Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been charting one of the bravest moral and intellectual journeys of the first quarter of the 21st century. Born in the Somali Democratic Republic, raised in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, she experienced firsthand the Islamist ideology that swept through African and Middle Eastern countries in her youth, which drew her into its frenzied orbit before she fled to the Netherlands. In just five years, she became a naturalized Dutch citizen, a member of Parliament, and an outspoken critic of the Islamist culture she saw taking root in the country that had granted her asylum. After an Islamist terrorist, born in the Netherlands, murdered her friend and creative collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, promising she would be next, she went into hiding but refused to be silenced. Moving to the United States—after the Netherlands proved disinclined to protect her—Ayaan’s courage, moral clarity, and willingness to articulate uncomfortable truths about the enemies of Western culture, including the West’s own predilection for disguising dangerous differences with narratives of virtuous inclusion, have made her an essential voice in a time of evasion and moral cowardice, and a welcome contributor to The Free Press. Today she writes on the nature of the threat Europe faces, and why some refuse to see it for what it is. —The Editors
On the cover of its latest edition, The Economist promises to uncover “the truth and the lies” about “Islam in Europe.” The story it presents is, for the magazine’s readership, a reassuring one: a crisis of two extreme fringes fighting across a sensible middle. But this is a false framing that betrays the complexity of Islam in Europe it promises to untangle, just when honest understanding is urgently needed. Allow me to explain why.
The editors offer a soothing symmetry: on one side, a small minority of Islamist extremists; on the other, a small minority of far-right extremists. “Islam poses no serious danger,” declares the accompanying editorial. “But Islamism and the fear of Islam do.” Both are dangerous. Both must be resisted. In this formulation, the vast majority of Muslims and the vast majority of native Europeans are peaceable people caught between two fringes. The task of the responsible commentator is to condemn both fringes with equal force, while warning against the temptation to blame whole communities for the actions of its extremists. This is presented as the fair, balanced, and non-paranoid position, making The Economist the sober grown-up in the room who refuses to be drawn into the ugliness of either side.
Unfortunately, that symmetry does not reflect reality, and by insisting on it, The Economist puts its elite readers in a box and discourages them from looking beyond it. Consider what would have to be true for the symmetry to hold. There would have to be, on the European far right, a creedal architecture of comparable depth to Islamic scripture and tradition: a body of texts venerated by a fourth of humanity, taught in seminaries across dozens of countries, printed in hundreds of millions of copies, and read by every serious adherent of the faith as an authoritative source of guidance. There is not. The European far right has no scripture. It has memes, manifestos, a handful of self-published tracts, and a scattering of ideologues who cite one another. It has no holy book or equivalent of the Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadiths. It has no equivalent of the four Sunni legal schools. It has no equivalent of a 1,400-year-old exegetical tradition.
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