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Hirsi Ali, like Ellian, belongs to what one could call the écrasez-l'infâme school of reformers of Islam. She and Wilders recently cowrote a column in the NRC Handelsblad calling for a "liberal jihad." Like Pim Fortuyn (who once said, "I have nothing against Moroccans; I have them in my bed all the time"), she has a tendency to taunt her political foes. And like Fortuyn, who could play up his gayness to an almost preposterous level of camp, she is aware that her outsider status makes her a natural leader for a society that fears it will die if it does not change, but would rather die than be accused of racism, gay-bashing, or Islamophobia.
So Hirsi Ali appears to many Muslims as the country's premier moral monster, and to many Dutch people as something like Joan of Arc. It is her position on women's issues that is potentially most explosive. Many European countries, notably France, are trying to recast arguments about the wearing of the Muslim headscarf as a matter of women's rights, as if that will somehow mollify fundamentalists by moving the discussion from a religious plane to a political one. But it risks doing something different: moving the discussion from an interpersonal level to a psychosexual one. It conveys that the West hopes to assimilate Islam by stealing its women out of the seraglio.
The Dutch minister for immigration and integration is Rita Verdonk, a woman, as it happens. In late November she went to the town of Soesterberg to speak about "Dutch values." There she was introduced to an imam named Ahmad Salam. He refused to shake her hand. In the hours after van Gogh's death, Verdonk had given a speech that had drawn fire from a representative of the radical, Antwerp-based Arab-European League, who likened her to Hitler. ("All she was missing," he said, "was the little moustache.") But that wasn't what bothered Salam. "I cannot shake hands with a woman," the imam explained.
"Well, then," Verdonk replied, "we have plenty to talk about." |