Q: One of your more startling arguments in Nomad is that Christian churches should proselytize in immigrant communities to try to convert Muslims.
A: Look at the amount of money Saudi Arabia spends on coming into Muslim communities in America and Europe, building schools and also taking leaders and training them in Mecca and Medina, then replanting them. It’s surprising that no other group of people is targeting the same communities. If you look at Western civilization, at the institutions [and movements] that were engaged in changing people’s hearts and minds—the Christian Church, humanists, feminists—they are doing next to nothing in these Muslim communities. When I was in Holland [recently], I heard about a Christian mission that had been proselytizing in Morocco. The government kicked them out and sent them back to Holland. I thought, “You don’t have to stop proselytizing—just go to the Muslim community in Amsterdam west and carry on there.” But of course there, they’re not only going to face the radical Muslims as opponents, they’re also going to face the multicultural opponents, saying they’re not supposed to be telling people to leave their religion.
Q: So how would they do it?
A: Next to every mosque, build a Christian centre, an enlightenment centre, a feminist centre. There are tons of websites, financed with Saudi money, promoting Wahabism. We need to set up our own websites—Christian, feminist, humanist—trying to target the same people, saying, we have an alternative moral framework to Islam. We have better ideas.
Q: But you also argue that children are indoctrinated very early in Islam. How would you even get them to listen to such a message?
A: They only get indoctrinated if they go to Muslim schools. I would, if I had the power, abolish Muslim schools. Children born to Muslim parents in North America or anywhere else in the West would get Islamic teachings at home, which is fine. But when they go to school, they would get the regular education that’s going to enable them to be absorbed into our society and become law-abiding, well-established citizens.
Q: In a multicultural and democratic society, how could we ban Muslim schools?
A: It depends how we weigh this problem of jihadism and terrorism. If we think it’s a chronic disease we have to live with, and I think that is actually the dominant opinion, people will take more trouble to look at what is going on in these schools and abolish them. If we think of these children as kids who, when they finish school, will be hostile to our society, then I can compile a whole host of arguments why they can and should be abolished.
Q: Let me ask a question you once posed. You said, “Western civilization is a celebration of life—everybody’s life, even your enemy’s life. So how can you be true to that morality and at the same time defend yourself against a very powerful enemy that seeks to destroy you?”
A: That is the big question for the open society today. We want to be distinct from closed societies, have less authoritarianism, allow people to make their own choices. And what we’re seeing now is that as far as that applies to an Islamic subset of society, there are other factors at work that are frightening. To have a whole generation of people just indoctrinated with this jidhadist mentality and for us to do nothing about it, and then every time there’s a terrorist attack, we panic—it’s not viable.
Friday, June 04, 2010
Ayaan Hirsi Ali recognizes that an honest conversation is one that tries to convert the Other
On why Christians should try to convert Muslims - Books, The Interview - Macleans.ca
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
There was a comment (reproduced below) which I earlier deleted because, in the midst of my frustrations with the world, and forgetting what Hirsi Ali is talking about here, I took to be off-topic spam. Now I see it was not off topic and it annoyed me only because I see the argument to be foolish and perhaps even intentionally deceitful: the incoherent "multicultural" idea that a free democratic society can be built from social segregation and the institution within of fundamentally different systems of education and religion; the idea that Sharia - i.e. "true Islam" - is somehow compatible with British justice and freedom. I find its attempt at Christian Amanpour-style moral relativism, one that dares compare Jewish "fundamentalists" in Israel as the moral equivalent of the orthodox Islamic jihad that seeks to colonize the entire world and is presently murdering people in many countries on a large scale, to be preposterous. Still, I am sorry I deleted it. Readers should see what people are thinking and decide for themselves. And besides, the author is right about some things, such as the failures of the present public education system. So, I reproduce it now, in the following comment.
IftikharA writes:
Almost all children now believe they go to school to pass exams. The idea that they may be there for an education is irrelevant. State schools have become exam factories, interested only in A to C Grades. They do not educate children. Exam results do not reflect a candidate’s innate ability. Employers have moaned for years that too many employees cannot read or write properly. According to a survey, school-leavers and even graduates lack basic literacy and numeracy skills. More and more companies are having to provide remedial training to new staff, who can’t write clear instructions, do simple maths, or solve problems. Both graduates and school-leavers were also criticised for their sloppy time-keeping, ignorance of basic customer service and lack of self-discipline.
