The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  We hope that our manifestation can reduce fear and the feeling of being stigmatized that ex-Muslims experience. We can tell from people’s reactions that there are a great many ex-Muslims, but that many of them are afraid to be counted even anonymously. It’s rather like being an ex-Christian during the Inquisition, but we’re doing it to make people here in the U.K. and in Europe aware that not everyone who comes from an Islamic country is Muslim, that there are various takes on the issue, and that imams do not speak on behalf of the majority.

  Maryam Namazie was 12 years old in 1979, when the mullahs came to power in Iran. She remembers how a man with a long beard and strange clothing appeared one day at her school and said that boys and girls were to be kept apart. Later, the school was closed down so the building and teaching materials could be Islamized. Members of the Islamic Hezbollah movement shouted obscenities at her on the street whenever she appeared without a hijab, and graphic images of televised executions remain etched on her memory. In 1980, the family decided to move to India, from where they relocated to the United Kingdom. They finally gained asylum in the United States, where Namazie attended university.

  Islam and her personal take on religion were not big issues for Namazie until she traveled to Sudan in 1988 to work for the United Nations with Ethiopian refugees. Six months later, Colonel Omar al-Bashir seized power in a military coup and introduced an Islamic government. It was the second time in 10 years that Namazie had witnessed religious fanatics taking power and introducing Sharia law. It made an indelible impression on her. She realized that she was no longer merely a nonpracticing Muslim: she was an atheist. She became involved in a Sudanese human rights group that so incensed the authorities that they began harassing her:

  They believed they had the right to violate my private life. They pressured me and asked questions of a very personal nature, things I didn’t think were any concern of theirs. They didn’t care for my answers and started threatening me. One guy from the security services warned that I could have an accident on my motorcycle if I kept up my work.

  The UN acted, evacuating Namazie out of fear for her safety. She devoted herself to humanitarian work for Iranian refugees around the world and has since been fiercely opposed to movements and governments seeking to constrain civil rights in the name of religion. “They want to control every aspect of people’s lives. They interfere in what you wear, what you eat and drink, what kind of music you listen to, who you have sex with in your own home, and what you draw. Everything has to be monitored, controlled, and regulated.”

  In Namazie’s view, all media should have reprinted the Muhammad cartoons in 2006, and she refers to Jyllands-Posten’s apology for having offended Muslim sentiments as naive. She posted the cartoons herself on her own blog and spoke at a demonstration in March 2006 on London’s Trafalgar Square in support of free speech, with the cartoons prominently displayed on placards, together with the slogans “Religion: Hands Off Women’s Lives” and “Long Live Unconditional Freedom of Belief and Expression.”

  She rejected criticism of the cartoons as being racist or attacking Muslims:

  Jerry Springer: The Opera or Monty Python’s Life of Brian are satirical takes on Christianity, and I don’t think they can be seen as being racist towards Christians. Criticism and ridicule of religions and ideas, or even hatred of ideas, regardless of what the pope or Islamic governments say, is not racism. It just doesn’t make sense. They try to tell people that ideas, religions, and cultures can lay claim to rights because someone says they’re sacred, but only people are sacred and entitled to rights.

  Those who saw the Cartoon Crisis as a conflict between a powerful newspaper and a weak minority were, Namazie said, narrow-minded and submissive. She believed they were ignoring the past 30 years of history, a time in which Islam had steadily gained ground as a political ideology, and she saw their view as overlooking those who had been persecuted and discriminated against in the name of Islam:

  I don’t think women who are stoned to death would see those responsible for their deaths as representatives of a persecuted and oppressed minority. People are slaughtered in the name of religion by Islamic governments and movements. So claiming that publication of the cartoons was not about freedom of speech but more about a big newspaper stepping on a weak minority is a poor excuse to appease and justify one’s own silence in respect of Islam.

  If you criticize Islam, you’re attacked for being out to get Muslims, but freedom, civil rights, and respect are for people, not religions and faiths. Anyway, how long must those of us with Muslim backgrounds live in Europe before we’re considered to be part of the majority and the population as a whole? Why should a certain reaction to the cartoons be identified as the view of the entire minority? That’s a problem, because political movements ideologically based on Islam have an interest in claiming that we are all of us Muslims. It lends them credibility, so those who claim that the cartoons offended all Muslims or the greater majority of them are in that way giving credence to the Islamic movements and enhancing their opportunities to exert influence upon society.

  Namazie snorted her disapproval when I laid out the widely held view that as a non-Muslim newspaper Jyllands-Posten ought not to have published the Muhammad cartoons and instead should have left it to Muslims to break the ban on depiction and to satirize Islam:

  How dare they? How dare they? By that logic, Danes, Dutchmen, Britons, and others who took part in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa should have left the South Africans alone in their Bantustans, deprived of their civil rights, until they managed to crawl their way out themselves. They didn’t have the same moral right to criticize the apartheid regime. I thought all of us were humans before we were Muslims, Christians, Hindus, blacks, whites, communists, or capitalists? I was actively involved in the struggle against apartheid, but I’ve never been to South Africa, so that would mean I ought to have kept well away.

