The danger in speaking your mind

Ian Buruma, Guardian News Service, London

The shit hit the fan last September. A 32-year-old Dutch political researcher, born in Somalia, named Ayaan Hirsi Ali, uttered the following sentence on a popular television talk show in the Netherlands: "Measured by certain criteria, Islam could be called a backward religion." Of course, measured by certain criteria, all religions are backward. Being progressive, after all, is not their business.

A member of the social-democrat party at the time, Hirsi Ali was referring specifically to the skewed power relations between men and women in Islam. She was saying what most secular, metropolitan Dutch people think. This, with the added bonus of being a young, good-looking woman from an ethnic minority, made her a welcome TV guest.

What followed shocked everyone. There were death threats. She could not safely walk the streets. Her employer, a political think tank, had to buy her protection, since the Dutch government refused to pay. She even had to disappear for a while, like Salman Rushdie.

It is, of course, outrageous that a person can no longer voice an opinion in a free country without fearing for her life. It is tempting to blame Muslim immigrants for this sorry state of affairs. That is what the late extreme right leader Pim Fortuyn would have done. But one forgets that Christian fundamentalists, right-to-lifers in the U.S., orthodox Jews in Israel and so on are just as prone to violence when they hear something they don't like.

So is religion per se the problem? People on the secular left are inclined to believe so, especially in the case of Islam, with its unfashionable notions about the proper place of women. Hatred of religion was the main thing that split the left after Sept. 11, 2001. Some commentators hated religion so much that they ended up sharing views on Middle-Eastern affairs with George W. Bush.

It has become almost a given in left-leaning circles that organized religion, and Islam in particular, is incompatible with modernity, whatever that may be. In the sense that clerics should not be in charge of secular as well as priestly powers, this is obviously true. But most Muslim countries were not governed by priests. The Iranian revolution was a modern phenomenon. It happened precisely because previous rulers believed that religion had to be crushed.

This was a bit of an idee fixe in many parts of the non- western world during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, still officially revered as the father of the modern fatherland, closed down religious schools, forced women to strip off their veils, and destroyed priestly authority. Reza Shah of Iran, the father of the last shah, used soldiers to force modern dress and habits on his citizens. When religious students protested, they were gunned down in the streets.

The notion that a modern nation had to be secularized, and that religion was the main obstacle to progress, drove state socialist regimes to even greater excesses, not only in Stalin's empire, but in China, North Africa and parts of the Middle-East.

The number of Muslims killed by Israel is insignificant compared to the bloodbaths unleashed by secular Arab regimes, in Egypt, Syria (20,000 Shi'ites murdered in 1982), Algeria (more than 100,000 dead since the military coup in 1992) and, of course, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And his is without counting such hecatombs as the Iran-Iraq war.

No wonder the reaction, spreading as far as a TV studio in Amsterdam, has been so ferocious. Whatever may have been wrong with the Muslim faith, state socialism and brutal military oppression were surely not the answers. That horribly failed experiment, far more than US imperialism or the global economy, is the reason we now have a worldwide Islamist revolution on our hands.

In any case, the premise was wrong to begin with. The U.S. shows, for better or worse, that modernization and religion can easily go hand in hand.

The irony of the current crisis is that the materialist, sexually unhinged, and supposedly godless American Satan has replaced the Soviet Union as enemy number one of the Islamist revolution, even as Christian fundamentalists are encroaching more and more on the American political scene.

The ideology of Bush's war on terrorism is partly furnished by born-again evangelists who speak in tongues. And his main enemy, Iraq, is a secular dictatorship. The moral of the story? When men decide to go crazy, pretty much any religion will do.