The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism Part III

VIII.
Buruma has not missed one other issue, though, and this is the biggest issue of all, though it may seem strange to say so, given how much we hear about anti-Semitism and terrorist violence. This is the question of women's rights. And it is here that Ramadan's dialectical language has proved to be exceptionally flexible, hitting notes that are ancient and modern at the same time--the tones of the Islamic renewal that wishes to return to the salafi past, yet wishes to do so with an eye to modernity and a willingness to innovate. In his conversation with Buruma, Ramadan said in regard to the relation between the sexes: "The body must not be forgotten. Men and women are not the same. In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives, or daughters. Now woman exists as woman." This makes Ramadan sound like a traditionalist, and he certainly is one. Yet the traditions in question here are not the same as folk customs or peasant gowns. Ramadan's phrase "Islamic tradition" in this passage means Islamic law: a religious matter, not a folk habit. But then, since religious law bespeaks the eternal, there is no reason why Ramadan should not seek to express his views in a fully modern language, something up-to-date and readily understandable.

And so Ramadan considers himself to be--it goes without saying--a feminist. Better: an "Islamic feminist," which is a traditional claim in the Muslim Brotherhood. Islam itself, in his description, should be regarded as a force for women's rights. At the time of the Qur'anic revelation, cultural assumptions with regard to women's role in society were extremely primitive, and Islam improved upon them. Islam, or at least his own Islam, requires women to wear headscarves or veils, and this, too, ought to be seen as a step in favor of women's autonomy. The scarves and the veils, the separate entranceways and seating sections, the general ban on intermingling the sexes--these rules of dress and conduct uphold a spirit of sexual modesty, and this modesty removes women from the oppression of male considerations. Modesty is liberation, from this point of view. And all this, Ramadan's argument for the rights of women, emerges finally as part of a larger battle, which he likewise expresses in the modern language of rights. It is the battle for individual liberty, for religious rights, for the right to choose one's path.

His position on the headscarf law in France--the law in 2004 that forbade the wearing of veils or headscarves (and other ostentatious religious symbols) in the public schools--followed this line of reasoning exactly. "Rights are rights," he told Buruma. "And to demand them is a right." On Ramadan's part, this sort of argument has been perfectly consistent. But it is strange--it ought to seem strange, anyway--to see the journalists adopt the same position, and even the same language. Ramadan presents himself as a defender of the rights of Muslim women, and in the Times magazine Buruma likewise presents him as a man who "promoted the right of Muslim women to wear the veil at French schools." The description could have been written by Ramadan himself. Once the terms for arguing an issue have been established, there is no getting away from them. And so Stéphanie Giry, Ramadan's reviewer in the Times Book Review, looked on Ramadan and the headscarf debate in exactly the same light. Ramadan, in Giry's presentation, opposed the headscarf law on what she described as "classic libertarian grounds--the right of Muslim girls to choose for themselves whether to cover up."

And yet all this ought to be fairly astonishing. A reader could almost imagine from these accounts that, in the French debate over the headscarf law, there were no other ways to present the issue. But there were, in fact, other ways. Some of them were silly, or anti-Muslim, or folklorically French, or a dozen other things, as in any national debate. But there was a serious argument, which emerged in the course of the hearings that were held and might even have produced the overwhelming public approval of the law. The whole controversy over headscarves in the schools is not anything old or traditional in France. The issue arose only beginning in 1989, which is to say, at the moment when the Islamist movement began to take on strength--though, once the issue had arisen, it grew rapidly, until at last the pressure to enact a law became too great to resist. And what was this issue?

The issue, the deep issue, the issue that commanded a genuine respect, was one of equal education for women, and, by extension, equal health care, too: the absolute fundamentals for any possible achievement of rights for women. As the Islamist movement grew in France, Muslim girls and women in the schools increasingly refused to participate in gym class, because of the immodest clothes that sports require; and refused to be alone with male teachers; and refused to be examined or treated by male doctors. The agitation in the immigrant neighborhoods to ban instruction in Voltaire, Darwin, and the crimes of Nazism attracted most of the public attention for a long while; but it may be that these issues were not nearly as fateful as the campaign that now got under way, on the basis of religious objections, to limit the education of girls and women, and to limit their access to health care, too.

