Ayaan's da'wah, Part 3

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has always been a religious person. Even her atheism was profoundly religious. She is quite open about how atheism offered her a way out of her post-9/11 religious dilemma. She says:

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

In other words, Ayaan had converted to atheism. She conceptualises atheism as a religion that allows, prohibits and provides different things to another religion one might have, but everyone, in one way or another, must believe in something, and it is best that something be God, however defined. Ayaan’s then new, and now abandoned, religion of atheism allowed her to “reject the existence of hell,” raising in her hopes of escaping “the danger of everlasting punishment.” Everlasting punishment is such an extreme deformation of the Muslim mind, along with the need to obey, that some, perhaps many, who leave Islam find it impossible to recover to psychic health and must necessarily seek another form of obeying, so they may have hope of one day escaping everlasting punishment. Ayaan’s choice of words is revealing: “I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.” The religion that Bertrand Russell preached, as she saw it, allowed her to do that. Nonetheless, her atheism, strange as it was, offered her a way out of the depravity that is Islam, and such is the blessing to be hoped for. If someone needs permission to reject the existence of Hell and the danger of everlasting punishment, then clearly, they suffer deeply and are far from free.

Interestingly, Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounts a particular experience with her madrassa teachers in Nairobi that is almost identical to an experience of mine. As a teenager, she had asked her teacher’s advice on her friendships with Christians:

What should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to, but who refused to accept our da’wah (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad, while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

She does not say so explicitly, but the subtext is clear: she chose loyalty to Allah and Muhammad over “the friends we loved and felt loyal to.” At the time, I was a teenager, too, and my case even made it into the following khutbah (Friday sermon). Yet I chose loyalty to and love of my Christian friends over loyalty to Allah and Muhammad. Ayaan continues:

Atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.” ...As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear.

“Atheism seemed so appealing,” alone already confirms the fundamental religiosity of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, even if sprinkled with reason: (“For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God”). “As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear,” she admits, still not realising that the sequence is the other way round: first you lose the fear, then you are freed to go anyway you want, including becoming an atheist, or a Christian, for that matter. Rhetorically, she asks what has changed to now make her a Christian, and offers, amongst other things, “The rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West”. Well, no and yes.

“The rise of global Islamism” is misleading in several ways. I have shown both here and in numerous other writings that there is no such thing as Islamism. “Islamism” is a curious splitting of jihad from Islam for someone who directly experienced the inseparability of jihad and Islam. Ayaan describes her early cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood:

The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. (Emphasis in the original)

And what did they do?

As girls, we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

But they could just as easily have been told to strap on a suicide vest and blow themselves up in the local market, and they would have done it. Her teenage friends and her, on the one hand, and the Muslim Brotherhood, of the other, were one. Their organic unity is what makes jihad possible. Without that unity, there is no jihad. In the universe of Muslims, “praying for things and doing things,” are kept separate until a “scholar” brings them together with the flick of a switch. Those who pray are primed from early childhood for this very moment. I find it hard to believe that Ayaan cannot see that her “existing Muslim” immigrants to America are in exactly the same position vis-à-vis the “activists/Islamists,” as were her teenage gang vis-à-vis the Muslim Brotherhood. I think she is being disingenuous.

“The rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West.” It happened in Kenya, it happened in the Netherlands and it is happening in the United States, across the three continents on which Ayaan has so far lived her life. Each time she witnessed the same pattern. This does not put her in mind of Saudi Arabia, where she briefly sojourned, and where the process had reached completion: there exists none but Muslims. Islam has always been global. To be global is its raison d'être. Its rise and decline can be observed throughout its history, starting with mass apostasy upon the death of their prophet and the subsequent Ridda Wars. The cycle decline and revival persists only because when Islam declines, no one deals it the necessary death blow, and hydra-like, it springs forth again. Historically, this neglect has been for different reasons. But today, when it is possible for everyone in the world to know exactly what Islam is, it is unconscionable to keep Islam alive by making excuses for Muslims.

Ayaan says, “It is a very ambitious project to bring the world under Muslim dominion.” Even this is an obfuscation. She knows that the telos of Islam is the subjugation of the entire world, “until all religion is for Allah,” in order to attain which, Muslims are commanded reduce all of humanity to praying and slaying as they do, in other words, make us all Muslim, or kill us all, and they have till the end of time to accomplish it, since accomplishing it will herald the end of time. In short, Muslims exist to destroy the world. It takes only one Muslim to take this seriously — only one — and the rest will fall into line.

