Book Review

Ironies at the heart of Islam

The Caged Virgin: a Muslim woman’s cry for reason

Only Half of Me: being a Muslim in Britain
Rageh Omaar
Viking, £17.99
Tablet bookshop price £16.20             Tel 01420 592974

The BBC journalist Rageh Omaar is a familiar name in Britain following his reporting from the front line during the war in Iraq. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in contrast, has acquired a degree of notoriety in Europe: this former Dutch MP has been living permanently under armed guard after her friend and collaborator Theo Van Gogh was murdered in 2004 for a film that they had made together about Muslim women. The murderer dug a letter addressed to her into Van Gogh's body as he lay dying in an Amsterdam street. Hirsi Ali, it said, "would be next".

Omaar and Hirsi Ali, both of them Somali Muslims, have now written books about the immigrant experience of life in Europe. They could not be more different.

It is a measure of the contemporary European mindset that Hirsi Ali's important writings about the experiences of Muslim women are so readily understood as controversial. What exactly does Hirsi Ali say? In The Caged Virgin she sets out the criticisms of Islam which have caused such furore. She suggests that the Qur'an be taken less literally by Muslims, that the life of the Prophet should not be considered the chief moral guide for modern Muslims. She highlights, from agonising personal experience, the sexual and other kinds of oppression experienced by Muslim women that, she says, is in some instances legitimised by Islam.

For many Muslims Hirsi Ali is an apostate: the name of anyone who defends her position will be found on various "Islamophobia watch" websites. But Hirsi Ali also has many vocal critics among moderate Muslims and non-Muslim liberals alike who strongly dispute her line of argument. Too often, however, she is subject to critical caricature. Rageh Omaar, for example, devotes a whole chapter of his memoir to what he considers Hirsi Ali's undeserved fame for bringing his religion into disrepute without explaining why he disagrees with her, or even referring in any detail to her argument. More outrageously, he equates her with those extremists who are tearing Islam apart by the use of violence. It is an irony that he everywhere sees Muslims maligned and caricatured. But then Omaar's book is not so much a memoir (though it is structured round events such as his own pilgrimage to Mecca) as an attempt to explain to European host nations that they need to understand a lot more about Islam before they can expect Muslims to integrate fully. There is much to be said for this argument - but Omaar nonetheless appears to baulk at the idea of any critique of Islam's conservative practices. His line seems to be that if you could only get inflammatory people at both extremes to pipe down, Islam's moderate middle ground would triumph without having to endure any uncomfortable criticism.

Hirsi Ali's views of the treatment of women under Islam stem directly from her own experience, not just in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya where she was brought up, but also in Amsterdam and Rotterdam where she worked for many years as an interpreter for Somali women in asylum centres and hostels for battered women (an experience that has marked her deeply).

She saw at first hand the way that certain practices that she thought she had left behind in Africa continued in the West, and that there was pressure on politicians to turn a blind eye to it for fear of upsetting their Muslim constituents. This was the reason she decided to become a Liberal member of the Dutch Parliament. She came to the conclusion that multiculturalists welcomed communities defined by their Muslim identities, believing that it would aid the economic emancipation of minorities, but underestimated the isolation that this has nurtured.

The Caged Virgin is a collection of essays written since 2001 on issues relating to Muslim women, "multicultural blindness" and sexual freedom for women. Hirsi Ali calls for Muslims to take note of what she sees as the oppressive relationship between men and women in the Islamic world, and to try to find a way to initiate reform. Many aspects of Islamic teaching she considers to be noble, and she goes out of her way to say so; but she also points out that practices such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honour killings, the stoning of adulterous women and other forms of sexual oppression are common in many Islamic countries, and that moderate Muslims need to stand up and decry these practices where they persist.

The book is clearly intended to spark discussion, not to imply sweepingly that all Muslims treat their women abominably. Hirsi Ali's line is that Muslims need to embrace thefounding principles of Western liberalism - instead of seeing themselves as intrinsically separate. She also points out, however, that Islam was, until the thirteenth century, in many ways a more sophisticated, more tolerant religion than Christianity. The scholars of Al Andalus and elsewhere were prodigiously curious about other cultures - a lesson many Islamic communities could learn from today.

Hirsi Ali maintains that the notion of "multiculturalism" has many serious failings. It is one of the reasons that Islam in the West has apparently failed to incorporate the liberalism and tolerance that Rageh Omaar claims for it. Few Muslims, for example, are prepared, in print, to take issue with or to debate openly aspects of the teaching of the Prophet. And many Western countries with Muslim communities have colluded with intolerance in the name of multiculturalism; millions of open-minded European Muslims are thus held hostage by an extremist minority. She is absolutely clear that criticism of Islam does not mean that Islam should be rejected, and she calls on Western cultural relativists as well as Muslims themselves not to shirk from freely held debate and self-examination.

Hirsi Ali's writing is clear, direct and, on occasion, startlingly provocative: she speaks of herself "struggling with the posthumous blackmail of the Prophet Muhammad" when he tells women to cover up, stay indoors and obey their husbands. She draws on an impressive range of reading, thought and experience.

One might argue that Hirsi Ali's avowed atheism may lessen the strength of her argument among her former co-religionists. One could also take issue with the degree to which she is correct in claiming that practices such as forced marriages and honour killings are widespread in Europe. But she is surely right to draw attention to them. While Muslim thinkers such as Tariq Ramadan call for the modernisation of Islam without addressing the question of female oppression in any detail, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has bravely crossed an important boundary.

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