DAR AL HARB - U.K.: WE SHOULDN'T IGNORE DISSIDENTS WITHIN ISLAM

We are making a fatal mistake by ignoring the dissidents within Islam
Some critical Muslim intellectuals think their faith is compatible with a liberal society. It's dumb to prefer Bin Laden
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday March 15, 2007
The Guardian

Are there credible versions of Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy as it has developed in the west? Can one be both a good Muslim and a good citizen of a free society? Or are Islam and the post-Enlightenment west like fire and water?

While I have been in Egypt over the last fortnight, exploring these issues with Muslims and non-Muslims in a pivotal society of the Middle East, a debate has been bubbling away on the web (see http://www.signandsight.com/ in which various woolly and nefarious views on the subject have been attributed to me. Among the accusations is that I, who was so much engaged for dissidents under communism, show insufficient solidarity with the "dissidents of Islam" such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This charge is based on a misunderstanding of the principle of solidarity which prevailed in the struggle against communism and should do so now. That principle is: total solidarity in the defence of people unjustly persecuted, total freedom to disagree with their views.

Our solidarity is particularly important in the case of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who are not so much dissidents of Islam as dissidents beyond Islam. For as she recounts in her new autobiography, Infidel, she made a long hard journey to the point where she stood in front of the mirror in a Greek hotel room and said out loud, in Somali, "I don't believe in God". So she speaks as an atheist - and lives in daily peril of being murdered by jihadist fanatics as a result. One reason solidarity is so important in such cases is that attitudes to apostasy are a critical test for Muslim attitudes to freedom altogether. Last week, I pressed leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo on precisely this issue. Their equivocal answers were not reassuring.

I cannot say plainly enough that anyone must be free not just to leave or change their religion but to propagate their new views, whether atheist, Christian, Muslim, Baha'i or whatever. In the course of those debates they have the right (though not the duty) to cause offence, without being intimidated by any laws, police harassment or threats of extremist violence. I have said this many times already and I repeat it here. We must defend this freedom unflinchingly. But it does not follow that one must agree with all the persecuted person's views. As it happens, I think Hirsi Ali is almost certainly right about God. And she's definitely right about the shameful, unacceptable oppression of women in some Muslim families and communities in Europe. But I don't think she's right about Islam.

"Islam," she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung last year, "is not compatible with the liberal society that has resulted from the Enlightenment." Many western secular intellectuals participating in these debates agree. But some Muslim intellectuals disagree. I think we should listen to them carefully. Apart from anything else, when it comes to discussing Islam they know what they're talking about.

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Pertinent Links:

1) We are making a fatal mistake by ignoring the dissidents within Islam