The Hymen and the Veil

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The Caged Virgin
The Free Press
From: $18,32
187 pp

Source: Richard King Blogspot & Sydney Morning Herald, 23/09/2006

The other day I attended a lecture on The Hague and international law in which His Excellency Judge Christopher Weeramantry, former Vice President of the International Court, argued for a less Eurocentric approach to the question of international justice. One of his more controversial points concerned the moral status of Islam. Contrary to popular opinion, he argued, Islam was not an obstacle to justice. Medieval Islamic scholars had developed the notion of ‘double truth’ by which religion and reason could coexist. Islam was not, in itself, a problem, and looked at properly might be part of the solution.

This approach has much to recommend it, but it is also jarringly reminiscent of the argument put forward by the NRA in the wake of some small arms atrocity, viz. ‘It isn’t guns that do the damage, merely their irresponsible owners.’ Moreover, I can think of many ‘Muslims’ who do see Islam as part of the problem. One such is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born, former Dutch MP, who, if she hasn’t crossed swords with the Judge, has almost certainly crossed his path, possibly while strolling around the Binnenhof. For Hirsi Ali, Islamic fundamentalism is built, not on sand, but on the rock of doctrine. That is why this collection of essays is subtitled ‘A Muslim Woman’s Cry for Reason’.

Born into an Islamic family, subjected to genital mutilation and threatened with marriage to a distant cousin, Hirsi Ali escaped (her word) to the Netherlands in 1992. Since then she has become a ferocious critic of political and non-political Islam, a crusade that has earned her much respect and not a little odium theologicum. Her most controversial action to date has been to write the script for Submission (included in this excellent book), an eleven-minute, low-budget film dealing with the misogyny inherent in Islam. In 2004, the film’s director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in Amsterdam. Pinned to his ritually mutilated body was a note informing Hirsi Ali to expect a similarly bloody end.

Though Hirsi Ali has much to say on the history and politics of Islam in general, it is, as the title of her book suggests, to the treatment of women that she turns first of all for an explanation of what she calls its ‘mental and material backlog’. Premodern customs such as female circumcision (apologese for genital mutilation) are singled out for particular censure. Though Islam does not condone this practice, it is Hirsi Ali’s determined contention that its ‘cult of virginity’ keeps it alive. ‘The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen. Her veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of this stifling morality that makes Muslim men the owners of women …’ (The proximity of ‘hymen’ and ‘veil’ in that passage is, at once, confronting and resonant.)

If Hirsi Ali has a secondary target, it is the ‘muzz-headed’ multiculturalism that makes ‘a virtual institution of Muslim self-segregation and isolation’. The question of how a secular society accommodates a determinedly non-secular community is one that European societies have failed to answer adequately. ‘Group rights’ has come to replace integration and advocacy for ethnic and religious minorities is left to so-called community leaders who tend to resist all change from without. This, for Hirsi Ali, is a calamity. ‘The tragedy for many Muslims is that their inability to criticise the dogma of religion in their own countries will be continued in Europe.’

As I write this, it is five years and a day since the Twin Towers crumbled to rubble and dust, an event to which Hirsi Ali refers a number of times in this necessary book. Since then, a certain self-hatred has set in in the minds of many Western progressives. The Caged Virgin is, if nothing else, a call to pull ourselves together – to start believing that we’re part of the solution.