“In the past fifty years the Muslim world has been catapulted into modernity. From my grandmother to me is a journey of just two generations, but the reality of that voyage is millennial. Even today you can take a truck across the border to Somalia and find you have gone back thousands of years in time.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life story, ‘Infidel’, is not the most elegantly written book I have ever read, which is understandable when you consider that English was the fourth of five languages that she had to learn during her young life. However, the narrative of a young girl fleeing the problems of the Third World to start a new life in the West and her concurrent intellectual voyage of discovery, neatly encapsulates what, in my opinion, is one of the defining issues of the early 21st Century.
Before Globalisation started its inexorable recent rise in 1945, human societies and cultures tended to develop at differing rates and along divergent paths. Native American tribes, isolated from the rest of humanity for up to 10,000 years, and Australian Aborigines, isolated for up to 60,000 years, did not diverge greatly from the hunter-gatherer societies from which all humans originate. Other great cultures certainly held differing beliefs and ideas but there was no great divergence in human society until the late medieval period slowly morphed into what may be loosely termed as the Western European Renaissance and then the Enlightemnent. Around this period, somewhere between the time of the Gutenburg printing press, Martin Luther, Montaigne, Voltaire and Spinoza, European culture began to develop along a path which was distinctly different from other societies.
Europe’s history is a story of constant flux, a narrative of sectarianism, persecution, slave-trading and imperialism; but also enlightenment, reformation, revolution and intellectual and social evolution. European rationalism and intellectual enquiry culminated in the emergence of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, modern philosophy, industrialisation, medicine, modern literature and economics, which fundamentally changed not only ordinary peoples’ way of life, but also the way they viewed the world. In the first half of the twentieth century this human story reached its climax as ordinary people saw their lives fundamentally changed through industrial, political, social and sexual revolutions; but also through two world wars, numerous civil wars and the most terrible genocide the world has ever known.
Whilst this 500 year long human story utterly changed the way that Europeans lived their lives, it led to a ‘Great Divergence’ in which European life and thought differed fundamentally from the dominant ideas of other cultures. In short, by 1969 Europeans were generally free to choose how to live their lives (so long as they did not cause harm to others) and were generally free to choose their own (secular) Government, to say what they wanted (within reason) and to choose the extent to which they observed a religion, (if they chose a religion at all). These seemingly simple principles were, and are, in many ways the antithesis of cultures in which the twin ideas of family honour and religious absolutism were, and are, held as unquestionable concepts.
Until 1945 Globalisation was a tangible but weak and largely latent process. After World War Two, a revolution in communications, trade and economic growth led to an unprecedented intermingling of different cultural beliefs and ideas. Most fundamentally of all for Western Europe, from the 1970s onwards it experienced one of the biggest migration of peoples ever known by humanity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was brought up in a culture in which the rights of the individual were totally subservient to the diktats of her religion, her family and her clan. She was circumcised in the name of family honour, her father effectively married her to a man he had met two hours earlier without her consent and she was told only to obey and not to enquire about her religion. Her family fled Somalia, a state destroyed by four decades of Communist dictatorship and two decades of clan warfare and anarchy. She lived in Saudi Arabia, a racist totalitarian theocracy and Kenya, a country mired by tribal hatred, endemic corruption, terrible disease, and poverty that grew with each passing year, before fleeing a forced marriage to claim asylum in Holland under false pretences.
Hirsi Ali describes how her Somali grandmother had been bewildered when she first encountered electric lights and radios. Her own first impressions of the West, (clean streets, rubbish disposal, buses that arrived on time, men and women treating each other as equals, even cheese graters) set her on the long road of empirical analysis and intellectual discovery which eventually led her to reject the cultural and religious dogmas which had been instilled in her since birth.
Yet while Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who crucially lived amongst indigenous Dutch rather than émigré Somalis, made a personal journey which led her to reject the diktats of absolutist religion and the concept of ‘honour’, many others have taken the physical journey but remained trapped in a mental cage. As a member of the Dutch parliament Hirsi Ali commissioned a study which found that between October 2004 and May 2005, eleven Muslim girls were killed by their families in just two of the twenty five provinces of the Netherlands. It was clear that there were problems with integration and mass-immigration in a liberal society. Hirsi Ali became an outspoken critic of the concept of multiculturalism which she believed encouraged immigrants to live in physical and cultural ghettoes, in which women could be beaten or even killed by their husbands without fear of punishment by the law, and in which free will, critical thought and social integration were stifled. Ayaan Hirsi Ali eventually made a short film called 'Submission' with the Dutch director Theo Van Gogh, in which they advocated the opening of a dialogue on equal terms between Muslim women and Allah.
Then, one day in Amsterdam, Theo Van Gogh was approached in the street by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-Moroccan. Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot Van Gogh several times at point blank range. Van Gogh collapsed and begged Bouyeri, “Can’t we talk about this?”; Bouyeri shot him four more times and slit his throat with a butcher’s knife; he then stabbed a death threat against Hirsi Ali to Van Gogh’s chest. Hirsi Ali has been forced to live in hiding ever since.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story tells us a lot about the fundamental issues facing the world today and my own halting attempts to address these issues are a leitmotif of my blog. The failed states and civil wars of the post-Cold War Third World, Islamic state-theocracy, mass migration, cultural dislocation, the rise of religious fundamentalism and the failings of multiculturalism in Western Europe. Hirsi Ali’s life has been dominated by these themes but they are issues which the entire world also faces today; from 9/11 and 7/7 through to Iranian nuclear programmes, the integration of immigrant communities, international dialogues, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the failure of Governance in states such as Pakistan and Somalia. The stories of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and many others like her help us to understand why we face such problems; but they also raise the question: why have others who have shared similar experiences taken such a different path and what can we do to reach out to them?
