Islamophobia Degenerating Into Anti-Islamism: An Advocacy By Ayaan Hirsi Ali For "Reforming" Islam Through Editing the Quran!!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - a young woman; an ex-Muslim; an ex-Somali.  A victim of Somali tribalism: genital mutilation, and an escapee from a pre-arranged marriage.  Her pain, we understand.  But her advocacy is Islamophobia that has crossed even the line of the most vehement anti-Islamist.

Her understanding of Islam is framed through her tribal experiences.  Islam, as a faith, has nothing to do with Ayaan.  Yet, in the West, she has become the poster child of virulent anti-Islamism.  Blaming what her tribe did to her on the religion of others.  1.5 billion Muslims.  For she has never met that faith, face to face.  Has never met young Egyptian women pilots.  Has never met Saudi women lawyers.  Nor Lebanese beauties who sing and dance.

Has never comprehended the Quranic vocabulary: The word "Read" means "Learn;" the term "Ayah" (verse) does not mean the words; it means "evidence" or "proof."  She is not an Islamic scholar.  Unfortunately she made the West see the rich Islamic culture through the parched land of her ignorance.

Because of predisposition to Islamophobia, the West has been using her as an excuse.  In return, she has used western pulpits to vent her grievance.  She has been regaled by membership in the Dutch Parliament.  And now she is described in the prestigious US magazine, Foreign Affairs

as "a public intellectual."  Presently occupying a post of distinction at Harvard as a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government.  Her writings, whether of books or articles, such as the recent one in Foreign Affairs (July/August 2015), are celebrated.  Yet their context and content are part of the oxygen that jihadism is gasping for. 

Emboldened by that misplaced attention, Ayaan has embarked on a journey for which her anti-Islamism is her only guide.

Calling for world peace through reformation of Islam.  How?  By editing the Quran.  She must know from her Somali wretched days that under Islamic dogma, the Quran is taken as the word of God.  It is not authored.  It is revealed.  This has to do with faith.  And faith is non-negotiable.

Moreover, the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad are subject to interpretation by Muslim qualified scholars.  In order to meet changing circumstances.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali is no faqih.  Otherwise she would have known that neither genital mutilation nor pre-arranged marriages are to be found in the Quran.

She had renounced Islam.  No big deal.  Contrary to Pakistani's anti-apostasy laws, Islam accepts apostasy.  It accepts Ayaan's decision to opt out.  The Quran says: "Surely those who disbelieve...cannot harm God in any way" (Chapter 47; verse 32).

So, Ayaan: if you are out of the game, stay out of the game.  Your pontification about "reforming" Islam through editing its primary pillar, the Qura, leads to a one-way street:  recruitment of idiots to fight for ISIS, endangering global security.

Here are the Ayaan arguments in her article in Foreign Affairs entitled "A Problem From Heaven," she starts off by: "We have a problem -not a problem from hell, but one that claims to come from heaven."  Believe what you wish Ayaan.  "In faith, there is no compulsion,"  so says the Quran -the Bible of Islam.  So why poke your stick into a hornets nest leading to more human tragedies?  Unless it is your way of victimization for validation.

• She is critical of Obama's statement before the UN General Assembly last September.  Why?  Because the U.S. President stated that "Islam teaches peace."  Well, Obama had voiced a fact. Islam means "the submission to God's will;" advocates peace; and accepts every faith, revealed or non-revealed.  What is the basis?  Tawheed (the Oneness of God).  Tawheed means that there is no special God for every faith.  In fact the God that you, Ayaan, think that you have abandoned is the same one which you have now espoused.
• She claims to be a "Muslim dissident."  How far from the truth.  And she is unaware of her own contradiction as she reports: "A few, including myself, have been forced by experience to conclude that we cannot continue to be believers.  Yet we remain deeply engaged in the debate about Islam's future."  
• I cannot find your "few."  The "few" is you.  And being "an unbeliever" by your choice is an automatic disqualification for an engagement "in the debate about Islam's future."  Reason: You cannot reform what you don't understand.  A pitchfork marauder like you, Ayaan, has no audience.  The Arab adage says: "You cannot give what you don't have."
• Ayaan then moves to the heart of her thesis.  A thesis of hallucination bred out not from the Quran and the Hadith (Muhammad's verified words and conduct.)  But from her own personal nightmare in Somalia.  Somalia the capital of Al-Shabab -a franchise of global terrorism.

