What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Would Have Said At Brandeis
A civil liberties- and free-speech celebrating excerpt from the talk she was not allowed to give, posted in the WSJ:
Two decades ago, not even the bleakest pessimist would have anticipated all that has gone wrong in the part of world where I grew up. After so many victories for feminism in the West, no one would have predicted that women's basic human rights would actually be reduced in so many countries as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.Today, however, I am going to predict a better future, because I believe that the pendulum has swung almost as far as it possibly can in the wrong direction.
When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago. The misnamed Arab Spring has been a revolution full of disappointments. But I believe it has created an opportunity for traditional forms of authority--including patriarchal authority--to be challenged, and even for the religious justifications for the oppression of women to be questioned.
Yet for that opportunity to be fulfilled, we in the West must provide the right kind of encouragement. Just as the city of Boston was once the cradle of a new ideal of liberty, we need to return to our roots by becoming once again a beacon of free thought and civility for the 21st century. When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with condemnation, but with concrete actions.
One of the best places to do that is in our institutions of higher learning. We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I'm used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.
I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women's and girls' basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight.
The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.
So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy--punishable by death--to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.
Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.
The motto of Brandeis University is "Truth even unto its innermost parts." That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.
We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged.
You know, maybe the administration read this and are just using their muslim students as the fall guys
lujlp at April 12, 2014 11:42 AM
Its too bad
Nicolek at April 12, 2014 11:30 PM
I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.
Puzzle me this: how do you reform the literal word of Allah?
Barring a second coming of the prophet with a new set of words from Allah, I don't see how you can.
I R A Darth Aggie at April 14, 2014 6:34 AM
"Puzzle me this: how do you reform the literal word of Allah?"
Declare it to not be so. It's that simple -- and that hard. First, you have to have a philosophical basis for walking it back. Such has certainly been done; the traditional way is that you evaluate the context in which the things were said and done and then make an argument that that context does not apply in today's world. Then, you have to convince a larg body of the believers. Of course, this is a thumbnail of how both Christianity and Reform Judiasm came into being. So it's doable. But it may take millennia. And the Muslim world might not last that long, either because it foolishly attacks a strong enemy, or because it wipes itself out with civil wars. We tend to forget that, from the down-in-the-trenches tribal standpoint, Islam is far from the monolithic entity that we sometimes assume it is.
Cousin Dave at April 14, 2014 10:20 AM
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