous to
share your money with your extended family, but when this involves taking out
loans it has a serious long-term cost. Skills of earning, budgeting,
and saving are indispensable for citizens. But we are not born with them.
Muslim girls and women, in particular, are not trained to have such skills.
Their ignorance of all things money-related affects them personally, of
course, but it also perpetuates the poverty of their families. These girls become mothers too
soon, and as mothers they fail to teach their children what it is to be
financially responsible. They fall prey to easy credit and fantasy spending.
This breeds
dependence on welfare states that are already overstretched. (182) Group solidarity It is often argued that tribal immigrants need close
cohesion for their mental health and self-esteem. On the basis of her own
experience Ayaan says this is not true. The idea that immigrants need
to maintain group cohesion promotes the perception of them as victim groups
requiring special accommodation, an industry of special facilities and
assistance. If people should conform to their ancestral culture, it therefore
follows that they should also be helped to maintain it, with their own
schools, their own government-subsidized community groups, and even their own
system of legal arbitration. This is the kind of romantic
primitivism that the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall
calls ‘designer tribalism.’ Non-Western cultures are automatically assumed to
live in harmony with animals and plants according to the deeper dictates of
humanity and to practice an elemental spirituality. Here is something I have
learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have
a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and
religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers
women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that
mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs
or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s
rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four
wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A
culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture
that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to
oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage,
nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.
(212-213) Originally
published by – 6 August, 2010 at http://www.rogersandall.com/nomad/
You
may also want to visit Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s website |
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