This is why there can be no compromise with Islam, none. There can be no accommodation towards Muslim sensibilities whatsoever. They are at war with us. Every single accommodation towards Muslims, from prayer time at work, to niqabs in security-sensitive places to, public swimming pools reserved for Muslim women on certain days, to halal school meals, all the way to Shari’a “in family matters” and beyond, is a capitulation. This is why the demands never stop. They are always a springboard to the next demand. This is obvious as day, if you don’t look through Judeo-Christian eyes.

One might then wonder why Ayaan is so fixated on “existing Muslims just being people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah.” Do they provide the neighbour that allows Ayaan to fulfil the defining commandment of her new Christian faith: love thy neighbour as thyself? Is Ayaan, whether she would admit it or not, slipping into the world of so-called “interfaith dialogue,” in which the Christian never mentions “what divides us” and only ever sees on “what unites us”? Or is it something else? Whatever it is, the upshot is that she has no choice but to posit one section of Muslims as good and the other as bad, God versus the Devil.

By opposing the “Islamists”, Ayaan can convince herself that she is opposing da’wah, and since it is a juxtaposition, supporting “people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah,” it cannot be da’wah. Ayaan claims that atheism had eased her cognitive dissonance. That cognitive dissonance she has now restored, but buried under layers of obscurantism. Out if sight, out of mind.

Ayaan says, “You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing.” Well, no, actually. If you are going to browse the supermarket of beliefs, then Judaism should be much more appealing. A clue to why she particularly chose Christianity, after atheism had failed to give her what she was looking for, is hinted at in: “The rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.” Ayaan does not see that woke is simply dhimmitude before dhimmitude, and that the woke are a zombie army at the disposal of Muslims that, together with Muslims, make up that “vast population” assailing the West. That the woke dye their hair blue, fight over messed-up pronouns, and feel “unsafe” within a hundred metres of a conservative are all red herrings that hide a far more serious problem: turning ignoring reality into a virtue.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

So dreamt American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King. That dream has become the nightmare of Black Lives Matter. From non-racial ideal to full-blown racist bullying. You need to be woke to not see a problem here. Queers for Palestine. You need to be woke to not see a problem here. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. You need to be woke to not see a problem here. Nazi propaganda minister,Dr Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed,“If the Führer wants it, two and two make five!” A Jewish maths professor, Laurie Rubel, of Brooklyn College, agrees with Goebbels:

‘of course math is neutral because 2+2=4.’ Rely on that supposed axiom to then target ppl (& especially women) for coordinated ridicule/harassment. …reeks of white supremacist patriarchy. i'd rather think on nurturing people & protecting the planet.

All of this, Ayaan either misreads or is simply ignorant of. During the early stages of “multiculturalism,” they defended Muslims and Islam, thought that these were cute, and felt terribly guilty that they were not doing enough to help Muslims integrate. “Helping them integrate,” already then, meant erasing from our culture everything that Muslims do not like, such as celebrating Christmas and displaying nudes in art. All across Western societies, they did everything they could to, so they still believe, integrate them, all the way to the highest echelons of our armed forces. Now, as woke, they no longer just defend Muslims, they go on the offensive for them. These woke kufaar challenge kufaar they see eating in public during Ramadan. Woke Israeli generals see their first duty as protecting Palestinians! The Western woke are out on the streets en masse celebrate the massacre of Jews, without the foggiest notion of the dire fate that Muslims have in store for them. Ayaan, however, who today needs to be at her sharpest, is instead obsessed with God:

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.[1]

And talks anaemic twaddle:

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

How about being united by a simple desire not to be murdered, or to be enslaved or kicked around in the gutter as a dhimmi? — Oh, you thought dhimmis are second class citizens; boy, do I have news for you! — When Ayaan says, “unite us,” one wonders whether she includes “people who identify as Muslim and worship Allah.” If she does, then it is not clear what stake such Muslims might have in “upholding the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” especially in the face of far more determined Muslims out to eradicate exactly that Judeo-Christian tradition.

Part 4/...

Notes:

1. Greta Thunberg solved this problem by becoming a pro-Palestinian eco-warrior. I think Queers for Palestine might have got there first. It’s becoming a crowded field.

Picture credits:

Rowland Scherman/ Adam Cuerden - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46527326

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a portrait by Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65758

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=738484

Unknown photographer - http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/262003.html(Original source listed, now a broken link: http://www.untoldlondon.org.uk/news/ART38118.html. Alternative source as originally listed, but note that its description of the image includes theories not included in the original source: http://histclo.com/act/work/slave/ast/io/cou/sc-zan.html.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6592423

PawełS - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23104279

Publicity poster for racist event at NYU in Shanghai.