The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  To return to my encounter with Hirsi Ali: she had to cancel our first meeting, being heavily involved in negotiations about setting up a fund to finance her security in the United States. She was being driven around in bulletproof vehicles and was shadowed by bodyguards wherever she went. The next day, though, we met over tea and biscuits in the bar of one of Manhattan’s most fashionable hotels. She was in good spirits, bubbling with self-deprecating humor. Every so often, despite the bodyguards, she cast a swift eye around the room to see who was coming and going.

  Hirsi Ali told me that the cartoons, and the first reactions to them in autumn 2005, had reminded her of something that happened in the Netherlands in 2003. In an interview in the Amsterdam daily Trouw, she had made some critical comments about Muhammad. By modern, Western standards, she said, Muhammad was a pervert: he had married a very young child and had sex with her. He was also a tyrant who oppressed freethinkers and ruled by fiat. He was therefore an inappropriate role model for Muslims in a secular democracy.

  Her comments prompted a Dutch Muslim group to file a complaint with the police on the grounds of discrimination. The public prosecutor, however, dismissed the case, stating that Hirsi Ali’s comments had not exposed the Muslim community to scorn.

  “I said that people like bin Laden, Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein saw him as an idol,” she told me. “And that kicked off a crisis in the Netherlands. Four Muslim ambassadors approached my party leader, urging him to punish me and throw me out of parliament, demanding an apology. When I saw the cartoons, I showed them to him and said, ‘Take a look at what’s going in Denmark.’”

  In Hirsi Ali’s view, we needed more depictions of Muhammad, not fewer. She said she longed for an Islamic version of Monty Python’s Jesus comedy, The Life of Brian. She wanted stories, comedies, illustrations, historical research, and philosophy to delve into the teachings of Muhammad, employing popular as well as more serious genres:

  One and a half billion Muslims see Muhammad as a role model. If you call yourself a Muslim, you have to follow his example, not just praying five times a day but living according to his moral values. So it’s hugely important to investigate the more exact nature of those values, in order to liberate oneself from the chains of ignorance, as Kant said. It’s crucial, not just for Muslims, but for all who value freedom.

  Hirsi Ali compared the teachings of Muhammad with those of Karl Marx. The more people who understood why and where Marx was wrong, the greater the chances that society would be able to avoid the pitfalls of Marxism:

  Marx took up important issues, the divide between rich and poor, but every time it was tried out in practice the recipe he suggested for solving the problems of poverty led only to bloodshed, prisons, need, and more poverty. In practice, it all turned out so different from the ideal he envisaged in his books and articles. The same is true of Muhammad.

  Hirsi Ali felt the cartoons had a beneficial effect on opinion in the West, particularly on leftist social democrats. It sparked a debate that Europe badly needed:

  The cartoons raised a series of issues. Can Western Europe keep pretending to live on a desert island far from the true tragedies of the world? Can Europe open its borders to millions of people from parts of the world that do not enjoy the freedoms of the West—people from countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, ravaged by civil war and anarchy—and pretend it doesn’t bother us? Those images of angry crowds in the Middle East attacking embassies, boycotting Danish goods, and protesting were a vivid picture of how small the world has become, how much the free world is in the minority and can be swept aside, and how much we need to safeguard and look after it.

  That was one important debate kicked off by the cartoons. Another was about freedom of speech and Islam:

  All of a sudden the issue was no longer about how the political right and left considered free speech and its boundaries in the West. Now, the very institution that allows us in the first place to debate each other without violence was under attack. Some wanted Islamic moral values and rejected free speech. They believed only Allah and his Prophet could decide what could be said. Everything else was taboo, and they were willing to force their view of the world and their norms upon others. Many thought they had seen the back of that kind of thing once and for all in Europe with the collapse of totalitarian ideologies like Nazism and communism, that it had all come to an end in 1989. But the Cartoon Crisis brought home a new reality and made Europeans realize that major parts of the world think in a different way altogether.

  Hirsi Ali believed the cartoons demonstrated the extent to which the people of Europe had taken freedom of speech for granted, and the Crisis revealed that many intellectuals were not prepared to analyze and confront a new totalitarian movement based on Islam:

  The cartoons made that clear. Therefore, it was only natural that so many intellectuals didn’t care for them. The whole thing showed how a small group of intolerant people could force a large group into silence when that group lacked the will to confront tyranny even when it gets up and punches you in the face.