First: In her misdirection, she attacks these two pillars of Islam: The Quran and the Sunna.  Saying: "the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge much less repudiate the theological warrants for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts."

Second: She also attacks Al-Azhar.  Citing one source in a statement published in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard in March 2015.  Her source, Sufyan Al-Omari blames Al-Azhar for the rise of ISIS.  He, as quoted by a very receptive Ayaan, says: "The Islamic State does not fall from the sky...The texts to which (ISIS) appeals for support are exactly what we learnt at Al-Azhar.  The difference is that (ISIS) truly puts the texts into practice."

Third:  She quotes individuals whom she describes as "Islamic thinkers" as dreaming of "a version of their religion that no longer exalts holy war, martyrdom, and life in the hereafter."

Fourth: Ayaan cites an Iraqi cleric as arguing that "the Koran was created by the Prophet Muhammad, but was driven by Allah" (Whatever "driven" means).  This, she says, was part of a report from "the Middle East Media Research Institute.  In that report, Ayaan's source "proposes a modifiable religious ruling based on fiqh al-maqasid, or the juris prudence of the meaning."

Fifth:  She calls for US intervention in support of those bogus claims.  In her words in that article, she makes this ludicrous appeal: "American presidents and Secretaries of State need not give lectures on the finer points of Islamic orthodoxy.  But it is not too much to ask them to support Islamic reform and make the fate of Muslim dissidents and reformers part of their negotiations with allies such as Saudi Arabia and foes such as Iran alike."

Now for my rebuttal.

• The U.S. Government, especially since 9/11, has committed to the advocacy that America was not at war with Islam, but with terrorism which wears a false mask emblazoned with the word "Islamic" on it.  In view of this sane policy, no intervention in religious beliefs by America could be envisioned.  This is particularly so in the light of the US constitutional provision for separation between State and church.
• Ayaan's call for US intervention in the core of Islamic faith and beliefs is based on the wrong analogy.  For she, in her article, refers to the impact of Radio Free Europe, an American medium, on the collapse of the USSR.  She is obviously oblivious of the difference between the Muslim world and the world of communism.  With the exception of the bands of terrorists, from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, the Muslim community of 57 States has never threatened US security.  The USSR did.  Two vastly different situations.
• A recent report in the New York Times headlined: "Most U.S. Attacks Are Homegrown And Not Jihadist."  And the Christian Century of May 27, 2015, in its review of a new book entitled Europe and the Islamic World concluded as follows: "Readers will come away from the book profoundly suspicious of simplistic narratives about Muslim aggression and endless jihad.  Ideally, they will also be skeptical of any claims about what Islam does, as opposed to particular States or communities."
• It is clear that Ayaan anti-Islamism, aside from deriving from her tribal experience now elevated to a whole industry, does not know:  That the term holy war is a crusader term, never an Islamic term.  That jihad in Islamic jurisprudence means "personal self-improvement" and "self-defense."  That in Islam, there is no aggressive war waged beyond your borders.  That self-sacrifice is forbidden by the very terms of the Quran.  That those terms equate between male and female.  And that Islam bestowed on women the right to choose their spouses, the right to own property, and the right to unilaterally divorce an abusive husband.
• The list of misconceptions, intentional or out of ignorance, can go on and on.  But her attack on the texts of the Quran and the Hadith are so outrageous and uninformed.  They have the imprint of total insensitivity that I should leave the rebuttal to someone else.  As so could be found below.

To the credit of Foreign Affairs, Ayaan's article was followed by another, authored by William Mc Cants, Fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.  Mc Cants, in his opening paragraph, states: "Hirsi Ali is profoundly wrong when she argues that Islamic Scripture causes Muslim terrorism and thus that the U.S. government should fund Muslim dissidents to reform Islam."

Appropriately Mc Cants article is entitled: "Islamic Scripture Is Not the Problem."

Ayaan also attacks Al-Azhar.  If she were "a public intellectual," and concerned about her so-called Islamic reform, she seems not to know, or chooses to ignore, that the Religious Revolution advocated by El-Sisi is spearheaded by Al-Azhar.  In this context, it should be noted that Al-Azhar's document of August, 2011 remains a primary framework for that revolution.  One of its eleven principles provides as follows: "Islam does not recognize a State solely based on religion."  The Coptic Church has fully endorsed that document.  Witness the disbarment by Egyptian authorities of Imams who use their mosques as arenas for jihadi preaching.

