EARLIER this month Brandeis University rescinded its offer of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born women’s rights activist, saying its officials had not been fully aware of some her more scathing remarks on Islam. Conservatives have accused Brandeis of muzzling Ms Hirsi Ali and bowing to Muslim pressure groups. Liberals have wondered how the university could possibly have overlooked Ms Hirsi Ali’s condemnations, not just of radical Islam, but of Islam as such. At the risk of coming off as a postmodern multi-culti squish, it seems to me that this discussion suffers from a lack of cultural context—but not the cultural context you’re thinking of. The way Ms Hirsi Ali talks about Islam strikes American liberals as strangely intolerant, but it has its roots in the prevailing discourse on religious freedom and Islam in the country where Ms Hirsi Ali first began seriously tackling these issues: the Netherlands.
As Ms Hirsi Ali noted in an interview on Fox News, the most-cited of her objectionable statements on Islam came in a 2007 interview with Reason magazine. In that interview she said it was necessary to “defeat” Islam and that ”we are at war with Islam”, including in the military sense of the word. In another 2007 interview, with the London Evening Standard, she called Islam “the new fascism” and “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death”. Characterising an entire religion in this way is considered entirely beyond the pale in educated American society; while some small right-wing or evangelical Christian organisations demonise Islam as an enemy, mainstream conservatives, and for that matter neoconservatives, characterise only radical Islam as a threat. Actually, bigotry against Muslims in America is common enough, but the public expression of such prejudice by figures of authority is taboo. Wholesale condemnations of existing religions just aren’t done in American politics. Once-open prejudices against Catholics and Jews were gradually wrung out of the public sphere in a process that started in the 1940s and was essentially wrapped up by the 1970s. The explicit consensus in America is ecumenical and strongly pro-religious, and Americans generally sense that when they single out one faith and aggressively criticise its spiritual content, they’re violating a national ethical code.
This is not quite the case in the Netherlands, where Ms Hirsi Ali developed her feminist critique of Islam and served as an MP for the centre-right Liberal party. To recap her story: Ms Hirsi Ali came to the Netherlands in 1992, fleeing an arranged marriage in Kenya. She was granted refugee status and ultimately a Dutch passport, and earned a master’s degree that led her into outreach work with Muslim immigrant women, initially in affiliation with the Labour party. Her politics shifted steadily rightward, due in part to the repression of women she saw in immigrant communities and in part to the September 11th attacks. In 2004 she made a deliberately provocative, rather surreal short film decrying Muslim oppression of women with the bomb-throwing TV director and personality Theo van Gogh; in response, a young Muslim extremist murdered Mr van Gogh. With her extraordinary charisma and impressively elegant Dutch, Ms Hirsi Ali was ultimately invited to run for parliament by the centre-right Liberals, and served from 2003 until 2006, when a scandal over her immigration status (she admitted to having concealed her name and lied about other details) led the hard-line interior minister to revoke her Dutch passport. She moved to America shortly thereafter, taking a job at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. (The affair, incidentally, precipitated the fall of the Dutch government.)
Returning to the theme: while the way Ms Hirsi Ali talks about Islam sounds extreme to the American ear, it doesn’t sound as extreme to the Dutch ear. To take the most obvious example, Geert Wilders, the leader of the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), has been calling for banning the Koran since 2007. To legitimate this sort of language, Mr Wilders has advanced the novel claim that Islam is not a religion at all, but a totalitarian ideology. Of course, Mr Wilders leads the farthest-right party in the Dutch political landscape, one with which most Dutch parties have refused to cooperate. Nevertheless, most Dutch citizens don’t see Mr Wilders’ PVV as an extreme-right party. This is incomprehensible to Americans: a party that calls for banning the Koran and terms Islam a totalitarian ideology seems by definition extreme-right in an American context. Yet intelligent, tolerant mainstream Dutch and Americans can go back and forth on this question in utter bafflement.