The hearings revealed something else. Quite a few Muslim girls and women honestly had no desire to see their educational and healthcare opportunities demurely shrink into something less than the maximum. The girls and the women refused to take gym class and engage in other activities for one reason only: they were under pressure to do so. The pressure sometimes came from their families at home, and other times from the larger Muslim community, in opposition to their own families. The pressure demanded conformity with Islamic precepts, not as determined by the already existing traditions of the Muslim immigrants, nor by the old and official mainline Muslim organization, but by the new Islamists. The headscarf was more than the symbol of this pressure. It was a mechanism of Islamist enforcement. The headscarf was precisely the item of clothing that guaranteed that any Muslim girl or woman who dared to venture into the wrong doorway or to take her place in the wrong classroom was going to be instantly visible to everyone who might disapprove.

The question, from this point of view, was not whether Muslim girls and women had the right to wear a headscarf in the schools. The question was whether Muslim girls and women had the right not to wear a headscarf. The purpose in proposing a law against wearing headscarves in the schools was not to crush the Muslim religion. Nothing in that law prevented women and girls from donning their headscarves as soon as they left the school building. The purpose was to transform the schools into a zone beyond Islamist control, not out of some ideological whim but in order to preserve and to enforce one of the major achievements of modern society, still not entirely realized, which is full rights and benefits for women.

The battle to secure equal education and health care for women has been going on for a century and a half, and it has always taken the same form, more or less: a battle against obscurantist priests, against reactionary patriarchs and prejudices, against entrenched social customs. The whole controversy ought to be fairly recognizable by now. Nineteenth-century novelists were obsessed by these themes. And yet somehow, in the case of Muslim girls and women in the schools and hospitals not just of France but everywhere in Western Europe (not to mention in the rest of the world), the entire question of women's rights, virtually every aspect of it, has disappeared from a great many journalists' narrative of events. And the dispute has been presented to the public in Ramadan's version: as a matter of rights for Muslims. Or, as Ramadan said to Buruma, without the slightest demurral on Buruma's part: "Rights are rights."

But that is not the half of it. The truly enormous issue in regard to women has always been a question of violence and brutality--the violence of husbands against their wives. The group rapes in the French suburbs (which, having been a problem in the last years, led to the formation of the Muslim feminist movement Ni Putes Ni Soumises, or Neither Whores Nor Submissives--an organization that Ramadan regards as hostile to the Muslim immigrants). The violence of fathers against their daughters, of brothers against their sisters. The genital mutilations of Muslim women (sometimes euphemistically described, by people who have never heard a description, as mere "circumcisions"), which by now are said to have affected thirty thousand women in France alone. The lurking potential, finally, of outright murders: the so-called honor killings of women by their fathers or brothers because of some transgression of the sexual code. Is there any educated person today who has not given a few thoughts to this horrendous issue?

On this question, too, on the issue of violence against women, especially the issue of violence and murder as punishment for sexual transgressions, Ramadan has taken a remarkable public stand--though it may be that he took this stand without much forethought, as something that he blurted out. His position emerged during the course of a debate in 2003 between him and Nicolas Sarkozy (who was then the French interior minister and has just now become president) on the French television program "One Hundred Minutes to Convince." Sarkozy arrived at the program with a debater's trick up his sleeve and, when the moment seemed propitious, came out with it.

This was a question regarding Ramadan's family--in this case, Tariq's older brother Hani, who has always taken more brazen positions than Tariq. The two brothers, Tariq and Hani, have been known to have their differences. Still, the question remained: how great were those differences between the extremist Hani and the moderate Tariq? Sarkozy brought up Hani Ramadan's view of the proper punishment for women who commit adultery. Hani Ramadan has favored stoning these women to death. That is the seventh-century law, and Hani Ramadan has stood behind it.

But what about Tariq Ramadan, Sarkozy asked? What is his own position? Ian Hamel, in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan, argues that Ramadan's response, in its frankness, proves that he does not practice a "double discourse" but says what he thinks, without the slightest effort to conceal his views. And maybe so, though you could just as reasonably argue that Sarkozy caught Ramadan off-guard, and he had no time to work up a modern and progressive language to express his religious conviction, and his thoughts came tumbling out in an unpolished version. In any case, Ramadan, in Buruma's account, "replied that he favored a moratorium' on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright."

Aziz Zemouri provides a transcript in Should Tariq Ramadan Be Silenced?, which offers a fine display of the French fondness for the ellipsis as an expressive punctuation:

Sarkozy: A moratorium.... Mr. Ramadan, are you serious?

Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.

Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?

Ramadan: No, no, wait.... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community.... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr. Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand....

Sarkozy: But, Mr. Ramadan....

Ramadan: Let me finish.

Sarkozy: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good.... But that's monstrous--to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!

