Ayaan’s da’wah, Part 1

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The big news on 11 November 2023, the end of the centenary week of the publication of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s two-part essay, “The Iron Wall,” was Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s public confession of her conversion to Christianity, “Why I am now a Christian.” It was news that drew wide public interest and spawned a minor industry of Ayaan retrospectives. Most significantly up to that point, as far as most people knew, Ayaan had been an atheist, after having left Islam two decades earlier. While I think that, by adopting Christianity, Ayaan has created an insoluble problem for herself, I have no issue with anyone freely choosing to practise Christianity. Having myself escaped a religion that commands, “If someone leaves his [Islamic] religion, kill him,” how could I possibly object to a former Muslim adopting a religion that commands, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”? The bottom line is that she is no longer commanded to kill me. This is not out of lofty principle; rather, it is my basic primate survival instinct at work.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali does say of herself at the time of 9/11, “I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one.” This is where my issue with Ayaan begins, and it is a serious one: there is no such thing as a “non-practising Muslim.” Such a formulation is a contradiction in terms, because a Muslim, by legal presumption, practises Islam. Ayaan still holds this Western voluntarist conception as valid, and the consequences of doing so come across very clearly in her Confession, in an interview on GBNews, conducted on 31 May 2024, and interviews on the edge of what the West will still tolerate as free speech, such as with Konstantin Kisin and with Ben Shapiro. Ayaan confuses her right to be a non-practising anything, which Western law permits, with her “deviation from the straight path” that Islamic law prohibits.

The admiration and respect afforded Ayaan are immense and well-deserved: growing up Muslim, severe physical assault in a madrassa, merciless battering from her mother, enforced genital mutilation by her grandmother, defying a marriage her father had secretly arranged, escaping Somalia in a deadly cat-and-mouse chase across continents, going into hiding, leaving Islam, seeing her friend murdered for an anti-Islam project they had collaborated on, living with round-the-clock security ever since, and goodness knows what else.

While taking on Islam is not for the faint of heart, Western sensibilities only allow for Islam to be challenged “as a set of ideas”, “as a narrative” or “as a point of view.” Woe betide those who scream themselves blue in the face that Islam is a doctrine of war, and its votaries are soldiers in that war. The observance of certain boundaries of decorum is expected. To mount any effective challenge to an enemy that demonstrates over and over again that it has no bounds is to “become like them”. Ayaan, right from the start, has always stayed within those bounds (her experience in the Netherlands notwithstanding).

Unfortunately, now that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a Christian, that respect has transubstantiated into reverence. I am about to assail Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I feel a bit how I imagine Christopher Hitchens might have felt when he wrote his critique of Mother Theresa. No one deserves reverence, not Ayaan and certainly not the evil Mother Theresa, who deserves neither reverence, nor respect. The beatification of such a figure as Mother Theresa makes Ayaan’s enthusiasm for Christianity as "a lovely story" just a little creepy. Ayaan offered Konstantin Kisin her alternative to Islam's fi-sabi-lillah:

What about good old boring Christianity? "Love thy neighbour" – there is an existing story. The West has a lovely story to tell. It's a story of life. It's a story that celebrates life. It's a story that celebrates merit, that celebrates art, that celebrates equality, that celebrates and protects women. It's a beautiful story to tell, if we want to tell it.

That's a great sell. Contrast this with no one noticing that, consistent on both sides of Ayaan’s conversion line, stands her unwitting da’wah, Muslim proselytising/propaganda. This came into sharp focus in the GBNews interview, mentioned above, in which she had much to say about da’wah. Some might say this is an unfair charge against someone who now subscribes to, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” but I will show that, combined with her conception of Muslims, this admirable Christian doctrine traps Ayaan into a position where she cannot but do da’wah for Islam, even as she accuses “activists” of it. In this she is aided by the West’s insistence on its self-inflicted impotence of fighting a deadly enemy with both hands tied behind our backs for fear of “becoming like them”.

The context is the GBNews interviewer’s focus on the micro-Islamic states beginning to emerge within the United States, with particular reference to Hamtramck, Michigan, a city of roughly 30,000, now under complete Muslim control and stepping up the substitution of Shari’a for civilised law. Europe has had a few decades’ experience with “no-go zones,” Shari’a micro-state enclaves beyond the jurisdiction of the official state, in major cities across its most prosperous countries, yet unsurprisingly, a Muslim-ruled town in America came as a shock to the wider American public who had managed to convince themselves that their Muslims are different, not like those extremists elsewhere. In Ayaan’s discussion of this Shari’a takeover of an American town, we see the paradox in which she has ensnared herself. She explains about da’wah:

Da’wah means literally to call or to invite non-Muslims to Islam. It also means to Islamise institutions. In modern times, da’wah has broadened to start first by getting Muslims to practice Islam and to command right and forbid wrong—it’s a very important principle in Islam—and so, first, it is to get existing Muslims and turn them from just being people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah, into activists; turn them into those who command right and forbid wrong within Muslim communities, invite non-Muslims to Islam and change institutions, convert institutions, to become Islamic and apply Shari'a law.[1] (My emphasis)