  The Islamist threats reminded Hirsi Ali of her years as a student in Leiden in the Netherlands, where she was confronted with historical accounts of World War II. There was the political history of the war, and the history of the major powers, but there were also attempts to unravel how anti-Semitism could ever have progressed as far as it did:

  They looked on as their neighbors were branded and driven from their homes. All these people just standing by and watching and doing nothing. I studied with young people of the second and third generations after the war. For them it was history, but I remember in class—whether it was the lecturers or the students—there was always this common assumption that if they had been alive in the 1920s and 1930s, they would have protested; they would have been on the side of good. The Muhammad cartoons revealed another, more prosaic reality. It transpired that the number of people willing to challenge tyranny is actually quite small, and that many were driven by the same motives as in the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and other places where atrocities take place. People want to keep their jobs, and they want their children to stay at the same schools and kindergartens. They want to keep in the same social circles, go to the same parties, and have what they write published in the same newspapers. How could they go on doing all that if they put themselves at risk of threat, if their surroundings were made unsafe, and neighbors turned on them for being a danger to their children? So the Cartoon Crisis showed there was a great gap between talking about the importance of not submitting to tyranny and actually doing something about it when the situation arises.

  I said to Hirsi Ali that some people felt, in connection with the Cartoon Crisis, that freedom of speech was not an imperative to speak out, but that it also entailed the right to remain silent, and that the whole thing was not actually about freedom of speech at all. “I don’t agree with that,” she replied.

  I think they confuse social etiquette and good manners with freedom of speech as a civic right. Imagine we were sitting in a restaurant. Think of how we’re seated, how we behave, how we eat, all of it social etiquette. We are aware that we have the freedom not to adhere to it, but we do so anyway. With freedom of speech it’s different. Let’s say I see children in school being segregated, boys and girls separated, the girls brought up to submit to men all their lives; a school in which children belonging to minorities learn to live apart from society, where they are taught to hate other children, taught to hate Jews and Christians and to consider themselves more worthy than others. If I hear that children are being made more vulnerable in that way, that people are making it more difficult for them to get an education and find work; if in that situation politeness and social etiquette and sensitivity cause us to say that freedom of speech is not an imperative but entails the right to remain silent, then I would say that we have become slow-witted, hard-hearted, and cruel, oblivious of what freedom of speech even is.

  It’s the same thing with the cartoons. We he
ard there was an author who couldn’t find an illustrator for his book because people were afraid, and then we discovered that a lot of people were submitting to self-censorship for fear of how some Muslims would react. To keep silent about that would be morally wrong. What would a journalist do if it were rumored that the mafia in Denmark were controlling people and that you weren’t allowed to write about them? Wouldn’t it be your duty as a journalist to investigate that? Or if you found out that Danish politicians were receiving bribes, would you say then that freedom of speech is not an imperative? Should we show sensitivity, respect the families who risk being affected, and for that reason remain silent? Of course not—not even if you knew that innocent people were going to feel injured. If a journalist learns that people are declining to illustrate a book about Islam because they are afraid of what will happen to them, and in misguided deference, the journalist decides not to pursue the matter further, then he or she is not a worthy member of the profession.

  But, I said, critics of the cartoons claimed that basically a large and influential newspaper used the drawings to bully and deride a weak minority; it was really about the right to mock a marginalized group of society.

  “In my view,” Hirsi Ali said, “the real bullying would be to let the minority steep in its own seclusion and fail to integrate its members into Danish society.” She explained:

  If Muslims are to be a part of Danish society and find jobs as teachers, politicians, doctors, journalists, nurses, shop assistants, bus drivers, or whatever, then employers are going to have to start treating them on an equal footing with everyone else. That means that every time someone arrives in Denmark, the Netherlands, the U.K., or France and is given a residence permit, he or she also receives a parcel of rights. In return, the recipient society must make it clear that with rights come duties. That has nothing to do with discrimination. Among those duties is the duty not to demand special treatment or special rights; and the duty to respect freedom of speech and the right of free religious exercise, which entail the right to be critical, to question and challenge.

  Those who talk of bullying a minority are guilty of the racism of low expectations. When you approach a blond, blue-eyed, white Dane, you expect a high degree of tolerance and reason. But faced with someone like me, you say OK, let it go. That is the racism of low expectations, and that’s what you are guilty of when you reduce the Cartoon Crisis to a story about a powerful newspaper bullying a minority. It’s a distortion of the essence of the matter. To harbor lower expectations of my ability to be tolerant and reasonable compared to the majority is to discriminate against me.

  Fortunately, there were Muslims in Denmark and other countries too who did not wish to take on the role of victim. They said that as practicing Muslims, they considered the Prophet Muhammad to be infallible, but that freedom of speech had to be defended, and that newspaper artists had to maintain the freedom to draw what they wanted. I don’t like it, but I can live with it, they said. That is a mature standpoint, and it shows that those who believe that we can expect uncontrolled rage across the board are wrong.

  I pointed out that many people appear to think that it is immoral to satirize another religion: satire should instead be turned inward against one’s own beliefs. Similarly, criticism should be leveled upward to those in power rather than targeted downward against a weak minority.