Ramadan: Mr. Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable--that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world.... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."

Sarkozy: Mr. Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.

Some six million French people watched that exchange. A huge number of Muslim immigrants must have been among them--the very people who might have benefited from hearing someone speak with absolute clarity about violence against women. Ramadan couldn't do it. Here was his Qutbian moment, the moment of frisson. The seventh century had suddenly appeared, poking out from beneath the modern rhetoric of feminism and rights. A moment of barbarism. A thrill. The whole panorama of Muslim women suddenly deployed across the television screens of France--the panorama of violence that is condoned, sanctified, and even mandated by the highest authorities. And here was Sarkozy, recoiling in horror: the bourgeoisie, shocked at last.

Even so, Sarkozy had more to say. Ramadan had written yet another preface, this time introducing a book that cites the Qur'anic passage enjoining husbands to beat their wives under certain circumstances--though the book maintained that beatings should merely mean a light slap, without producing a physical wound. "We are grateful for this advice and recommendation," Sarkozy mordantly remarked.

And yet--here is another peculiarity--some people, and not just salafi reformists, convince themselves that Ramadan came out looking pretty good in that exchange. There is the case of Olivier Roy, one of the world's supreme experts on Islam and Muslim culture. In his new book Globalized Islam, Roy takes the view that Ramadan's argument on stoning was not merely understandable, for reasons that supreme experts could best appreciate, but was, in absolute terms, positively progressive--a blow for secularism, no less, on the grounds that state and church ought to be separate, and here was Ramadan maintaining the autonomy of his separate sphere, and yet doing so with just the right touch of admirable hypocrisy not to run afoul of secular law. From this point of view, Sarkozy in this debate was the tyrannical oppressor, and Ramadan the progressive--but, oh, never mind the reasoning. The point is: Ramadan did a good thing.

Buruma in the Times magazine was a little cagier:

When I talked with Ramadan in London, the mere mention of the word "stoning" set him off on a long explanation.

"Personally," he said, "I'm against capital punishment, not only in Muslim countries, but also in the U.S. But when you want to be heard in Muslim countries, when you are addressing religious issues, you can't just say it has to stop. I think it has to stop. But you have to discuss it within the religious context. There are texts involved. I am not just talking to Muslims in Europe, but addressing the implementation of huddud everywhere, in Indonesia, Pakistan and the Middle East. And I'm speaking from the inside to Muslims. Speaking as an outsider would be counterproductive."

And Buruma in his article left it at that--for the moment. He appended not one comment of his own, not even a skeptical phrase equivalent to saying, "This may or not be accurate," as he had said in regard to Ramadan's picture of Hassan al-Banna's British-style parliamentarism--though, in this case, the comment would have had to be something like, "This may or may not be civilized."

Still, Buruma did linger over one aspect of Ramadan's argument in his profile, and this was the matter of speaking to Muslims as an insider versus speaking as an outsider. A pragmatic question. Buruma invited his readers to amble with him down Brick Lane in London's East End--the old and traditional immigrant district, which, as he lachrymosely observed, "used to be a poor Jewish area, where refugees from Russian pogroms eked out a living in the Sunday markets, cheap clothing stores and kosher dining halls." Brick Lane's immigrants today are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. Amid these colorful and touching scenes, Buruma contemplated Ramadan and compared him with another Muslim intellectual. This was Ayaan Hirsi Ali--the Somali woman who, after having undergone many gruesome experiences in Africa and in Saudi Arabia, escaped to a new life of academic study and liberal activism in Holland, making movies and writing books titled, in one case, Infidel, and subtitled, in another case, "An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan seemed to Buruma rather similar in one respect. "Her mission, too, is to spread universal values. She, too, speaks of reform"--though I have to interrupt these quotations to recall that Buruma's understanding of Ramadan's universal values is based on a philosophical miscomprehension, and his notion of reform in connection to Ramadan reflects a simple factual error. He continued: "But she has renounced her belief in Islam. She says that Islam is backward and perverse. As a result, she has had more success with secular non-Muslims than with the kind of people who shop in Brick Lane." But--this was Buruma's implication--that is not the case with Ramadan. His own credibility has remained intact.

