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rfmcdonaldLast Friday, I commented on Rohan Jayasekera's remarkable combination of misogyny and racism in his treatment of Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He's at it again, in his reply to his critics.
Jayasekera above makes the racist assumption that Hirsi Ali's Somali identity must precede any of her other identities. He also fails to notice that Hirsi Ali supports policies which she believes will provide substantial help to Somalis and other Muslims in the Netherlands. His biggest mistake, though, comes when he buys into the myth of Muslim women as passive, as entities incapable of autonomous decisionmaking and as beings vulnerable to exploitation, particularly by manipulative non-Muslims. (He should read Fatema Mernissi's recent Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems.) True, she did suffer from a significant degree of misogynistic persecution, as Time's European edition reports:
Now, if you argue that she should have played the part of a Somali woman regardless of what she actually wanted, then you're a racist. If you argue that people who have suffered oppression at the hands of a particular ideological system (in Hirsi Ali's case, a combination of conservative Islamic and Somali traditions) can never be trusted to offer useful critiques of these systems, then congratulations! you've just negated the legitimacy of every political dissident from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn.
Hirsi Ali knows quite well what she is doing. In fact, she reports in an interview carried by the International Herald Tribune that she is the one who provided the script to Van Gogh. The relationship did not run the other way.
It's not at all a coincidence, I think, that the radicals in the Dutch Muslim community who would like to kill her, the racists in the Dutch non-Muslim population who would like to expel her, and the misguided liberals who critique her in passing, all agree that she is fundamentally incompetent, and lacks the prerogatives normally assigned to adult human beings of sound mind. Like I said, it's an interesting combination of racism and misogyny.
I do though regret making presumptions about Ayann [sic] Hirsi Ali. It did seem like a faintly exploitative relationship to me. To me something seems not right about her association with a political party with policies that are so inimical to her fellow Somalis in the Netherlands, as well as to so many others. But in speaking for her for the purposes of my own argument, I think I was treating her no more fairly than van Gogh did.
Jayasekera above makes the racist assumption that Hirsi Ali's Somali identity must precede any of her other identities. He also fails to notice that Hirsi Ali supports policies which she believes will provide substantial help to Somalis and other Muslims in the Netherlands. His biggest mistake, though, comes when he buys into the myth of Muslim women as passive, as entities incapable of autonomous decisionmaking and as beings vulnerable to exploitation, particularly by manipulative non-Muslims. (He should read Fatema Mernissi's recent Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems.) True, she did suffer from a significant degree of misogynistic persecution, as Time's European edition reports:
It wasn't the first time Hirsi Ali fled persecution. The daughter of a leading Somali opposition leader, she was born just a few weeks after the coup by Mohammed Siad Barre in 1969 and was forced into exile with her family when she was 10. She was brought up as a traditional Muslim girl in Kenya, although her father was progressive enough to insist that his daughter receive an education. At 22, confronted with an arranged marriage to a distant cousin in Canada ("I was repelled by his comment that I would bear him six sons," she says), she decided to escape to the Netherlands.
Right from the start she felt pressure to conform from the Somali community in the Netherlands. But she resisted. "I wanted to be part of Dutch society, to be financially independent, take off my headscarf and drink alcohol," she says. In the spring of this year she finally admitted to herself that she was no longer a Muslim, and she started speaking out.
Now, if you argue that she should have played the part of a Somali woman regardless of what she actually wanted, then you're a racist. If you argue that people who have suffered oppression at the hands of a particular ideological system (in Hirsi Ali's case, a combination of conservative Islamic and Somali traditions) can never be trusted to offer useful critiques of these systems, then congratulations! you've just negated the legitimacy of every political dissident from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn.
Hirsi Ali knows quite well what she is doing. In fact, she reports in an interview carried by the International Herald Tribune that she is the one who provided the script to Van Gogh. The relationship did not run the other way.
It's not at all a coincidence, I think, that the radicals in the Dutch Muslim community who would like to kill her, the racists in the Dutch non-Muslim population who would like to expel her, and the misguided liberals who critique her in passing, all agree that she is fundamentally incompetent, and lacks the prerogatives normally assigned to adult human beings of sound mind. Like I said, it's an interesting combination of racism and misogyny.
