Hirsi Ali and the failure of a multicultural society by Aboeprijadi Santoso

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Hirsi Ali and the failure of a multicultural society

by Aboeprijadi Santoso

09 June 2006

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Amsterdam - Is she Ayaan Hirsi Ali born in 1967 or Ayaan Hirsi Magan born in 1969? The question has been fatal for the political career of the high-profile Somalia-born Dutch woman legislator, who is seen here as a crusader against both Islam and Muslim radicals. The empire thus strikes back, defining a new phase in one of the most painful dynamics of Europe's post-Sept.11-multicultural reality.

In a country facing a huge immigration problem, the "lies" Hirsi Ali has allegedly perpetrated, are seen as common among non-European asylum seekers. But it took everyone by surprise as it prompted the Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, who is a new rising star in the anti-immigration campaign, to act unusually swiftly by cancelling, in effect, Hirsi's citizenship.

Neither Hirsi Ali nor Verdonk had anticipated the storm the latter unleashed. The whole political elite was dismayed as Hirsi Ali quit the parliament. In the end, however, the minister was forced to help Hirsi regain her citizenship.

But the genie was already out of the bottle. It revealed the gap between elite and popular perceptions, indicating the limit of Dutch tolerance toward a celebrated, outspoken, but controversial woman of foreign origin, who had fought at home and abroad for many of the enlightened ideals her adopted country claims to represent.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a remarkable woman, intelligent and beautiful. A former-Muslim-turned-atheist with an understanding of patriarchal oppression in her country of origin, she has had the courage and determination to raise sensitive issues about the integration of Muslim communities in the West.

She came to the Netherlands in 1992 and became a Dutch citizen in 1997. Few - even Dutch natives in their own country - could have achieved so much so quickly within just a decade. She gained fame, becoming bigger than life, but her persistence and provocative style apparently made life more difficult and insecure. No wonder, she chose to join the Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank associated with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, sooner than planned.

The state and, even more so, the public in the Netherlands seem to be suffering from a Hirsi-Ali fatigue. They are ready to ignore her contribution and play out a legalistic game -- insensitive to the Somalian tradition that justifies her using the two names, while denying the fact that her false data has been known for years thanks to Hirsi herself.

In short, Hirsi Ali has been victimised by the very force that she helped build. Elsewhere, such an affair is known as "a revolution that eats up its own children".

In the Dutch case, the "revolution" is one of a mind-set pioneered by the right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. His unprecedented popularity once reached more than one third of the electorate as he put a new attitude on the map, saying that racism is one thing, but anti-immigration and anti-Islam, both seen as legitimate, are another. Hirsi Ali's, and now Verdonk's, fame are products of this. Thus, in famously liberal and tolerant Holland, it is "politically incorrect" to welcome migrants and restrain from offence and provocation against alien customs and religions.

Its climax was the making of Submission, a film seen by many as a deliberate offence against Islam. The brutal killing by a Moroccan Muslim extremist of its producer, Theo van Gogh, in 2004, and a death threat for Hirsi Ali, its scriptwriter, left the latter the most vocal fighter among Dutch "Islamophobists".

In 2003, Hirsi argued, to tolerate Islam-inspired protest and intimidation was "suicidal". Hence, she maintained, to emancipate Muslim women, one should provoke rather than persuade, and confront rather than educate. Putting them in a social and personal dilemma, she believed, would effectuate change. Her approach apparently failed. Even before the death threat, she rarely mingled publicly with the most important of her would-be constituents i.e. Muslim women.

Moreover, like most Dutch politicians, she too was apparently unwilling to distinguish between Islam and the local i.e. Arab and North African patriarchal traditions and customs. In the narrow-minded monolithic view of Hirsi and the Dutch people, there is only one "Islam" -- one which is basically associated with, or identical to, these local traditions.

The van Gogh tragedy led to a widening gap between the Dutch and the Muslim communities. Muslims' lifestyles and Islam's alleged inability to be critical of itself resulted in a growing scepticism of the multicultural ideal. However, recent local elections, won by political parties on the left, thanks mainly to the intensive participation and votes from Muslim migrants, among others, suggest a return to the pre-Fortuyn days.

Has the pendulum really swung back? Not quite. While many attempted to seize Fortuyn's legacy and failed, the liberal-conservative VVD, the third biggest political party, is now trying to do just that. Like Margaret Thatcher in her early days, Verdonk --VVD's most popular leader, now dubbed "the Iron Rita" -- has proudly fostered her tough leader image. This former director of prisons now imitates Fortuyn's populist style and themes, too.

Like elsewhere in Europe, a modus vivendi has to be found to deal with a large Muslim minority -- here about one million mainly of North-African origin. It has to resolve, for one thing, the contradiction the process has apparently created as many young European Muslims, who take pride in their multicultural identity e.g. being Dutch and Moroccan at the same time, live in a world that proudly defends the freedom of expression, but no longer believes in multiculturalism.

Thus, hard times persist, but dialog rolls on -- now without Hirsi Ali.

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* Aboeprijadi Santoso is a journalist with Radio Netherlands. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.

Source: The Jakarta Post, May 27, 2006

Visit the website at www.thejakartapost.com

Distributed by the Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH).

Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.

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