In short, Ramadan made the right decision in refusing to condemn the practice of stoning women to death--not for Roy's reason (a principled blow for secularism) but for political reasons: to maintain his viability on streets like Brick Lane. This ought to be a familiar argument--it was more or less the argument that Sartre invoked in order to explain why he refused to condemn the Soviet Union. Sartre invited his audiences to think of the industrial suburb of Paris called Billancourt, where the ignorant workers believed in communism and the Soviet future--and he did not want to demoralize the downtrodden, to désespérer Billancourt. And so Sartre bit his tongue; if the workers were going to learn the truth about the Soviets, it was not going to be from him. And Ramadan is right not to désespérer Brick Lane by offering a simple straight-out condemnation of violence against women.

Needless to say, yet another positive evaluation ran in the Times Book Review under Giry's byline. Giry argued that Ramadan's refusal to condemn stoning could be sympathetically regarded as, in her words, "an expression of his view that each society must decide for itself how to put into practice the values of Islam." An argument for self-determination. It is almost comic to notice that Roy, Buruma, and Giry disagree entirely about why Ramadan was right to take the position that he did, but everyone agrees that, whatever the rationale, he was right. To go on television and unambiguously condemn the stoning to death of Muslim women--surely everyone can see how wrong that would have been, especially for any progressive person who cares about secular values, oppression, poverty, and colonialism. This is amazing.

There is something more, though, and this has to do with the Muslim intellectual whom Buruma contrasted so unfavorably to the admirable Ramadan--namely, the author of Infidel and the "Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam," Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Buruma's criticism of Hirsi Ali in the Times magazine did not come out of the blue. A year ago he published an op-ed in the Times likewise criticizing Hirsi Ali, though on the slightly broader grounds of fanning the flames of right-wing racism against Muslims. More recently he reviewed Infidel for the Times Book Review and lit into her yet again with a suggestion that her passionate devotion to exposing the scale of honor killings around the world ought to be likened to Muslim fundamentalism. His most extended criticism appears in Murder in Amsterdam, his book about the murder of Hirsi Ali's film-making colleague van Gogh, who was found dead on the street with a knife plunged into his chest, pinning to his body a sheet of paper containing a death threat to Hirsi Ali. In his article in the Times magazine, Buruma referred obliquely to this murder and the death threat by noting that "having had her fill of controversies in the Netherlands," Hirsi Ali has not only moved to Washington, D.C., but has taken a job at the American Enterprise Institute--a remarkably serene way of describing these events, neatly packaged with a sly suggestion that Hirsi Ali has sold out to the neocons.

At least in Murder in Amsterdam Buruma summons an occasional kind word for Hirsi Ali. His book concludes: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had to leave the scene. My country seems smaller without her"--which at minimum decently acknowledges that she might have departed Holland for reasons going beyond pique and annoyance. But Murder in Amsterdam is mostly filled, in connection to Hirsi Ali, with one argument or insult after another, accusing her of being a fanatic, of entertaining intellectual arguments that are substantially no different from those of van Gogh's murderer ("two fundamentalisms"), of retaining the zealousness of the Muslim Brotherhood in her own arguments against the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood, of exaggerating the dangers facing her, of being strident and arrogant, of being an aristocratic snob ("It was this wave, this gentle gesture of disdain, this almost aristocratic dismissal of a noisome inferior, that upset her critics more than anything"), and so on: pages written with an unmistakable flash of anger, relative to Buruma's normally phlegmatic manner.

The chapters in Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin--the book with the subtitle about the "Emancipation Proclamation"--carry such titles as "Genital Mutilation Must Not be Tolerated," "How to Deal With Domestic Violence More Effectively," and "Standing Up for Your Rights!" And yet one of the chapters is titled "Let Us Have a Voltaire"­--and this was too much for Buruma. He wrote: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali was no Voltaire. For Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church, one of the two most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe." Voltaire was brave--but Hirsi Ali? She is a bully.

Why has Buruma done this, and at such length, too, and repeatedly--three articles condemning Hirsi Ali in The New York Times alone, apart from his book? His main ostensible complaint, as expressed in the Times magazine, seems absurdly tiny. He remarks that, because of her Voltairean insults at Islam, she has frittered away any chance she might have had to make friends and influence people on streets like Brick Lane. Is this true? I wonder if bookish young Muslim women in the immigrant zones of Europe aren't sneaking a few glances at Hirsi Ali's writings and making brave resolutions for themselves. Anne Applebaum contemplated this possibility in The Washington Post, in the course of noting what a large campaign has been gotten up against Hirsi Ali. In Holland, the novelist Margriet de Moor, in her own contribution to the recent debate over Buruma's journalism, has insisted that in fact Hirsi Ali has been tremendously effective in speaking to Muslim women. "And it was claimed that she did not reach her target group?" De Moor thought otherwise: "Secretly, though, all of them swallowed what she said, their ears burning." Ramadan himself has ruefully observed that the overwhelming majority of European Muslims are far from devout--though it should be added that in many places the devout minority have intimidated the majority.

