The Muslim World’s Intellectual Refuseniks Offer Enlightened Views on Islam and Israel
When it comes to the Muslim world, Western opinion-makers seem to have a taste for what Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”—figures whose intellectual and political virtue flows from their rootedness in their native cultures. The West is allowed to admire its own native pantheon of free-thinking men and women who turned their backs on racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism and relied on the fiercest invective to scorch false beliefs and repressive practices. But Muslim intellectuals who condemn even the worst aspects of their own societies must be rootless cosmopolitans rather than genuine voices of Islam: It’s assumed that true voices of Islam must, to some degree, be racists, anti-Semites, and sexists.
This twisted general logic was seen most recently in the New York Times’ hiring the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany as a regular op-ed columnist despite, or because of, his authentic belief in “a massive Zionist organization” that “rules America.” But perhaps the most famous instance was Ian Buruma’s celebration of the bigoted Muslim cleric Tariq Ramadan. Of course, Buruma admitted, Ramadan’s nudges toward reform were necessarily subtle, given the hidebound prejudices of the people he was addressing: He called, for example, for a “moratorium” on stoning women for “honor” offenses (i.e., having sex), rather than condemning the brutal practice altogether. Still, the fact that Ramadan’s tapes sold well on the Muslim street made him a model of reform-minded Muslim thinking worth drooling over. By contrast, Buruma suggested in other articles, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an apostate from Islam, was alienated from her culture and therefore a fitting object of contempt—precisely because she was repulsed by misogyny and had been condemned to death by her accusers. Buruma’s strange defense of Ramadan and even stranger attack on Hirsi Ali were dissected by Paul Berman in his book The Flight of the Intellectuals: Berman argued that Hirsi Ali was just as representative of what happens in the Muslim world as Ramadan and just as entitled to speak about it; moreover, Buruma’s assumption that Hirsi Ali would be ignored by “real” Muslims was wildly condescending—those people, Buruma seemed to be saying, just aren’t ready for enlightenment.
Yet the marginalization of Muslim thinkers who embrace enlightenment values does not mean that they won’t win out in the end, as the example of the Cold War shows. Until the late 1970s, Soviet dissidents were similarly treated as doomed outliers, freaks and curiosities consigned to the dustbin of history. But it turned out that it was communism, not its critics, that landed in the dustbin. Perhaps the same will be true of Muslim theocracy; if so, it will be the Muslim refuseniks who will have paved the way—the Sakharovs of their place and time, largely ignored by the Western media, only to be acclaimed as prophets and heroes.
Irshad Manji, who calls herself a “Muslim refusenik,” has repeatedly condemned the common Arab description of Israel as an “apartheid state” or a fortress of “Zio-Nazism,” pointing out the many freedoms that Arabs enjoy there but not elsewhere in the Middle East. Nonie Darwish, whose father was an Egyptian fedayeen commander killed by Israel, runs a website called Arabs for Israel. And Hirsi Ali has been unsparing in her condemnation of Muslims who insist that Israel is really Arab land and that they have a religious duty to recover it. For these Muslim refuseniks (some of whom, like Hirsi Ali and Darwish, are actually ex-Muslims), rehabilitating the image of Israel goes hand in hand with a wider attack on repressive Islamic notions about women and family life. Others, like the ex-Islamist Ed Husain, focus on public policy (Husain has argued for full trade relations between Israel and the Arab world).
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/154724/muslim-refuseniks
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