“Get existing Muslims and turn them from just being people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah, into activists,” is the first thing these “activists” do, according to Ayaan. However, firstly, “existing Muslims” are not the only “people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah;” those “activists” are also Muslims and also worship Allah. Secondly, both the “activists” and the “existing Muslims” engage in da’wah. What Ayaan today calls “activists”, she called “Medina Muslims” back when she was an atheist. It was part of a fanciful theory that divided Muslims into three categories: “Mecca Muslims”; the aforesaid “Medina Muslims”; and “modifying Muslims”. This purely-formulaic linking of “peaceful Muslims” to the earlier Meccan suras (verses) of the Qur’an that were supposedly peaceful, violent Muslims to the Medina suras that are staggeringly violent, and Muslims who try to “modify” Islamic teaching into something more to their Western tastes. If this theory had any substance to it, Ayaan did not see that all three categories are so-called modifying Muslims, in that they all modify the (immutable) teachings of Islam. It has to be pointed out, though, that since the violent verses abrogate the peaceful verses, the Medina Muslims are the least modifying of the modifiers, and thus the least inauthentic of Muslims.

Since Ayaan became a Christian, her Medina Muslims have transformed into “activists”, while her Mecca Muslims and modifying Muslims have now merged to become “existing Muslims who identify as Muslim and worship Allah.” Ayaan’s new “activists,” however, are the ones “getting Muslims to practice Islam and to command right and forbid wrong,” making them more Muslim than Muslim, since commanding the right and forbidding the wrong is a central principle of Islam that every Muslim must uphold. It is Islam’s most important police-state feature. Ayaan does mention that Islam is totalitarian, but without any understanding of what makes it so.

Essentially, Ayaan’s complaint amounts to asserting a right of Muslims to “identify as Muslim and worship Allah,” without anyone reminding them of what it means to be a Muslim, or what it means to worship Allah. Unfortunately, as Ayaan herself points out, that is not quite how it works, since such reminding “is a very important principle in Islam.” In short, the “activists” are merely helping her “existing Muslims” to return to being Muslims.

Crucially, such existing Muslims, read: moderate Muslims, do not object to the activists commanding them to do right and forbidding them to do wrong. They fall into line straightaway, as Ayaan has noticed. “Here’s the paradox,” says Ayaan:

You have millions and millions of Muslims who are fleeing their own societies in order to search for a better life. They come to America and they come to other Western societies and then they become radicalised and Islamised on American soil, because the only infrastructure that is really preaching a message, a moral framework, a message of this is how to live, that is the Islamists. Some of them, obviously, when they go to university and other schools, they encounter the woke and they join that agenda. But there are very, very, very few other groups that are inviting new immigrants, regardless of their background, into becoming part of a religious movement or a religious moral political framework. It’s at the moment only the Islamists. (My emphasis)

“You have millions and millions of Muslims who are fleeing their own societies.” On the one hand, this is true. On the other, you also have millions and millions of Muslims who are migrating from their own societies in fulfilment of their jihad duty to invade non-Muslim lands. Western officials cannot tell the difference and Ayaan is not helping. At a stroke, Ayaan has cancelled her own “activists”, the very people she in the next breath relies on to “radicalise” the poor, innocent Muslim immigrants. They fled their own societies precisely because the know the message that the "Islamists" preach. It is the message of Islam. Ayaan presents them as if they are duped, when they are anything but. This is da'wah.

To the Western reader, this might seem an unnecessarily harsh judgement. I would ask the reader to keep in mind that such Muslims do not want Islam, yet lack the moral courage to leave Islam. Instead, they flee to the West and bring their Islam with them, thereby passing their dilemma onto the Western society to solve. And the West, fools that we are, flatter ourselves that they are providing a safe haven for these poor people who just want to practise Islam in peace.

“Then they become radicalised and Islamised on American soil, because the only infrastructure that is really preaching a message, a moral framework, a message of this is how to live, that is the Islamists.” This is pure muddle. The immigrants who become “radicalised,” in obfuscatory parlance, meaning Muslims who do as their religion commands them to do, enter the West as Muslims from Muslim lands. They cannot be Islamised because they already are: they are Muslims. Those who are Islamised are neither Muslims nor immigrants. They are members of the local population who either kowtow to Muslims or are drawn to Islam.

