Betrayal of the 'Brown Memsahib'(Shame on the Dutch For Betraying a Heroine)

The treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali marks a sad day for the West, says our correspondent

FOR HER COURAGE, her honesty and her unflinching support of the rights of Muslim women, Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves to be considered a heroine. A target for extremists throughout the Islamic world, her life is in constant danger. When, after the making of her film, Submission, its Dutch director, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered, she too found herself under sentence of death. Yet she has never held back from expressing her outspoken view that, in terms of subordinating women, repressing art and limiting freedom of speech, Islam is a backward religion. Controversial or not, she has a right to be heard.

One might have imagined that the Netherlands, as a bastion of liberal values, would guarantee that right. Ms Hirsi Ali is a full citizen of the country and, until yesterday, was an elected member of the Dutch Parliament. She is entitled to expect the same kind of protection that Salman Rushdie once had in the years after the publication of Satanic Verses. Instead, she finds herself today abandoned by her political colleagues and forced into exile. She intends to go to America, where she has been offered work and where she will be given the security that she no longer has in the Netherlands.

It is a squalid tale. Ever since the making of Submission, Ms Hirsi Ali has been subjected to a campaign of denigration by fellow Muslims. They have accused her of insulting her own native country — Somalia — her religion and her family. By refusing to marry the husband that had been chosen for her, by criticising Islamic attitudes to women, and then by using her position to argue for restricting immigration into the Netherlands, she has incurred the hostility, not only of fundamentalists, but also of even moderate Muslim opinion. Last year, Emel, the British Muslim lifestyle magazine, carried an article that described her as “a brown memsahib” and accused her of selling out to right-wing opinion. That Time magazine chose her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world did not endear her to her left-wing critics.

In the Netherlands, a country with a large Muslim population, struggling with multiculturalism and acutely aware of its failure to integrate its minorities, Ms Hirsi Ali’s uncompromising views were uncomfortable, not least because they were couched in such cogent terms. “I am not against migration,” she told The Guardian last year. “It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe. But that will only work if universal human rights are also adopted by the newcomers. And if they are not, then you run the risk of losing what you have here, and what other people want when they come here, which is freedom.”

It is for views like this — persuasive as they are — that she is being forced out of her adopted country. The lowest blow has come from her own political party in the Netherlands, the centre-right VVD, which has caved in to demands to open an inquiry into how she secured her Dutch visa. Ms Hirsi Ali has never denied that, when she first arrived in the country, she falsified her name and some of her details, claiming that she had come directly from Somalia, when in fact she had spent time in Ethiopia, Kenya and Germany. The VVD knew all of this when it adopted her as a candidate in 2002. It knew about the pressures she had been subjected to from members of her own family, and about the acute danger she found herself in because of her views.

Now, however, Rita Verdonk, the Immigration Minister, who is running for leadership of the party, has caved in to pressure from Ms Hirsi Ali’s critics and has pledged a formal investigation of her citizenship. Responding to a TV programme that has aired many of the accusations made against Ms Hirsi Ali, including complaints from her neighbours about the extra security she has been granted, Ms Verdonk has turned against her, saying her visa had been “improperly granted”. As Ms Hirsi Ali said yesterday: “It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live. It is difficult, but not impossible. As of yesterday, it became impossible.”

This is a sad day in the history of liberal democracy, a stain on the reputation of a once-tolerant country and a setback for the reputation of Islam itself, cementing the impression that is simply not open to criticism. In particular, it lets down Muslim women, who are still being subjected to forced marriages. The debate about its role in Western society is one of the most urgent and complex that confronts us today — only this week, the Government launched an attempt to find a frame of traditional British values that could encompass young Muslim opinion. At the very least, therefore, we should be free to hear all strands of opinion, however challenging they may be.

Ms Hirsi Ali’s penetrating analysis of religion and society in Muslim countries should be answered, not ignored. This is not just a matter of a novel satirising the Prophet, or a few insulting cartoons; hers is a sustained and clear-sighted critique of Islam, from someone who has experienced its restrictions and believes that there is a reasonable case to be made against it. A country that turns its back on those views reveals itself, not only as illiberal, but one that has lost confidence in the resilience of its own democracy.

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