It has been almost nine years since Dutch film director Theo van Gogh was murdered while biking to work in Amsterdam. Dutch-Moroccan terrorist Mohammed Bouyeri shot Van Gogh while he begged for mercy, slit his throat and used a dagger to pin a warning message to “America, Europe, the Netherlands and infidels” on his lifeless body. But the letter’s main target was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch member of parliament. She worked with Van Gogh on a short film called “Submission,” which critiqued the treatment of women under Islam, motivated by her own experiences growing up as a girl in Somalia where she was subjected to genital mutilation before escaping a forced marriage.
Hirsi Ali describes herself as a classical liberal and an atheist, but her political writings denouncing Islam have made her a favorite among religious, right-wing Republicans in the United States. She joined the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute when she moved to the United States in 2007 and is currently a fellow at Harvard, where her husband Niall Ferguson is a professor of history. Tonight, Hirsi Ali will speak at Central Congregational Church on Angell Street, a poorly chosen location for someone with the ideological views — the Christianity vs. Islam, West vs. rest divide — that she will address in her talk.
Hirsi Ali has been living under a fatwa, a death sentence imposed on her by Islamists. As a Dutch member of parliament, she proposed a bill that allowed employers to screen Muslims based on their ideological convictions, a move she acknowledged was at odds with the Dutch constitution. She has famously called for the defeat of Islam in numerous publications. When asked by an interviewer for Reason, a libertarian magazine, whether she meant a defeat of specifically radical Islam she responded, “No. Islam, period.” Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times that the ferocity with which she denounces the religion could “potentially feed religious bigotry.” For the purpose of this column, I am not appraising these statements. Let’s consider them not for whether we agree with them, but for what they signify in combination with the church as the location of Hirsi Ali’s speech.
I am all for freedom of religion. I am all for freedom of expression. Hirsi Ali has the right to speak, and she has an experience and intimate knowledge that very few scholars can match. This is not about content. This is about a form of implication by association. Why a church? Whether one agrees with her views or not, and while her views are too complex to boil down to a singular catchphrase, Hirsi Ali talks about religion and politics. The location of her speech conflates the narrative and the surroundings too much. Holding her speech at a church introduces Christianity into a lecture that could otherwise have fairly straightforwardly engaged with why the political incarnations of Islam — think jihad and sharia law, though neither defines the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims — are at odds with Western values and culture.
But because Hirsi Ali is speaking at a church, her message automatically comes to carry the stamp of religion. It seems to be delivered with the approval of a Christian institution, transforming the discussion into a clash of religions.
I’m not saying this is what Hirsi Ali or the organizers have in mind — but it is what it looks like. I asked my classmates whether they knew who Hirsi Ali is. Three did not know, and five said “anti-Islam” or a variation of that. In other words, the danger here is exactly this lack of knowledge. People living in the United States may not know who she is, just as those reading about the lecture abroad may not know the Central Congregational Church is just one of many churches and has hosted this lecture series on religion and politics for 10 years now. Just as a mosque represents Islam for many non-Muslims, a church represents Christianity to non-Christians. Internet forums are already rife with dispute over Hirsi Ali’s lecture.
Again, there is no question that Hirsi Ali should give this talk. The fact that the event is taking place in a church is what bothers me, as this once again reinforces the split between “Islam” and “the rest.”
The church should not be coded as an anti-Islamic institution. But this is exactly the message it sends by hosting an event that gives a platform to perhaps today’s best-known critic of Islam, especially given that Hirsi Ali does not differentiate between the radical Islam that results in heinous acts of terrorism and the Islam that millions practice peacefully every day.
Clarity is especially important in a time when religious violence reigns supreme. The recent events in Nairobi, where dozens of shoppers were killed by Islamic militant gunmen, or in Nigeria, where 40 students were massacred in their dorms for receiving “Western-style education,” or in Myanmar, where five Muslims were killed and many fled after Buddhist-Muslim tensions rose to peak levels, all underline the fact that acts of unimaginable horror committed in God’s name are as much part of today’s world as they were of the crusades.
I’ll be there tonight. I am eager to hear what Hirsi Ali has to say. I have great respect for the way in which she has refused to compromise her beliefs, even after Van Gogh’s murder. I think it’s fantastic that Rhode Islanders will have the opportunity to hear her speak as part of this annual lecture series. But I know I will be uncomfortable seeing Hirsi Ali address an audience enveloped by a dome with a giant cross painted on it as she speaks about Islam. The double othering of Islam on a visual and narrative level will not do anyone any favors.
Suzanne Enzerink GS encourages everyone to attend Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lecture tonight.
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