  I’m also actively involved in the gay rights movement speaking out against homophobia, though I’m not a lesbian myself. But the logic would say I would have to be, otherwise I would have no moral right to support the rights of homosexuals. Some say, too, that only theologians should discuss Islam, because ordinary people aren’t knowledgeable enough. I could go on. People are always looking for excuses to restrict the right of others to criticize. But it won’t work. The right to criticize Islam is like the right to criticize Zionism. I don’t like either of them, and I criticize both. Unfortunately, far too many people think Islam should be treated as a human being equipped with rights, and they’ll drag you into court for libel if you dare to attack Muhammad and his religion.

  Maryam Namazie’s compatriot and peer, Afshin Ellian, involved himself at a young age in the politics of his Iranian homeland. He was 13 when revolution broke out in 1979, but like many of the youth on the street, he had only vague ideas about what the demonstrations were for. “During the daily protests, we shouted about wanting freedom, but if anyone had asked me what that meant, I would have been unable to give them a satisfactory answer, and the same was true of those who were older than me,” Ellian says.

  It’s a grimy day in January 2009, and we are sitting in Afshin Ellian’s office at the University of Leiden. Leiden is a quaint Dutch town with canals, narrow alleys, and 115,000 inhabitants. Ellian, now 42, has worked on the university’s law faculty since completing his doctoral dissertation in 2003 on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed in the wake of apartheid. The waves of his hair are black as ebony, and every now and then, his narrow spectacles slide down his nose. At regular intervals, he asks politely if I mind his smoking and lights up another cigarette. He laughs easily, though he is also clearly a very serious person.

  To get to Ellian’s office, I must first pass through an electronically secured glass door and state my business to one of the two bodyguards who accompany Ellian to work each day. It’s been like that since just after the assassination of Theo van Gogh, in November
2004, when Ellian called for intellectuals to make jokes about Islam and more generally to make Islam the object of the same kind of ridicule, artistic exploration, and philosophical investigation as Christianity.

  “I hereby call upon all artists, writers and academics to stop discriminating against Islam,” he wrote in de Volkskrant on November 6, 2004.7

  When on television and in hundreds of theatres jokes are made about Islam, and when academics begin to treat Islam more critically, then Muslims will learn tolerance. The terrorists can intimidate and eliminate a handful of critics of Islam, but they can never kill hundreds of critical minds. Come, my friends, and enter the brothels and torture chambers of Muhammad and Allah. You will find great inspiration there. Come, my fellow scholars, and put Islam upon the operating table of philosophy. Otherwise it will remain a question how many murders our society can deal with.

  Death threats were not long in coming, and the desire of Dutch comedians, newspaper editors, and scholars to follow Ellian’s call has been subdued, to say the least. Ellian completely understands that reaction. He himself felt a strong reluctance to confront Islam when the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 so devastated and shocked the West. He and his wife had arrived in the Netherlands as refugees in 1989, and he had devoted many years to learning Dutch, getting an education in law and philosophy, and trying to fathom where the Islamic revolution back home in Iran had gone wrong. He had laid it all behind him when New York and Washington were struck on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.

  Afshin Ellian grew up in northern Iran in the 1970s, the youngest of six children. His father was a retired army officer who cared little for the mullahs. On Fridays, he took the children with him to his own “mosque,” the local cinema, where the family was transported around the world with Hollywood as its guide. It provided a cosmopolitan background for which Ellian to this day is profoundly grateful.

  Ellian’s father was killed in a traffic accident a few months after the revolution of 1979. The years that followed were full of drama and pain. Ellian protested for freedom along with others on the political left, but no one had any real sense of where they were going. “We had a real and burning desire for freedom, but we didn’t know what freedom entailed,” Ellian recalls.

  That’s the debate going on in Europe right now, because many Muslims are in the same situation as we were in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s. Many Muslims have yet to grasp that the price of freedom is that others are allowed to disagree with what you believe in and can criticize your ideology and cultural background.

  Some six months after the revolution, the regime commenced persecuting freethinkers—first from the far left, then the Islamic Marxists, Mujahedin, and moderate leftists. Two of Ellian’s relatives were executed for counterrevolutionary activities, one an uncle’s son active in the same circles as Afshin himself:

  I was only 15 or 16 at the time and was forced into hiding. For a while, I hid out at my uncle’s. My being there reminded him constantly of his son. One day, he was in tears and asked me why I was alive when his own son was dead. It was painful, but I could understand his question and told myself: OK, this is how life is now; you risk being executed or tortured, but I have to try and understand how it got this far.

  A few months later, Ellian fled the country, traveling by camel to Pakistan, from where he went on to Afghanistan after six months. He ended up in Kabul, began to study medicine at the university there, met his wife, and involved himself in the Iranian exile community where he ran into communists who had supported Khomeini during the revolution. It was a source of conflict, and eventually he feared so much for his safety he sought refuge with the UN mission in Kabul, where with the aid of a shrewd Swedish diplomat, he was accorded status as an asylum seeker, allowing him to leave the country as a political refugee.