Within the first seven minutes of the GBNews interview, the “activists” shed some of their invisibility cloak to become “Muslim Activists” and “activist Muslims”, later shedding a bit more cloak to reveal themselves as the “Islamists” that had started appearing in Ayaan’s discourse about a year earlier. She now needs “Islamists” for her explanation to continue:

What you see is, first of all, that these Muslim majorities have been exposed to da’wah, turned away through this activism from being just normal peace-loving American Muslims going about their business. Many of them have been turned into Islamists with an agenda to Islamise, and so the first thing you see is this transition of American Muslims who, when I came to the United States in 2006, American Muslims, who are generally speaking different from European Muslims, and Americans were proudly telling me:

“Our Muslims in America, they’re assimilated; we don’t have any of these issues that you have in Europe, that you have in France and in Britain and in the Netherlands, etc., because our American Muslims, they love the flag, they love the Constitution and they have no problems with Jewish communities, Christian communities, and, of course, in America we do have a fringe, a small, small group of Muslims, who are radical and who are jihadi, and we’re watching them. But the body of the Muslim community is very much American."

That is not the case anymore. First and foremost is American Muslims have been persuaded, they’ve been changed and with that I think American Muslims are manifesting the same problems of a parallel society that adapts to Shari'a law and that has formed ghettos of their own that are very anti-semitic or express Jew-hatred and express a hatred for America. In 2006 it was unthinkable for a man born and raised in Michigan to shout to a large Muslim audience “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” and in 2024, this is happening, and that is a clear-cut result of years of da’wah.” (My emphasis)

The problem Ayaan has now created for herself is that what the “Islamists” practise, including commanding the right and forbidding the wrong of the “existing Muslims,” is obviously Islam, in her own words, “a very important principle in Islam.” She says, “da’wah has broadened to start first by getting Muslims to practice Islam”. In other words, Ayaan’s “existing Muslims” are not practising Islam, while the “Islamists”, who are “getting Muslims to practice Islam,” obviously are practising Islam. Ayaan does not spell this out, but the implication is clearly there and clearly 100 percent correct.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali implies to her audience that “worship Allah” means what Christians understand by worship. She must know, as she was once a Muslim, that worship, in the Christian sense, is the lowest form of worship in Islam. It is what a lay Muslim must do to remain Muslim. Everything that is “pleasing to Allah” is worship. Things that are pleasing to Allah include invading non-Muslim lands and claiming them for Islam, deceiving infidels, raping infidel women, enslaving infidel children, killing Jews, and much, much more, right up to dying in the act of killing in the cause of Allah. “In the cause of Allah” means anything that advances or protects Islam by whatever means, in a word, jihad.

Ayaan’s critique of Americans who are so proud of their assimilated Muslims is also correct, and applies as much to non-Muslims anywhere who are proud of their assimilated Muslims, loyal Muslims, peaceful Muslims, integrated Muslims, Westernised Muslims, etc. It is a delusion that afflicts Europe as much as it does America. Yet, Ayaan’s critique, “that is not the case anymore,” suggests that belief in assimilated Muslims was once correct, but is now out of date. She does not tell her American audience that they have always been wrong, that Muslims were never assimilated. She does not tell them that the “existing Muslims” and the “Islamists” are two sides of the same coin. By tying jihad to the Islamists, she obfuscates that jihad involves both what she calls “existing Muslims” and so-called “Islamists”. She neglects to say that each has its own role in jihad, and that these roles complement each other.

Jihad is both the killing that the “Islamists” do: jihad of the sword; and the da’wah that “people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah” do: jihad of the tongue. The “broadened da’wah” of “getting Muslims to practice Islam” is simply a case of those who practise jihad of the sword being forced to backfill for those who have not done their jihad of the tongue, da’wah, to infidels with the aim of winning converts, as they are supposed to, thus necessitating jihad of the tongue to be done to those not doing the killing to remind them of their duty. The “existing Muslims” immediately pull up their socks and fall into line, because they know that they have been remiss. They identify as Muslims, after all.

Whether they hand out dates to passers-by in shopping malls during Ramadan, invite the Mayor to the fast-breaking ritual in their mosque, coo all over the non-Muslim women they dress up in hijabs, or anything similar, it is always a charm offensive to convince the kufaar of how harmless Muslims are. None of these action are ever undertaken without sugar-sweet smiles and telling their targets a little about Islam. Many of them do not even intend this as the softening-up for the death-blow to come, because they genuinely believe Islam to be what they practise. In reinforces this illusion by telling us that these Muslims are "exposed" to da'wah, Ayaan Hirsi Ali dissimulates and so does both her “existing Muslims”, and the West as a whole, an enormous disservice.

Part 2/...

Notes:

1. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, interviewed by Steven Edginton, "The Muslim plan to 'bring the world under Islam dominion'," GBNews, YouTube, 31 May 2024 https://youtu.be/GxP1u7mVIh8

Picture credits:

Kwamikagami - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?

Robyn E. Blumner, "Give the Four Horsemen (and Ayaan) Their Due. They Changed America." Free Inquiry, Volume 41, No. 1, December 2020 / January 2021 curid=130713230https://secularhumanism.org/2020/12/give-the-four-horsemen-and-ayaan-their-due-they-changed-america/

Comments:

On 14 June 2024 at 12:54, Ben Dor A. wrote:

Dear Anjuli Pandavar You certainly understand the Islamic culture better than many others.It reminds me of this vile person.

Best Regards

Ben Dor A