Nomad (32 page)

A
MINA:
I don’t like where this conversation is going. I want to stop talking about this.

J
ANE:
Would you kill me? Would you stop a Muslim from killing me or my family?

A
MINA:
Would you stop a Christian killing me in the name of Christianity?

J
ANE:
Well, yes, actually. In a nanosecond. And you know, I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe that we should take orders from an outside force. Life is my religion.

A
MINA:
I really don’t want to talk about this.

J
ANE:
You don’t want to talk about it because you would not save my life or because …

A
MINA:
(close to tears) I don’t know. I want to do what is right. Allah tells me what is right. I just want to be a good Muslim, I don’t want to kill people, I don’t want people to be killed, I just want to be a good Muslim.

J
ANE:
Are you sure you want to be a good Muslim? Here! (She takes the Quran out of her bag and puts it on Amina’s lap.) Have you read the Quran? Do you know what it says? Look on this page: It says “Kill the infidels.” Look, here it promises eternal punishment for all unbelievers, here, I marked it for you. And here it says “Beat the disobedient wife.” Here, turn this page, look, it says “Flog the adulterer.” Are you sure that you want to do what Allah wants you to do? Are you sure?

A
MINA:
(now in tears, desperately crying) I really don’t want to talk about this.

Faced with this imaginary scenario, one group of people would say that Jane is too cruel, too insensitive, that she seeks to drive poor helpless Amina over the edge. It’s not Amina’s fault that some Muslims act badly in the name of their shared religion. Amina needs to protect her identity and her traditions; Jane should be more tolerant, more polite. Muslim organizations would charge Jane with Islamophobia. On all sides there would arise a chorus of pity, treating Amina as a victim.

But this is exactly how minds are opened: through honest, frank dialogue. Tears may be shed, but not blood. Amina’s feelings may be hurt, she may be upset or confused, but perhaps she will begin thinking, questioning her unspoken assumptions in the light of her own, real experience. It is a myth to think that people’s minds will be opened by their government or some higher authority; even teachers in school are not as effective as peers. Classmates like Amina and Jane ask each other questions in the schoolyard. Colleagues confront each other on the work floor, neighbors in each other’s kitchens.

My first encounter with the Enlightenment as a movement, a coherent set of ideas by philosophers who have enthusiastic supporters as
well as passionate enemies, was in 1996. I was then twenty-six years old, attending the University of Leiden, one of the first great beacons of the Age of Reason. I was living among students for whom these values and ideas were so familiar that they were unaware of them. My own naive discovery of them made people react to me with a mixture of surprise, amusement, and even alarm.

The first value of the Enlightenment was one I had already encountered in the Netherlands and had taken to immediately: encouragement and reward for asking questions. The adults in my life (my mother and grandmother, other relatives, and teachers) had systematically rejected and punished inquisitive behavior as insolence toward authority. In Holland I was permitted to question authority and was entitled to an answer. This very simple attitude was to me a revelation. It reflected an attitude in which all problems had physical causes and possible solutions. Afflictions of all kinds were not simply handed down by Allah as a curse for unknowable reasons that could be lifted only by prayer. If the causes were not known, then it was a noble exercise to pursue knowledge of them; inquiry was not a blasphemous or insolent act.

I secretly used to watch a children’s TV program called
Willem Wever
, presented by a man of that name. Children would write in questions on issues they were curious about. (This was before Google.) Their parents would assist them—
assist them!
—in posing the question in a clear way. Two or three questions would be selected every week, and the children would be invited onto the show to elaborate on what they wanted to learn. Then they would go on a journey to find the answer. Why do fireflies have lights in their body? Why do planets move clockwise around the sun? Why do people in England drive on the wrong side of the road? Mr. Wever and the child would visit experts and build models and put together the pieces of the puzzle; the riddle would finally be solved.

When some of my friends found out that I actually stayed at home to watch this, they treated me as if I were a child in an adult’s body. But to me it was a revelation. By asking questions, you got not a scolding but answers!

This brings me to a second value of the Enlightenment that was new to me: learning is a life-long experience and it is for
everyone
.
Acquiring knowledge is not reserved for adults only, or men only, or a certain clan or class only; everyone is assumed to be capable of acquiring knowledge.