Still, everyone can grant that Hirsi Ali, in taking her Voltairean stand against Islam, has put herself in a less than ideal position for addressing the devout minority, and everyone who has come under their influence. But why this should arouse Buruma's animosity is hard to know. Salman Rushdie has not endeared himself either in some neighborhoods--which is not a count against him, given that, normally speaking, novelists in our modern day have no reason at all to pander to the religious reactionaries. Hirsi Ali is a tractarian and a memoirist, and it is not obvious why the rules for her should be any different. Her entire purpose in fleeing to the Netherlands, as she has explained eloquently and at length, was to escape a life of submitting to other people's reactionary opinions and to go bang the table on behalf of individual freedom, and here she is doing what she has intended to do. Why the attacks, then?

If you open either of her books and read a few lines at random, you will discover one reality that you would hardly guess from reading those attacks. Buruma--and he is not the only one to do this--presents Hirsi Ali as a diehard enemy of Islam, dedicated to hurling insults, which, to be sure, she does do, and with gusto. But this is not her major theme. In her books, and in the little film that she made with van Gogh, she dedicates herself mostly to something else, and that is to describe and to decry the miseries of women in the portion of the Muslim world that she knows best--in East Africa and Saudi Arabia, together with the immigrant zones of Europe. Her account of her own genital mutilation as a little girl, and of the botched genital mutilation of her sister, and the sister's tragic life and suicide; her portrait of girlhood and marriage in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, not to mention her own forced marriage, which she fled; the portrait of her grandmother, the Somali nomad, and the patriarchal customs of the past, which do seem to have lingered on; her sense of horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, these women who have no faces because of their veils and whose black garments hang so shapelessly upon their bodies that, in order to know which way the women are facing, you have to look to see which way their shoes are pointing; her account of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland; her account of the terrors of refugee existence, and the double terrors of refugee existence for women--all these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today. It is a visceral anger at oppression. A moral indignation, and not just a wistful pragmatism.

But mostly these passages in Hirsi Ali's books raise the issue of women's rights, and not from an outsider's point of view, regardless of how many times she has been denounced for making herself an outsider to Muslim life. Hers is a story marked by knives--the knife at her own genital mutilation, and at her sister's; the knife at the murder of her friend and colleague, pinning to his chest the sheet of paper threatening her own life. This is not a Swiss professor! Here is the actual insider; the real thing. I suppose that all this unironic indignation can only be annoying in the extreme to a certain kind of refined sensibility. Something about those knives takes away the quality of abstraction that allows a social issue to be shrugged off. It is always good to be subtle and nuanced, but Hirsi Ali's writings have the effect of making a large number of nuanced subtleties look ridiculous.

About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France, the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma's. This talk of women's rights--doesn't it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy.

If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali--this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death--this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan's career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women's oppression and the struggle for women's rights from discussion--no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

IX.
The reactionary turn has aroused a response, however, and this has been fascinating to see. A fairly large controversy over Buruma's journalism has broken out in Europe during the last few months, originally in an online English-language journal in Germany with the slightly punny name of signandsight.com (the pun being on Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, though what Heidegger has to do with this is beyond me); and from the cloudy zones of cyberspace the controversy has precipitated by now onto the feuilleton pages of paper-and-ink newspapers in Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, and France. A first book adverting to the scandal has already appeared in Germany, Welche Freiheit: Plädoyers für eine offene Gesellschaft, or Which Freedom: Arguments for an Open Society, an anthology edited by Ulrike Ackermann (to which Buruma himself has contributed an adaptation from Murder in Amsterdam). A second book is on its way.

The controversy was inaugurated by Pascal Bruckner, the French writer, and this was entirely in keeping with his own work over the years. The group of French intellectuals known as the New Philosophers are famous for having launched a criticism of communism, and of totalitarian doctrines as a whole, some three decades ago--actually, a mortal blow to communist and pro-communist ideas in Europe. But Bruckner's contribution to this literature veered in a slightly different direction. He wrote a criticism of the leftist doctrine that in those days was still known as "Third Worldism"--meaning the hope and the expectation that, around the world, the impoverished countries, the former colonies and semi-colonies, would generate, as an aspect of their struggle against Western imperialism, a worldwide revolutionary alternative, a soulful new kind of socialism, a new and revolutionary culture. This was the doctrine that venerated revolutionary leaders such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro not because they were communists but because they were the leaders of the Third World revolution.