  Looking back now on his first encounter with the West, Ellian recalls one vivid contrast with the world he had fled: The Dutch openly and loudly discussed politics and social issues in public. They spoke critically of the government without having to glance over their shoulder.

  That was completely new to me, and it surprised me. I was used to keeping quiet and not uttering a superfluous word outside the home. What freedom, I thought. They say what they think, and no one comes after them. That was the reason I decided to study law. I wanted to find out how the Dutch could live together like that without killing each other; how people could openly express disgruntlement without it leading to violence.

  What did Ellian learn from his study of law?

  I came to understand what freedom entails, and what they should have done in Iran to ensure freedom after the revolution. Back then, unfortunately, Khomeini was the only one who knew what he wanted and how to go about it. Studying law made me understand how a political idea becomes constitutional and translates into an order of democracy. I learned the imperative of accepting a diversity of opinions, even those that are wrong and abhorrent, and the importance of acknowledging a political opposition.

  Studying Western philosophy, Afshin Ellian became aware of an undercurrent of self-hatred running through European culture. A lack of faith in the strengths of their own culture had caused many Europeans to give themselves up to totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism, communism, and Nazism:

  It surfaces in an uncritical, romantic cultivation of foreign cultures, even when there is nothing whatsoever romantic about those cultures up close. That self-hatred is only partly rooted in postcolonial guilt. It runs a lot deeper. European self-denial means that Europe is viewed as more racist and intolerant than most other parts of the world, even though the opposite is true.

  In Ellian’s view, that self-denial involves a diminished ability to distinguish between good and evil, between what is ethical and what is not. That inability to distinguish explains why people can even think to juxtapose Theo van Gogh’s assassin, Mohammad Bouyeri, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and to declare them both to be fundamentalists in their own way—he an Islamist fundamentalist, she an Enlightenment fundamentalist:

  Time and again, Europeans demonstrate an inability to distinguish between the criminal and the victim. The criminal becomes the victim and the victim the criminal. Beneath it all, one clearly senses the consequences of European nihilism. If Europeans are unable to separate out their own fundamental values in that way then eventually, there will be no one left to defend Europe at all.

  Ellian continues:

  You see it very clearly in the debate on freedom of speech. In that area, we are no longer Europeans. Maybe we’ve become Arabs, or maybe we’ve taken on the Islamic or the Soviet view of freedom of speech. Whatever, it’s certainly not the European conception of free speech we champion. To begin with, Europe’s great strength was its defense of freedom. In the European view, tolerance entailed being willing to accept all the pain and affront that accompanied the right of the citizen to exercise his freedom of speech. Christians learned to withstand the pain that followed from the rejection of God and the scriptures, and in that sense, they became free. But it’s not like that anymore.

  I asked Ellian what, then, he understood by the term “European civilization.”

  The ability to establish a political order that takes freedom and justice as its points of departure, and the ability to question one’s own culture and way of life. A philosophical approach to life. These are things that are essential to European culture. The Judeo-Christian culture tried from day one to reconcile itself with the Greco-Roman tradition. That’s a painful and complicated story, but a path was found from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Europe has reconciled all the various elements of its past; they have been integrated and included and form a bridge into the present.

  In Islam, the opposite is the case. Everything that has to do with a pre-Islamic Arabia is discarded. Anyone not adhering to the Koran is misguided and wrong. They call it the Age of Ignorance. In the view of Islam, the past is not to be reconciled, and its various elements are not to be integrated into
the tradition in the manner in which that has occurred in Europe.

  For Afshin Ellian, the Muhammad cartoons were an example of the kind of challenging approach to Islam that he had urged following the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004. He welcomed the cartoons as input to Muslim understanding of the concept of tolerance. He believes it would be wrong to claim that the drawings were not so much about freedom of speech but more about the right of a big newspaper to bully a weak minority:

  That’s a false argument. We’re not dealing with a minority at all in the traditional sense. This is a minority that enjoys great power. Geert Wilders has been taken to court here in the Netherlands because the Muslim lobby demands it. The mayor of Rotterdam, a very large city by Dutch standards, is a Muslim. Two ministers of the Dutch government have Muslim backgrounds. The same kind of thing is seen in other European countries. That’s not what they would call a weak minority in Iran. Muslims in Europe are a powerful minority with representatives in European parliaments and governments. Or take freedom of speech: a minority that can stop others writing about and discussing Islam freely is not weak.

  Ellian rejected criticism of the cartoons that claimed that only Muslims have the moral right to make fun of Islam and that criticism from within a culture possessed more moral weight than that from without:

  All right, then, let’s begin by telling the Islamic world it has no right to criticize the Jews. It’s a ridiculous argument. First, Islam is a part of Europe. It’s absurd to say to Europeans that they should keep silent because Islam is a foreign religion, and Muslims are a minority. Muslims have been in Europe since the eighth century. There was an Islamic culture in Andalucía in Spain, in parts of France and Italy. Sicily was Islamic for 200 years. Islam was predominantly a military power in Europe, but then it became a part of Europe in cultural terms. So Islam is a part of Europe, and criticizing Islam is necessary, just as it is necessary to criticize Christianity and Judaism.