As for the essential role of interpretation in Islamic jurisprudence, Ayaan does not even once refer to "ijtihad."  It is the application of the mind to the text.  One of its primary products is that public interest trumps.  It is called "Fiqh Al-Maslahah."

In my research in 2006 for the American Bar Association, I found that there is 80% commonality between Islamic jurisprudence and the U.S. Constitution.  I teach the subject as a law professor in New York City.  My late Al-Azhari father has blessed my marriage to a Catholic American woman.  He was on sound grounds.  Islam fully acknowledges diversity and the full right of others to their creed.

It is a shame that Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not accord the same diversity to her former Muslim co-religionists.  For she does not realize that Allahu Akbar is not a war scream as per ISIS.  It means "we are all equal before God."

Hirsi Ali's ignorance is not surprising.  She has made of it a real industry.  In her authorship of that book entitled "Infidel" -an incredible diatribe against Islam, she does not realize that the term does not mean "a Non-Muslim."  It means "a person who has no values."  An apt characterization of Ayaan and her campaign.  Her primary beneficiaries are the ISIS franchises.  They use her arguments against Islam as a war cry for jihadi recruitment.  In this regard, you, Ayaan are one of their enablers. 

Ayaan:  I judge you by your words.  By analysing them, I find you to be intellectually depraved.  You call for Islamic reformation a la reformation undertaken by Martin Luther.  His was a rebellion against central authority which made of faith a trade in the indulgences.  And a return to the holy scriptures.  Islam is a different setting.  There are no payment for coupon to go to paradise; no central authority, and a full adherence to text, modifiable by ijtihad (by common sense and changing circumstances).

Then you call yourself a "Muslim dissident."  But you have already opted out of Islam.  Enjoy your conversion.  Who cares?  The Quran says: "Whoever wishes to believe, let it be.  And whoever wishes to disbelieve, let it be."  Terming yourself a dissident is an obfuscation.  For dissidence does not mean anti-Islamism which has become your mission and your industry.

Your call for US intervention in support of your ridiculous theory is a clear call for cultural imperialism.  This means endless wars.  But you describe it as a path to peace.  How obscene!!

Through your ignorance about and antipathy about Islam, you regard Sharia as a frozen unevolved legal system.  A threat to individual human rights and friendly relations among nations.  Utterly insane.  With the exception of few Islamic States, the legal system is a hybrid.  Sharia plus legislated law.  The former is a family law jurisdiction.  The latter is everything else.

The poor treatment of women in Somalia has nothing to do with Islam.  It has to do with arcane practices elevated to the levels of law by ignorant imams.

The Quran and Hadith call for shura (consultations), which is institutionalized in today's parliaments.  Those two pillars of Islam call for the removal of an unjust ruler.  The only limitation is avoidance of mayhem (FITNA) resulting from such populist action.

The judicial system, in Islamic jurisprudence, encourages the judge to be defendant oriented.  Punishment for a proven guilt does not follow the literality of the Quran.  It is modifiable by legislated law.

Ayaan: Under your misguided notions, you look upon the Quran as if it was a textbook in need of revision.  Nearly two billion Muslims regard it as revealed.  It is a faith, regardless of poor Islamic practices.  A heavenly road map which all modern legal systems respect.

So enjoy your notoriety.  I pity those who, at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, sit to hear you expound on your anti-Islamism.  The only winners are those in the ranks of murderous terrorism who take your attacks on Islam as a justification for their conviction that Islam is under attack.  

You have elevated your personal vendetta against Islam to the level of an international cause.  The Hirsi Ali cause is a hopeless one.  It exists only in her tribally traumatized head.

From the foregoing, you, Hirsi Ali, could see the depth of my rejection of what you stand for.  Denigration of Islam and stirring up of inter-faith conflict.  

Yet there is one thing that you have said correctly.  Unintentionally.  You titled one of your books "Infidel."  This is because you have adopted the western error that "infidel" means "non-Muslim."  It doesn't mean this at all.  In Islamic jurisprudence, "infidel" means "a person who has no values."  Without realization, you have chosen the correct term.  An omnibus description of yourself.

The Muslims abide by this verse from the Quran:  "So woe to those who write the scripture with their hands, then say, 'This is from God,' to trade with it for a pitiful price!" (Chapter 2, verse 79).  This is the Muslim faith.  And Pope Francis said it all when he declared that freedom of expression does not include attacking the faith of others.