But Bruckner, in writing about the "Third Worldist" idea, noticed that among the good-hearted leftists of the Western countries, sympathy for oppressed people in the former colonies had turned into a kind of dehumanizing contempt for the oppressed people in the former colonies, without anyone having noticed. He called his book The Tears of the White Man, and in its pages he served up a spectacular exposé of left-wing European clichés about the poor and the oppressed in faraway places--an enormous catalogue of Noble Savage imagery and other fantastical pictures of the superior qualities of downtrodden people in poor countries, compared with their former oppressors in Europe. The book was a demonstration of how, through a combination of guilty consciences and patronizing ignorance, the European intellectuals had ended up re-creating the worst sorts of racist and colonialist imaginings of what people in other places and with other skin tones must be like: their wisdom, virtue, selflessness, brilliance, and, above all, their profound quality of being different.

Bruckner has returned to this topic from time to time over the years, and just last year he came out with a sequel called La Tyrannie de la Pénitence, or The Tyranny of Penitence, updated to our own age, in which the "Third World" of yore has been renamed the "south," and the imperialists have been renamed the forces of globalization. And the sequel has led Bruckner to take a new glance at how, in our own time, the progressive intellectuals of the Western countries, out of a continuing self-contempt and feeling of guilt for the Western crimes of the past, have likewise updated their fantasies about the wronged and inscrutable people of other regions without really changing them. Ian Buruma, because of his sundry books, was the ideal person for The New York Times Magazine to assign a profile on Tariq Ramadan; and Pascal Bruckner, because of his own books, has turned out to be the ideal person to write about Ian Buruma. Bruckner noted the peculiarities of Buruma's campaign against Hirsi Ali. He took note of Timothy Garton Ash's contribution to this campaign in The New York Review of Books. And Bruckner offered a philosophical analysis.

Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices--a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another--not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh's murderer.

But this means only that Hirsi Ali's critics have lost the ability to distinguish between a fanatical murderer and a rational debater. Here is "the racism of the anti-racists," in Bruckner's phrase. It is the racism that, while pretending to stand up for the oppressed, would deny to someone from Africa the right to make use of the same Enlightenment tools of analysis that Europeans are welcome to use. Bruckner took note of the nasty personal tone with which Hirsi Ali had been discussed--the masculine condescension, to mention one aspect, which scarcely anybody could have missed in Garton Ash's New York Review essay, where he suggested that Hirsi Ali's literary success must be owed significantly to her looks.

"It is astonishing," Bruckner wrote, "that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment of Europe's intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy." This was not a gentle criticism. Then again, Bruckner was hardly alone in making these points. It must have been depressing for Buruma to see both the Turkish writer Necla Kelek and Bassam Tibi weigh in with their own ferocious criticisms. Kelek saw in Buruma's writings a new set of stereotypes about Muslims that had prevented him from being able to notice a series of dangers--for instance, the increasing problem in Europe of Muslim men preventing their own women from receiving medical care from male physicians. Tibi, without being much of a fan of Hirsi Ali, was indignant that Buruma could not tell the difference between Islam and Islamism, between the religion and the totalitarian ideology. Tibi was indignant that Buruma had conceded to Tariq Ramadan the right to speak for Islam; and indignant that Buruma could not see the virtue of a genuinely new kind of Europeanized Islam, which can hardly be salafi.

Then again, it was surprising to see how much difficulty Buruma and Garton Ash had in mustering a proper response to these criticisms--not that anyone suffered an inability to summon forth minor phraseologies and harrumphs. Garton Ash was not at his best. The first of his responses to Bruckner began, "Pascal Bruckner is the intellectual equivalent of a drunk meandering down the road," and proceeded from there, chiefly for the purpose of trying to demonstrate that Bruckner, in his inebriation, had failed to identify any sort of problem at all. Garton Ash's second intervention meandered a little further down the road. He came under criticism in Germany from Ulrike Ackermann, and this must have been, for him, less than pleasant. Garton Ash, years ago, was a hero of the anti-communist dissident movement in the East Bloc. Certainly he was a hero for many of us who read him in the Western countries--a journalist who, with a dramatic flair, brought to life the struggles that were going on throughout the East Bloc in the last years of communist rule. He was an unimpeachable authority on the nature and the necessity of dissidence.

