Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Debbie Almontaser, and the call for moderate Islam

Two articles caught my eye over at the NYT today. The first is about Debbie Almontaser, who has lost the first round in her suit against the NY Dept of Education, filed after she was fired as principal of a Brooklyn Arabic language school. The second article is an Op-Ed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. You might recall that Hirsi was formerly a member of the Dutch Parliament, and has been outspoken against radical Islam, particularly in relation to women’s rights. She is currently a fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank.

Taken together, the two articles highlight the predicament of a living in a diverse world in which moderate religious and cultural views are so important, but that is also a world that values extremism for its political and commercial value.

Hirsi Ali, whom I have following for a few years, has a real talent for making political statements. She is good at getting to what is at stake in an event, at the larger implications of events that might otherwise seem random or unconnected. In recent years, however, I cannot help but feel that Ali has lost sight of her feminist/activist goals and has simply become one self-interested talking head among many.

Several respondents to Ali’s article were quick to post links to the very kinds of moderate responses Ali seems to be calling for, particularly from national organizations. Why has she not reached out to these groups? Where do they fit in her article? Or where, for instance, do the lawyer marches in Pakistan (a story she could not have missed) fit into all of this?

One could even be quite conservative, an interventionist even, and still see how Ali’s rhetoric falls short of any actual sense of being connected to any real-world struggles, and that disconnection makes me uncomfortable. Tauheed Ahmed, who also appears in one of the readers’ comment on the NYT Op-Ed, puts it this way:

I am a muslim who would I assume qualify for the term “moderate” (a term that I resent, incidentally, since I am quite comfortable with my faith and do not consider being a muslim to be a disease that one catches in moderation or in extreme). I consider terrorists to be criminals - and for criminals the most direct defense is the police. I consider absolute rulers in countries like Saudi Arabia or Sudan to be exploiting Islam as a means to preserve their power - and the most direct defense against such countries is seeking to replace kings and dictators with democracies. As the brave Pakistanis fighting for democracy today have shown the world, the alternative to dictatorship is not terrorists. Rather it is a democratic society where law-respecting middle class people are the natural leaders, not men in uniform or in men in beards posing as saviors.

Once Ms. Hirsi understands the above - she will perhaps realize that the solution is not in “moderate muslims” taking to the streets to demonstrate every time some crime or some absurd action is done somewhere in the world in the name of Islam. The solution rather is with supporting the middle class in countries like Pakistan in their struggle for freedom and the rule of law from dictators and kings.

In her embracing of the rhetorical strategies that have unfortunately come to characterize our notion of political leadership, Hirsi is potentially turning her back on the women whose rights she claims to defend. Or as Samer Salhab puts it:

I submit to the author that he [sic] is not looking hard enough for us moderates. People like me do exist in droves. However, rarely do we get the media attention that we deserve. I figure that showing extremists burning flags and “chanting death to America” will sell more papers and get more people to watch the news. Others of us do not have the luxury of writing Op-Ed pieces in the NY Times.

Which brings me to Debbie Almontaser (pictured right). I can’t quite say as much as I would like on her case because I just haven’t had time to do the research. The broad outline of her story, however, is that she was recruited to start an Arabic language school in Brooklyn, that the school’s opening became a beacon for anti-(”radical”) Islamist response, and that she was recently fired from her post as principal of the school, after an incident in which she refused to condemn a student’s T-shirt that read “Intifada NYC.” There is all kinds of stuff in the case about her claiming that the Board of Ed forced her to make a statement, and then, unhappy with her response, fired her. But, again, that’s the part I need to catch up on.

After a morning of googling, however, I cannot help but think that Almontaser is exactly the kind of Islamist “moderate” whom Ali would like to see emerge into public view. I see moderation in her approach to the T-shirt question; I see moderation in the kinds of educational opportunities she has sought for herself. And, oh yeah, I see moderation in her choice to lead a public school.

Funnily enough, I have the feeling that Almontaser– in her invocation of her pride in her hijab, and in the way her appearance evokes extremist notions of Islam as “difference” itself– is exactly the kind of woman whose work Hirsi Ali would castigate.

In her attempts to bring attention to the plight of women in specific places, under specific regimes, Ali has herself turned to strategies that are the mark of extremism: the willful misrecognition of ideology’s presence, the reduction of complex social relations to rhetoric, and the refusal to acknowledge information that runs counter to her agenda. I am disappointed in Hirsi Ali because she has so much material and symbolic potential– potential as exactly the kind of moderate voice whose absence she so stridently decries. Who, really, is silent here?

It is all just too slippery to be ethically appealing, this troubling deployment of her status as a woman who “knows” Islam from the “inside,” and also as a non-Muslim, as a person who has “escaped.” As yet another reader, Asma, put it, Ms. Ali

… is not a Muslim, which does not trouble me in the slightest. If she chooses to leave Islam, that is her right and privilege. However, I am angered by her manipulation of her image as both a Muslim and a non-Muslim. Get off the fence! You cannot both claim to be a voice for Muslims and at the same time applaud yourself for leaving this religion that is “archaic and extreme.”

I don’t know how Hirsi Ali defines her faith, but, on the level of its media representation, I can’t help but here No Snow Here’s claim from earlier this year, that “There is a huge difference between questioning your faith and ignoring your faith when it is convenient for you (which I consider to be the American style of practicing religion).”