And Mr Wilders doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He launched the PVV in 2006, after dropping out of the Liberal party just when Ms Hirsi Ali was becoming one of its biggest stars. A few years earlier, Pim Fortuyn, the flamboyantly gay populist politician, had blazed the trail for such language by terming Islam a “backward religion”. Beginning with Mr Fortuyn’s rise in 2001, Dutch politics was seized by an impulse to cast off “politically correct” taboos on negative characterisations of (mainly Muslim) immigrants, and to “name the real problems” of crime, failure to integrate, and suppression of the rights of women and gays among immigrant communities. Ms Hirsi Ali’s sharp anti-Muslim language did not spring out of nowhere; she was part of this broader shift in Dutch politics and political language.
At a deeper level, while the Netherlands has long been renowned for, or even defined by, its religious tolerance, the Dutch variety of tolerance is not the same as the American one. For example, I’ve repeatedly encountered non-religious Dutch who see no difference between a religion and a belief or opinion, and feel that religions therefore don’t deserve any kind of special consideration, be it in terms of schooling, of exemptions from public rules and duties, or of conversational deference or respect. That view may be shared in certain emphatically atheist quarters in America, but it seems much more widespread in the Netherlands. To some extent this may be rooted in the much lower level of Dutch religiosity; 21% of Dutch believe in God, against 61% of Americans, and Dutch religiosity declined markedly from 1991-2008. And while Americans who do not actually go to church often nevertheless identify with some denomination on a family basis, Dutch who do not believe or worship tend to describe themselves simply as having no religion. One sometimes gets the sense that non-religious Dutch are so alienated from religious tradition that they lack empathetic understanding of what belonging to a faith is like.
But then, the bargains entailed in the Dutch tradition of religious tolerance have always worked differently than those in America. From the late 19th century to the 1960s, the Dutch hewed to a social system called “pillarisation”, in which the country’s Protestant and Catholic communities lived, studied and voted in largely segregated blocs, each with their own schools, newspapers, and political parties. The socialist movement formed a third, non-religious bloc. The blocs were often openly disdainful of each other, and it’s not surprising that the Dutch tend to be more willing than Americans to bluntly criticise the substance of others’ religions, just as they might criticise a political ideology. Even in the 17th century, when the Netherlands became a haven for religious refugees from the 30 Years’ War and the Inquisition, tolerance was largely seen as a pragmatic virtue, good for business, so long as those with alien faiths kept their houses of worship out of sight. One might look even further back: many of the Netherlands’ firmest critics of religion belong to the country’s strong Humanist movement, which traces its roots to the atheistic or pan-theistic philosophy of that greatest apostate of Amsterdam’s Jewish community, Baruch Spinoza. The intellectual historian Jonathan Israel makes Spinoza the model for what he terms the “radical” wing of the European Enlightenment, which totally rejected religious authority, in contrast to more moderate figures such as Descartes; and one can hear some echoes of Spinoza in Ms Hirsi Ali’s uncompromising turn away from, and finally complete rejection of, her native Islam.
The interview in which Ms Hirsi Ali called for a “war” on Islam came in 2007, just a year after she had left the Netherlands. In deciding to rescind its offer of an honorary degree to her, Brandeis was in part drawing a line between the kind of discourse on religion that is acceptable in mainstream American intellectual life, and the kind that has arisen over the past decade and a half in the Netherlands. The university was not silencing Ms Hirsi Ali; it still invited her to come to the university to “engage in a dialogue”. As Isaac Chotiner puts it, the “controversy isn’t about shunning someone from polite society. It is about giving a person an honorary degree.” Asking Ms Hirsi Ali to speak to students at Brandeis is a great idea; giving her an honorary degree as part of graduation ceremonies suggests that Brandeis thinks calling for a war on Islam is an acceptable statement within the bounds of normal political and social discourse. The fact that such statements are not welcomed in American public discourse is one reason why the American model of integration and tolerance works better than the Dutch model, and why the Netherlands continues to be wracked by tensions over Islam and integration—years after those tensions forced Ms Hirsi Ali herself to leave.