But Ackermann was also, in those years, a hero of the dissident movement. She defended the Czech partisans of Charter 77, which marked one of the early and most important stages of the East Bloc dissident movement, at a time when hardly anyone in her own West Germany or elsewhere in the West was paying attention. And, for her troubles, she was arrested by the communist authorities in Prague and jailed for six weeks, and was lucky not to have served a longer sentence. From Ackermann's perspective, Hirsi Ali was the true heir of the East Bloc dissidents of the past--and Garton Ash had turned himself into the kind of person who, in the past, out of a failure to appreciate the achievements of liberal democracy in the West, never did want to see communism collapse. "Precisely because of his support for the Central European dissidents--which I am very familiar with--I find it astonishing that Timothy Garton Ash has clearly become a fellow traveler of Tariq Ramadan," Ackermann wrote.

Garton Ash replied in the Guardian. He heaped still more criticism on Hirsi Ali. He was indefatigable. He had lately spent a little while in Egypt, and he wished to explain that other dissidents and intellectuals in the Muslim world were infinitely preferable to the feminist Voltairean. He even came up with a first-rate example. This turned out to be Tariq Ramadan's great-uncle Gamal al-Banna, age eighty-six, the younger brother of Hassan al-Banna. Perhaps it was not surprising that Garton Ash would find himself in the company of Ramadan's great-uncle. Garton Ash was Ramadan's colleague at St. Antony's College at Oxford, and Garton Ash had already expressed his approval of Ramadan in The New York Review of Books in the course of his encomia to the brilliant journalism of Ian Buruma, and, whatever the route may have been, the path from St. Antony's to Ramadan's great-uncle in Cairo must not have been a difficult one to tread.

In the Guardian, Garton Ash described al-Banna's apartment. He was awed by the mass of religious texts filling the space: a true indication, he meant to suggest, of Sheik al-Banna's erudition. Garton Ash contrasted the sheik's knowledge to Hirsi Ali's pitiful ignorance. Garton Ash quoted one of Hirsi Ali's critical comments on Islam, and he quoted a statement by Sheik al-Banna, and, comparing the two quotations, he was beside himself with indignation at the inferiority of Hirsi Ali's. About those two quoted statements, Garton Ash asked the readers of the Guardian, "Which do you think reveals a deeper historical knowledge of Islam? Which is more likely to encourage thoughtful Muslims in the view that they can be both good Muslims and good citizens of free societies?" Garton Ash seems to have felt that finally he had unmasked the pretensions of Hirsi Ali.

Only, a pity! And more than a pity! On the very day that Garton Ash's favorable comparison of Gamal al-Banna with Ayaan Hirsi Ali ran in the Guardian, the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as MEMRI, issued its own report on Gamal al-Banna, and the MEMRI report put Sheik al-Banna in a rather less flattering light. This was chiefly because of Sheik al-Banna's praise--it is terrible to have to report these things--for the September 11 attackers and, in al-Banna's words, their "extremely courageous" action, which was "dreadful and splendid," in opposition to the "barbaric capitalism" of the United States. Nor was this the whole of it. Sheik al-Banna expressed a few thoughts in support of suicide terror among the Palestinians, too. He had been on television expressing these ideas; his opinions were not a secret. You might argue that Garton Ash's error in selecting Sheik al-Banna as a model dissident was understandable, and the error was doubtless caused (I am surmising) by the urgent need to come up with the name of somebody, anybody at all, who could be used to take one more swat at the author of the "Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam." Yet there is something uncanny, almost creepy, about how often the journalism on these themes has led Ayaan Hirsi Ali's critics and Tariq Ramadan's defenders into the zones of the grand theoreticians of suicide terror.

Buruma's responses to the several criticisms of his work in Europe were not as calamitous as Garton Ash's, and yet he too could not get himself to see or to acknowledge that Bruckner and the other writers might possibly be on to something. Buruma could not even recognize why anybody would suppose that he, the affable author of Murder in Amsterdam, had launched a prolonged, inexplicable, and reactionary campaign against arguably the best-known liberal champion of women's rights ever to come out of Africa. Buruma wrote, "If Mr. Bruckner has been kind enough to read my book, I'm not sure how he came to the conclusion that it was an attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali." And he went on: "I admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and agree with most of what she stands for." Of course he does! This is precisely what he said about Ramadan: "We agreed on most issues."