Bilingual Muslims children have a right, as much as any other faith group, to be taught their culture, languages and faith alongside a mainstream curriculum. More faith schools will be opened under sweeping reforms of the education system in England. There is a dire need for the growth of state funded Muslim schools to meet the growing needs and demands of the Muslim parents and children. Now the time has come that parents and community should take over the running of their local schools. Parent-run schools will give the diversity, the choice and the competition that the wealthy have in the private sector. Parents can perform a better job than the Local Authority because parents have a genuine vested interest. The Local Authority simply cannot be trusted.
The British Government is planning to make it easier to schools to “opt out” from the Local Authorities. Muslim children in state schools feel isolated and confused about who they are. This can cause dissatisfaction and lead them into criminality, and the lack of a true understanding of Islam can ultimately make them more susceptible to the teachings of fundamentalists like Christians during the middle ages and Jews in recent times in Palestine. Fundamentalism is nothing to do with Islam and Muslim; you are either a Muslim or a non-Muslim.
There are hundreds of state primary and secondary schools where Muslim pupils are in majority. In my opinion all such schools may be opted out to become Muslim Academies. This mean the Muslim children will get a decent education. Muslim schools turned out balanced citizens, more tolerant of others and less likely to succumb to criminality or extremism. Muslim schools give young people confidence in who they are and an understanding of Islam’s teaching of tolerance and respect which prepares them for a positive and fulfilling role in society. Muslim schools are attractive to Muslim parents because they have better discipline and teaching Islamic values. Children like discipline, structure and boundaries. Bilingual Muslim children need Bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods, who understand their needs and demands.
None of the British Muslims convicted following the riots in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 or any of those linked to the London bombings had been to Islamic schools. An American Think Tank studied the educational back ground of 300 Jihadists; none of them were educated in Pakistani Madrasas. They were all Western educated by non-Muslim teachers. Bilingual Muslim children need bilingual Muslim teachers as role models. A Cambridge University study found that single-sex classes could make a big difference for boys. They perform better in single-sex classes. The research is promising because male students in the study saw noticeable gains in the grades. The study confirms the Islamic notion that academic achievement is better in single-sex classes.
Iftikhar Ahmad
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk
Iftikhar Ahmad writes:
Fundamentalism is nothing to do with Islam and Muslim; you are either a Muslim or a non-Muslim.
-that's an interesting example of Muslim self-understanding. If a religion/politics is by its very nature one code of uniquely correct conduct to which one simply submits, wholeheartedly, as a matter of course, then the Western concept of a "fundamentalist" doesn't really describe any kind of Islamic "extreme" because our Western conception of a fundamentalist is closer to what a Muslim considers to be normal than it is to our conception of "moderate" or mainstream religion which entails critical religious dialogue, i.e. real thinking that entails devloping the religion in an evolutionary or historical process of greater human self-understandind and freedom.
But then how do we square the above-quoted comment of I. Ahmad with this:
Muslim schools turned out balanced citizens, more tolerant of others and less likely to succumb to criminality or extremism.
-what is this "extremism" if not literal-minded, self-empowered, Koran reading? How can "fundamentalist" be inapplicable to Islam if "extremist" is not?
Muslim schools give young people confidence in who they are and an understanding of Islam’s teaching of tolerance and respect which prepares them for a positive and fulfilling role in society.
-this is the kind of writing I wonder about calling "deceitful". Likely, it is a sincere expression of Muslim self-understanding. But how can Islam look tolerant and respectful to those of us who are kaffirs and who see how the Koran speaks of the unbeliever? In what sense is the "protection" Islam affords the dhimmi anything like the modern Western conception of tolerance?
An American Think Tank studied the educational back ground of 300 Jihadists; none of them were educated in Pakistani Madrasas. They were all Western educated by non-Muslim teachers.
-if this is supposed to be an argument for the goodness of Pakistani Madrasas I fear it comes close to being intentionally deceitful. First, there are so many Jihadists in the world, I suppose it is easy enough to select 300 who were never educated in Pakistani Madrasas. So what? It is not difficult to find students who studied in Pakistani Madrasas who went on to become jihadi terrorists, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and many other places, even if the majority of jihadis in the West are "homegrown". A serious discussion of Pakistani-style Madrasas would be honest and detailed about what is taught there. It would then be interesting to read how one thought that this education was appropriate for preparation of a student to enter into the public life and economy of Great Britain. Wouldn't Britain necessarily have to go through radical changes to accomodate such graduates? And why would that be a good thing from the perspective of the established society of the UK?
I would like to add that Iftikhar is no doubt sincere and correct in his depiction of the problem: Muslim youth in the West who don't know who they are and who, caught between worlds, are attracted, in desperate search for an identity, to Islamism.
My above response reflects a growing sense on my part that this problem is so great that it may well be best to limit immigration into the West only to those families or individuals fully committed to become Westernized and modern in outlook.
Post a Comment