  “Well,” Hirsi Ali said, “the amazing thing about that argument is that what all those who speak of being tolerant and of including Muslims really are saying is this: let’s exclude Muslims.” She explained:

  To become a part of the community of Danes, one has to be integrated in the Danish culture, which includes the culture of satire. Being a community means that Jyllands-Posten in principle is just as much their newspaper as any other Dane’s. Why should they be excluded from its satire? Integration means inclusion all the way round—in film, theater, literature, satire, and cartoons.

  What about the other argument, I asked—that scorn, mockery, and ridicule should only be targeted upward?

  “That’s indicative of the Marxist approach to human existence: the division of the world into powerful and powerless,” she said.

  I’m not a supporter of that idea, and that’s what the United States is so good at. Everyone can come here, and opportunities are equal for everyone. Society’s approach is equality for individuals, not groups. Those born into low-income families with poor education can move up in the world, and the rich can fall. There’s movement both ways. Education and being included by satire, being included in the culture, and critical thinking increase the opportunities of the minority individual with respect to moving up in the world.

  If you accept the Marxist view of the world, things aren’t that simple. Muslims who are lacking in resources, who live in ghettos in Europe, are being brainwashed with totalitarian doctrine, and those behind it all are exploiting those people’s vulnerability. They indoctrinate and preach an ideology of totalitarianism that exceeds that of Marxism, and at the same time, they claim to be a weak minority whose ideology must be spared criticism. This is a doctrine issuing from a rich oil state, Saudi Arabia, and is therefore very powerful indeed when you start looking at it from a new angle. They are extremely authoritarian and oppressive; they have the money and the influence to export their ideology to our part of the world and indoctrinate Muslims with low incomes.

  Satire is a wonderful instrument by which to combat that. The funny thing is that many of those who claim that this is all about strong versus weak are not against the use of hard, military power, but all of a sudden, they’re against satire, the softest form of power imaginable.

  People like to compare Christian and Jewish communities in the West with Muslim communities, but Christians and Jews have accepted the division of divine and secular power. Only few Muslims have done that. In the United States, a Christian can be just as fundamentalist, just as orthodox as he wants. He can read the Bible as literally as he sees fit, but he has accepted that outside his home and his church resides a different reality, an open, secular space in which the American Constitution is law. When Muslims say the American president rather than God is sovereign, they are committing a sin. Many Muslims live in secular societies without having accepted that model as the prerequisite of democracy and freedom of religion. Recognizing that principle means becoming an infidel.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one of the 12 signatories of the anti-totalitarian manifesto published during the Cartoon Crisis. A second was Maryam Namazie. Both are women, both were born and brought up in Muslim environments; they are roughly the same age; and they have both left Islam, are deeply involved in the women’s rights movement, subscribe to the idea of universal human rights, and are prominent figures in the debate on Islam. And despite threats against their lives, neither intends to step back from the public eye and give up the struggle for what they believe in.

  Yet the two women have positioned themselves at different ends of the political spectrum. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a classical liberal in the sense of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman—a believer in the free-market economy. Maryam Namazie is a socialist, a member of the Central Committee of the Worker–Communist Party of Iran. She combines criticism of capitalism with a defense of human rights, and she believes political Islam and U.S. militarism to be the greatest threats to world peace and development.

  Initially, Maryam Namazie declined to sign the manifesto, since it put communism on a par with Nazism and fascism as totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. When “communism” was replaced by “Stalinism,” however, she agreed. At the end of May 2008, I traveled to Cologne to attend a conference organized by the Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, which saw itself as a counterweight to the Central Council of Muslims, and I spoke with Namazie. I met with her again in the autumn of that year when she organized a similar conference in London.

  Namazie is a founding member of the Council of Ex-Muslims in the United Kingdom, set up in June 2007 as a response to
the British Council of Muslims. She holds a number of prominent positions, is actively involved in the fight against Sharia law and stoning, and hosts her own program on New Channel TV, a 24-hour station broadcasting to the Middle East and run by the Worker–Communist Party of Iran.6

  After forming the Council of Ex-Muslims, Namazie received an email from a Muslim believer pointing out that Islam could not be renounced. Namazie replied that she would demonstrate the falsity of that claim, for she had indeed renounced her religion, and that many others would follow her example. The aim of the groups of ex-Muslims that were being formed around Europe was to break down the taboo that said Muslims could not leave Islam, and that those claiming to have done so were apostates, guilty of a crime deserving of the harshest punishment. The law in many Islamic countries punishes apostates with death.

  A number of Muslims in the United Kingdom apparently believed such punishment to be only fitting. One day, there was a message on Namazie’s phone saying, “You are going to get your throat cut.” She has received a number of others since, but Namazie refuses to be intimidated, though she admits the threats do affect her more since she became a mother.

  In Namazie’s view, the open proclamation by ex-Muslims of their renunciation of Islam has clear parallels with the situation of homosexuals some 30 years ago. Sexuality and religion are private matters, but when homosexuals were threatened or marginalized, it was important for them to publicly demonstrate that they would not be intimidated. She told me: