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Idols and Ideals.

by | 11:13 am, February 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

The phrase I am looking for is ‘stunningly disappointed’.  And I’m surprised, too.

But should I be?  I consider myself more than a bit cynical and am well acclimated to the idea that people whose ideas and accomplishments I greatly admire still have deep flaws.  For a woman like me, the usual comment on a hero’s collapse is, “I’m disappointed but I’m not surprised”.

Yet Ayaan Hirsi Ali has surprised me.  This potent Somali born campaigner for human rights is lately in the news for breaking up a marriage.  British think-tank guru and Tory party capo Niall Ferguson has left his wife, Susan, to live openly with Hirsi Ali, after revelation the two have been carrying on an affair for some time.

Miss Hirsi Ali lives under a fatwa for her pointed criticism of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly its barbaric treatment of women.  A victim of the disgusting practice of female genital mutilation, she has worked to bring attention to the continuation of the practice, something too many so-called champions of feminine dignity gloss over as a sacrosanct cultural tradition.  She speaks half a dozen languages fluently, holds an advanced degree, is a published author, a screenwriter, a one-time member of the Dutch House of Representatives, and at present a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

She is also no stranger to controversy; an investigation uncovered discrepancies in her asylum application to the Netherlands and ultimately forced her to admit to lying on documents.  Her own family disputes the story that she was fleeing a forced marriage to a cousin.  The scandal nearly cost Ali her Dutch citizenship, led to her resignation from her parliamentary seat, and ultimately precipitated the collapse of the Dutch cabinet.

Given the way women live under totalitarian Islam, it’s difficult to blame any woman for what she does to escape, and her family’s allegations that she fabricated the plans for her forced marriage could be explained as reluctance to admit that perfectly nice looking people still visit such abhorrences on their children in the name of religion.

No doubt, she has achieved good, contributed an authoritative voice to the discourse, and shed light on things too long in darkness.  But where should we draw lines on our public figures?

One of Hirsi Ali’s many firestorms was sparked when she commented that Muhammad, who married Aisha at six and consummated the union at nine, was a pedophile.  She later admitted her words were poorly chosen, but it does seem she holds that Western, Enlightenment morality is universal and that people shouldn’t get a pass on grounds of ‘context’ or ‘culture’.  Or that, even if that’s simply how it was done circa 600, it’s not permissible today to hold such reverence for a child rapist.

In her comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she has pointed out that the two sides are held to differing behavioral standards based on political preferences, making her again an adversary of situational ethics and moral expectations based on an agenda rather than on first principles.

Yet her stance on immigration while serving in the Dutch Parliament and since then evince  a position that would have mandated her own deportation.  Once a by-the-book Muslim who wore a hijab voluntarily and supported Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, she is now a self-professed atheist, a fire-breathing enemy of Islam and religion in general, and has cosigned a petition supporting Jyllands-Posten’s decision to publish the now-infamous 12 cartoons with, among others, Rushdie.

As her renunciation of Islam and its culture has happened in the public eye, we may have some sympathy for a woman, who, like all of us, expands her sphere of knowledge and develops her beliefs in small steps and sometimes in staggering breaks.  However, she is smart enough to know the source of her moral authority and to realize how high her profile is, so a bit more consideration for her choice of words may well be in order.

For me, the vehemence of many of her statements today are worrying, because she seems to have swung from excessive endorsement of one ideology to and excessive endorsement of its polar opposite.  Some of her proposals get it all wrong.  Battling genital mutilation with forced annual exams of girls fleeing from countries that still practice cliterectomies, which she proposed in 2004, would serve only to replace one privacy violation on a person’s body with another.  If the child is truly in such danger of blood-letting from her own blood, take her out of the family home.

Though I like much of what she argues for, I cannot dance around the fact that she has a distasteful habit of reinventing herself, and she is as much concerned with her own star as with her preferred moral crusades.  As the Russians say, ‘not all who carry crosses are martyrs’.

The man she is currently attached to counts her as only the latest affair, and the one that finally caused him to leave his long-suffering wife and three children.  The pair of them seem to misunderstand liberalism to be a cleverly worded academic sham designed to service those who pursue their own ends absent effects on others rather than a legitimate and ancient school that is grounded on moral absolutism.

So what?  Why should any of us care about the private failings of public figures who more-or-less think along the same lines as we do?

In the end, it’s still a question of drawing a line.  Liberalism holds privacy and personal conduct to be just that, but it is also a philosophy of universals.  What Ayaan Hirsi Ali has done runs counter to what she professes to believe, shows stunning disrespect to another woman, and must be considered to diminish her authority to speak as a champion of human dignity.

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Comments

  1.   james
      February 11th, 2010 @ 1:13 pm

    The author states;

    “Yet Ayaan Hirsi Ali has surprised me.”

    I am not surprised. I have been aware of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s atheism. It is my observation that atheists and agnostics tend to make up their own morality as they go along. The ones who borrow most heavily from a Christian upbringing are the least objectionable.

    As I understand her, Hirsi Ali had no Christian upbringing at all. So, I am not at all surprised.

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