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http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/07/30/2969254.htm
Ayaan's Allah is an idol
Rachel Woodlock ABC Religion and Ethics 30 Jul 2010
"Be good to your parents and relatives and orphans and paupers and close neighbours and distant neighbours, and the companion by your side, and the traveller on the road, and those in your legitimate custody" (Qur'an 4:37).
The children have received a visit from special guest Maithri, a Christian doctor invited to share news of his Swaziland orphanage project. Being the perfect opportunity to engage in interfaith cooperation, and put Allah's message of caring into practice, Yasmin and her classmates collected toys and wrote heartfelt letters of sharing, for Maithri to give to children a world away in distance and opportunity.
This is the Islam I know and love, far removed from the polemical caricature offered by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, currently visiting Australia to promote her latest book, Nomad.
Raised in Australia, I became a Muslim in the 1990s, long before 11 September 2001 turned Islam's Western followers into suspect fifth columnists.
I'd always had a vague knowledge of the Arabian prophet, but it was not until I began studying the language of the holy Qur'an at university that I realised Islam is my spiritual home.
I studied Arabic in Yemen, gained a Master of Islamic Studies and am currently analysing questionnaire responses from six hundred religious Muslim Australians to understand how they see their place in Australian society.
I am introducing myself so as to explain some of the exasperation I feel when I read damning generalisations of Islam and Muslims based on little more than inflammatory polemics.
But when the vast majority of peaceable Muslims are dismissed as being ignorant of the true nature of Islam, that for me is the last straw.
The real ignorance is the lack of religious literacy amongst non-Muslims that allows a whole generation of polemicists - Ayaan Hirsi Ali among them - blithely to repeat the most astonishing howlers ad nauseam to the unsuspecting reader perusing the shelves of Borders or surfing the Internet trying to understand why some people calling themselves Muslims seem intent on causing violence and mayhem.
If someone asserts, without even a single credible reference, that Jesus was a violent revolutionary who said: "I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword" (Matthew 10:34), then at least even the most religiously illiterate among us knows that this is not how Christians themselves understand Jesus' statement.
But until very recently the religion of the Prophet Muhammad remained outside the interest and concern of the average Westerner, leaving a dangerous lacuna.
As Daniel Varisco writes in Islam Obscured, "Recent collective cultural memories, whether premeditated or self-mediated, comprise an inescapably politicized litany: oil embargo, hostage crisis, mad mullahs, shoe-string budgeted airplane hijackings, skyscraper terrorism, Hamas suicide bombers, and the uncivilized clash with a post-red, green menace of fundamentalist militants."
Varisco goes on to lament, "The cycle of blaming victims and victimizers from CNN crossfiring to talk-radio jockeying and Internet chat rooms, ensures that 'Islam' will be viewed suspiciously as a 'problem' by Americans and Europeans for the foreseeably intolerant future."
But just as we would not consider Christian identity militants, hardline racist Israeli settlers, or violent Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalists to be representative of Christians, Jews and Buddhists respectively, nor should we imagine Usama bin Ladin and his ilk are representative of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims.
This includes the 340,000 who live in Australia, who adhere to the Qur'anic command: "Call on your Sustainer with humility and in private. Lo! He loves not aggressors. Hence, do not spread corruption on earth after it has been so well ordered. And call unto Him with fear and longing: Lo! The mercy of God is near to those who do good." (Qur'an 7:55-56)
The most fundamental error in Hirsi Ali's Nomad, is her peddling of a violent, fundamentalist vision of Islam, contrasting it to an idealised Christian West.
Hirsi Ali recognises the positive aspects of Christianity and dismisses problematic issues within the Church as accidental, whereas she does the reverse for Islam. The worst excesses of a minority become representative of the totality of Islam, whereas any grudgingly conceded positive aspect is dismissed as being inauthentic to true Islam.
For example, she lauds the modern Catholic Church as a more tolerant institution, open to criticism, yet that same institution has most recently received scathing criticism for Pope Benedict's letter making the "crime" of ordaining women on par with priests' sexual abuse of children.
She says the relationship between the various Christian denominations is now largely peaceful. But this is not because of any inherent Christian non-partisanship.
From earliest times Christianity has been riven by factionalism, as Bart Ehrman describes in The Lost Christianities.
Even in Australia, my parents remember when Catholic/Protestant sectarianism had devastating effect on families. My own grandmother's Catholic family refused to enter her house, because of her marriage to my Protestant grandfather.
Rather, the current positive state of ecumenism amongst the mainstream churches is because of the secular process of divesting churches of State power, that is: the ability to apply violence in the pursuit of its goals.
The churches did not give this up willingly or easily and there are branches of Christianity that would seek to reclaim it back. One need only look at the heady dose of fundamentalist Christianity that infuses the Tea Party movement in the United States.