The third value, individual freedom, is related to the second. If you assume that everyone, regardless of descent, sex, ethnicity, or religion, can increase his knowledge via the simple process of asking questions and seeking answers, then you have already accepted that individuals are free, because this freedom is inseparable from a life of curiosity. If the rest of the group does not like your questions, or the answers that you found, or what you did with those answers, or if you develop the annoying habit of posing more questions and chasing their answers, no matter how annoying or disrespectful they are, you run no risk of being punished.

Nobody in Leiden understood why I found this so odd, so new, so revolutionary.

A few years later, because of my research (asking questions) and my statements about Islam (the answers that I had found), I was threatened by Islamic fundamentalists. Many people, some of them the same professors and fellow students I had known in Leiden, were just as surprised then as they had been when I was a student. How could this be happening? How could it happen
anywhere
in the world, but especially in Holland? Surely this reactionary, violent attitude was from the Middle Ages?

It is hard for Westerners today, inheritors of the legacy of rational thought, to comprehend the phenomenon of group thinking, the claims and constraints that groups lay on their members’ conscience, time, money, sexuality, loyalty, and even life. For the fourth value of the Enlightenment (though it was not quite so clearly formulated until Max Weber put it this way in the late nineteenth century) is that the state has the monopoly on violence in society. If individuals are free to seek answers to any question, they may come up with answers that are unacceptable to some of the members of the society to which they belong. These groups may attempt to silence the questioners. They may even use violence. It is the state’s responsibility to deal with outside aggression and also with cases of violence between citizens. Checks and balances bind the state to rules that counter the potential for abuse of its enormous power. If a church wants to silence a
believer, the Enlightenment state stands by the individual believer, for articulate and well-educated adults may say and do what they please, so long as they bring no harm to others. Thus the thinkers of the Enlightenment devised a dynamic framework of legal and community instruments to help people resolve conflict without resorting to violence.

A fifth appeal of the Enlightenment is the idea of property rights as the foundation of both civil society and the political system. As a child, if you succeed in working your way out of a miserable parental environment, succeed in making money and buying property, the rule of law will protect you and your property.

So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights. It did not take me long to see that the very novelty of these concepts made me treat them with much more respect than many of the people living around me in the Netherlands, who took them entirely for granted.

Social workers in the West will tell you that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion for their mental health, because otherwise they will be confused and their self-esteem destroyed. This is untrue.

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
.

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.

No doubt there was once poetry in Somali clan culture; people dressed in colorful garments; they had a dark and biting sense of humor; they knew strategies for surviving a harsh desert environment that perhaps the world could have learned from. But the multiculturalist belief that Somali clan culture should somehow be preserved, even when its products move to Western societies, is a recipe for social failure. Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.

Instead of affirming the value of tribal lifestyles, people in the West—activists, thinkers, government officials—should be working to dismantle them. At least they should encourage individuals to escape them, perhaps even by providing specific incentives to those who do. Liberals should be engaged in an active campaign of civilizing—not by colonizing people, but by vigorously trying to educate them, by making freedom attractive to all, as it was conceived in the Enlightenment.

In the West, individuals free their imagination from the fear of superstition and direct their energies toward the pursuit of their own happiness. This is a great achievement. Of course there are many complacent followers of habit in the West, but individuals who want to pursue happiness on their own terms may do so. Yet Western governments also practice a racism of low expectations: they presume that people from traditional countries are like toddlers who will freeze in growth, who cannot evolve, who will never be able to let go. But I know that they can, for I have done it myself.

I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. Yet when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenment thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy. Muhammad says my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?

Every important freedom that Western individuals possess rests on free expression. We observe what is wrong, and we say what is wrong, in order that it may be corrected. This is the message of the Enlightenment, the rational process that developed today’s Western values: Go. Inquire. Ask. Find out. Dare to know. Don’t be afraid of what you’ll find. Knowledge is better than superstition, blind belief, and dogma.

If you cannot voice—or even consider—criticism, then you will never see what is wrong. You cannot solve a problem unless you identify its source. And if you cannot look at the root of what is wrong with Islam today, then in a very real sense Islam has already defeated the West.

The Enlightenment honors life. It is not about honor after death or honor in the hereafter, as Islam is, but honor in individual life, now. It is about development of the individual will, not the submission of the will. Islam, by contrast, is incompatible with the principles of liberty that are at the heart of the Enlightenment’s legacy. Yet more and more people are coming to the West from countries where life is organized according to tribal custom and increasingly subjected to radical Islam. They introduce customs, practices, and dogmas that preceded the Enlightenment and are indeed clearly anti-Enlightenment.