Something is disturbing in all this agreeableness. At least Buruma might have worked up the courage to acknowledge that some people do seem to regard his attacks as attacks, which have left an impression that if anyone from a Muslim background is right now responsible for whipping up dangerous moods in Europe, that person must be Hirsi Ali. He might have had the courage to assume responsibility for what he wrote about Ramadan in the Times magazine, as well, the anointing of Ramadan as the interlocutor for dialogue between the West and Islam--"a laudatory portrait," in Bruckner's dismissive phrase, that "borders on hagiography, despite minor reservations."

But I see that, in recounting these disputes, I have, by the logic of my own narrative, ended up trotting out the dread word "courage." This may be the heart of the matter. Bruckner seemed to think so: "A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today's directors of conscience." This sort of remark is not Buruma's cup of tea. The word "courage" leads him into thoughts of fascism. In reply to Bruckner's call for a bit of courage, Buruma tut-tutted, "Now where have we heard that kind of thing before? The need to defend Europe against alien threats; the fatigued, self-doubting, weak-kneed intellectuals...." Buruma wanted his readers to recognize the fascist rhetoric of Europe from seventy years ago, the kinds of phrases that used to pour from the mouths of Nazi intellectuals. Yet something seems to have eluded him. In his own book Murder in Amsterdam, the narrative of events requires him to describe sharing a harrowing car trip with Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, rolling along the streets in an armored car with bodyguards nervously making contingency plans, in case of an assassination attempt against her. The worst thing that Hirsi Ali has done, to judge from Murder in Amsterdam, was to engage in a televised discussion with women in a Muslim women's shelter in Amsterdam, where Hirsi Ali came off looking like a snob. Yet maybe it is worth focusing instead on the ghastly fact that, by Buruma's own account, most of the women engaged in that televised discussion wore disguises over their faces, for fear of what might happen to them; and, soon enough, Hirsi Ali herself was forced to take refuge in women's shelters, for fear of being murdered.

When I met Hirsi Ali at a conference in Sweden last year, she was protected by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. Buruma himself mentions in Murder in Amsterdam that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his Bertrand Russellinfluenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled out for assassination. I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in Il Corriere della Sera--and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full complement of five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards. Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding. I have no idea what security precautions have been taken by Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published the Muhammad cartoons. And van Gogh....

So Salman Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class, a subset of the European intelligentsia--its Muslim wing especially--who survive only because of their bodyguards and their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe during the last sixty years. And yet if someone like Pascal Bruckner mumbles a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin--"Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?"--and onward to the litany about fascism. In the Times magazine, Buruma held back even from hinting obliquely about the fascist influences on Ramadan's grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death. Yet Bruckner, the liberal--here is somebody on the brink of fascism!

And this, too, is something new. Eighteen years ago, when Rushdie came under threat, and one of his translators was killed and another was knifed and a couple of Norwegian bookstores were bombed and a British hotel was attacked by a suicide bomber, not to mention the more than fifty people killed in anti-Rushdie rioting around the world--at that terrible moment, when the dangers were obvious, a good many intellectuals in Western countries, people without any sort of Arab or Muslim background, rallied instinctively in Rushdie's defense. A good many reached out to their endangered Arab and Muslim counterparts and colleagues, and celebrated the courage of everyone who declined to be intimidated. My glance happens to rest just now on a dusty volume on my bookshelf, brought out in the course of the Rushdie affair, in 1993, by the French publishing house La Découverte, which contains statements of support for Rushdie by a solid one hundred Arab and Muslim intellectuals: a moving display of fraternal solidarity by the publisher and the contributors both. Leafing through, I stumble on the contribution of Orhan Pamuk, who nowadays goes about with his own detail of bodyguards, though in his case the danger comes from Turkish nationalists, not from Islamists. And here is the contribution of Antoine Sfeir, the Lebanese historian who criticized Tariq Ramadan some years ago in France and found himself facing a lawsuit (which, at least, he won).

Sfeir, in his 1993 essay, recalled that in Egypt the intellectual Farag Foda had recently been assassinated, and Naguib Mahfouz had been brutally assaulted, as part of the same wave of Islamist violence that was threatening Rushdie and his associates. Sfeir declared, "We will never say it enough: to attack the Islamists, to denounce their actions and their lies, is not to attack Islam. To attack the Islamists is, on the contrary, to defend the Muslims themselves, the first though not the only victims of the Islamists." How times have changed! The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb. Today the menace to society is declared to be Hirsi Ali and people of similar minds, of whom there are quite a few: John Stuart Mill's Muslim admirers, who are said to be just as fanatical as the fanatics. During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women's rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan's family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks--what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

Paul Berman is a writer in residence at New York University and the author, most recently, of Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (Norton).