None of this means that the vast majority of modern Christians are not peaceable, productive citizens of Western societies. Unlike atheists like Dawkins who legitimately decry religion used in the exercise of political power, but make the mistake of attributing violence and delusion as inherent within religion, I suggest that all the great religious and philosophical traditions of the world - including Islam - have rich spiritual treasures that help human beings reach their highest potential.
There is a notion within Islamic teachings that human beings have the ability to be higher than the angels, or lower than the worst animals. It seems religion is the crucible that tests the difference.
I would long for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to shift her gaze away from her troubled past, to the great Muslim heroes and heroines of the past and of today.
In her introduction to Nomad, she writes, "The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. By the time they menstruate they are rendered voiceless. They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks. They are required to comply with their father's choice of a mate, and after the wedding their lives are devoted to the sexual pleasures of their husband and to a life of childbearing. Their education is often cut short when they are still young girls, and thus as women they are wholly unable to prepare their own children to become successful citizens in modern, Western societies."
This is not what research on Australian Muslims shows us. For example, Helen McCue's research has found in her examination of the 2006 Australian census, "Significant numbers of Muslim women are undertaking and participating in tertiary education successfully. Some 17.5% of Muslim women in the 18 plus age bracket have a bachelors degree or higher. This compares extremely favourably with the 18% of total Australian women in the same age range and with the same qualifications."
While Muslim women's employment status in Australia is significantly less than the general female population, it is increasing at each census count, and currently stands at 31%, with women being employed in wide and diverse fields.
Hirsi Ali claims that Muslim minds are blinkered due to an unquestioned blind obedience to the Qur'an and to the Prophet Muhammad. She writes, "Allah may demand immoral or unreasonable behaviour, for he is all-powerful and demands absolute submission." She quotes Pope Benedict as saying "God cannot ask you to do something unreasonable".
It is not my intention to attack the Catholic Church (in fact some of my favourite Irish in-laws are Catholic) but there are many who would criticise Pope Benedict's God as "unreasonable" for prohibiting the use of contraception in AIDS-torn Africa, preventing priests from marrying, or excommunicating anyone who might dare to ordain a woman priest.
Of course the requirements of religions - including both Christianity and Islam - are mediated through the interpretations of fallible human beings.
Christians once believed the earth was the centre of the universe, and today there are those who think that killing abortion doctors is God's "reasonable" will.
However, the vast majority of Christians take a much more ethical and nuanced approach to the teachings of the Bible.
Likewise, while there do exist Muslims such as Bin Laden, who exalt a controversial approach to Islamic ethics, abrogating everything but a violent, triumphalist reading of the Qur'an. But those of us who belong to the mainstream point out that some of the Prophet's last revealed verses promote interfaith harmony.
For example, in the last sermon the Prophet delivered before his death, appears one of the last-revealed verses of the Qur'an giving permission for Muslims to break-bread with, and even marry Jews and Christians:
"Today, wholesome things are permitted to you. And the food of those to whom scripture was given is permitted to you, and your food is permitted to them. And so are chaste, believing women, and chaste women from among those to whom scripture was given before you." (Qur'an 5:5)
As Reuven Firestone points out in Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, it is incorrect to presume a consensus on a Qur'anic evolution moving from initial pacifism, to self-defence, to unlimited warfare to assert the dominance of Islam.
There is no "clash of civilizations," despite what either Bin Laden or Hirsi Ali says. What we are seeing are the difficult birth-pangs of a world-community moving beyond crass tribalism and nationalism, into the borderless global melange, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse calls it.
Instead of fearing the diversity that migrants bring, unsettling the essentialist narratives of Western hegemony, might we not celebrate our diversity and share a common vision based on our humanity: Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics and Muslims alike?
But finally, let me make an observation about Hirsi Ali's strange proposition that Christians - Catholics in particular - should engage in a proselytising competition to convert Muslims away from Islam.
Hirsi Ali is an atheist. Indeed, she counts among her friends and admirers, celebrity atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. She does not believe in a supernatural realm that includes one or more deities.
For her, the Christian God does not exist, therefore one of the most central claims of Christianity - that Jesus is the Son of God, sent to redeem humanity through his death on the cross - does not have any existential veracity.
So why does she want to co-opt Christianity to convert Muslims away from Islam? The answer: to rescue Muslims and protect the West.
In effect, Hirsi Ali is asking Muslims to reject one false god for another false god that isn't quite as bad, implying that the people of colour she castigates Western liberals for mollycoddling, need to latch onto someone else's unreal deity, in order to civilise them.
What Christian could view this as anything but disrespectful to the beliefs they hold dear? What Muslim could fail to be insulted at this crass, racist colonialism?
There is nothing in this strange proposition that hints of a genuine commitment to truth, despite her claim to cherish Enlightenment values.
Rachel Woodlock is a researcher and lecturer, based at the Centre for Islam and the Modern World, Monash University, Melbourne.
