Translate

Friday 2 May 2014

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - What if She Succeeded in Becoming a World Dictator?

Towards deconstructing the logic of anti-Muslim or anti-faith secularism


HIRSI THE ISLAMOPHOBE

I am in the process of building these HIRSI pages. I shall put more links on Hirsi's bio, writing and news, as I learn more about her, and will attempt to develop a picture of what she is really doing from the point of view of humanity, ie, benign human beings in general, including people like myself for that is what I consider myself to be when I am at my best.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to my mind, from what I have so far learned about her, can only at best serve as a tool for political ends.  What seems to be driving her, at bottom, seems to be only deep-seated resentment and hate.  For, it is neither logical nor normal to hate a person in the knowledge that such target of hate is not an ideology but a person with feelings.

Normally a human being has no intent to do harm.  Indeed, most believing people (theists) have entirely the opposite intentions: creative, wholistic, loving, protective and friendly ones, embracing of life; most Muslims simply follow their faiths in order to nourish balanced lives that faith has helped them to keep simple.  It is under the shelter and comfort of the institutions of the faiths of believing families and communities that political aspirations that sought a response to oppression have found violent expression.

But Hirsi also has intellectual training, intellectual stature (not sure how high, though, taking into account the commercial markets that reward her for her work); she enjoys recognition, and she has done a lot for women's rights, too.

INTERROGATING AYAAN HIRSI ALI
I should like this page (and links) to be one place where we could join and study Ayaan Hirsi Ali (and the positive and negative aspects of her opus) and how she succeeded in influencing so many clueless non-Muslim people in perverting the meaning of the word, "Islam".  In the name of protecting various heritages of Islam, this woman needs to be watched, constantly and engaged.

For the moment then, here is an article by Dr Kashif ChaudhryThe original in The Huffington Post has also been republished on the The Muslim Times.  Please would you read it.   Kashif has succinctly deconstructed some of the Hirsi logic in two short shrifts.  You can tweet him @KashifMD. I decided to comment on this article on The Muslim Times site and here are my comments:

Nice and resourceful way of setting standards! What reading you triggered in my mind:

What would happen if those whose practice of faith Hirsi theoretically crushed, searched and filled the vacuum of bereavement from the journey to, the search for the sight of, Allah with something new she approved of… until they then decided to call it Islam?

One of the readers (also an editor?) there, Brother Rafiq A Tschannen, asked me to clarify my comment and I did so, thus (some minor edits included here for further clarity):

Rafiq A. Tschannen

May 1, 2014 at 12:16 am

Sorry Mohamed, I do not quite get what you are saying…

Read more: http://www.themuslimtimes.org/2014/04/countries/netherlands/hirsi-ali-telling-a-critic-from-an-islamophobe#ixzz30Y3EqgB3
So this is a more understandable version of how I replied to him:
Assalaamu Alaikum Rafiq,

Thanks for your response and asking me to clarify, and please forgive me for my terrible shorthand. I am assuming - by writing in that way - that Muslims in general ARE united by some values, one of them being seeking the nearness to Allah.

Kashif Chaudhry turned the tables on Hirsi’s standards for measuring the ethics of Islam by posting a status on FB (crush Atheism). Thereby he set a similar standard by which other <belief> or <non-belief> systems can be measured, no? If this premise is acceptable, then:

While I was reading his article, something popped up in my mind: Suppose Hirsi’s goals (to crush Islam, period) had been fulfilled -- the crushing of “Islam as an Ideology” -- by crushing all people who identify themselves as “Muslim”, then what might the scenario then be [theoretically speaking because, of course, Islam cannot nor will be crushed - so I am stretching the thinking to build a set of posits]?

Now, here I am referring to “Muslim” as someone who is constantly in the search of nearness to Allah, (theoretically only) being severed from a means of continuing his or her search for that nearness to Allah, seeking that sight of Allah.

Being separated from this access to search would also imply that one would, in not being able to find a path (siratul-mustaqim), become bereaved. It is like suddenly going blind -- not knowing in which direction to turn -- once your material and symbolic cultures have been stolen from you by the likes of Hirsi, if she were to succeed. Suddenly losing a sense of the Divine by being severed from a means of reaching Him would, literally, become a torture, worse than hell itself.

To my mind, this is the degree to which has reached her hate towards someone (I don’t know whom) in her life, that she is willing to transfer that hate to anyone who calls himself "Muslim", which must be quite a ghastly ethical basis upon which to sell oneself, (successfully to the highest bidder, which sometimes seems to be what some of these ex- and anti-Muslim secularists are doing).

Imagine, now, that Islam has been (theoretically) crushed. Muslims would then feel bereaved (as in Gitmo, for example) for the separation and alienation from the right to live and celebrate life as a believer. Would they now not be in search of something to fill the vacuum? Is this not the way in which Islam found a wide variety of expressions, too?

Whatever Hirsi (as a theoretically benevolent dictator) allowed those bereaved of their Islam to do in order to restore themselves from that bereavement under her beneficial rules is a question she may want to think about (if she had any morality in her being, which is what she claims she has).  It could, after all, obviously be an expression in the hearts and minds of believers, only of siratul-mustaqim as long as such people did not openly give it that name, if you follow me thus far.

Immediately the stream of their search (for restoration) would once again flow into the wider rivers which run towards Allah Who, after all, whatever name you give to Reality, is the only Reality, as anyone who has had the baraka of means to see can see.

My question is, what would happen in such a fictive scenario where Islam (as the practice of a search) had been overtly blotted out by the likes of Hirsi, but is being covertly practiced by names given to it approved by Hirsi and her ilk alone?!! I mean, let us imagine for a moment: suppose such a dictatorship had been given rope to succeed by the wrong people? And what name would someone like Hirsi give such a replacement for Islam? Has she extrapolated the consequences of having removed the spirit/ emotion/ culture and faith components of humanity from her simplistic projections? Is she purporting also to have the intellectual prowess to remove the IMAGINATION that directs the seeker towards Allah through Islam?  (Or is she relying on the Zionist to do that?)

I am not sure whether I have still made any sense but do tell me!

[I had a long argument with an anonymous secularist group (which was adamant about hiding their true identities) on Twitter. It has been removed now because I blocked them after I realised by what arguments they had attempted to confound me and can tell you about it another time. My conclusion was that they are probably Zionist-funded and are commissioned to use the word, "Islam" to cover everything that is criminal and it is very frustrating. I finally concluded that they are not talking about Islam at all but things like 'Ghazniism' and all forms of criminality perpetrated in the name of Islam. They are probably victims of abuse, as Muslims or ex-Muslims or anti-Muslims, and are easy fodder for the proponents of using hate and oppression for political ends. But the problem of stoking the fires in the hearts of the likes of Hirsi and other simplistic forms of Secularism is far from solved.]
(Sorry I don't have time to stick in the links on all the highlighted words, yet, but am working on it, and shall add more links, promise.)

Read more: http://www.themuslimtimes.org/2014/04/countries/netherlands/hirsi-ali-telling-a-critic-from-an-islamophobe#ixzz30Y1932oc
 (Postscript:  Actually, in reality, to cut someone off from Islam one would require having to keep that person, as may have been attempted in Gitmo for experimental purposes, under a permanent regime of torture by keeping the person still (not being allowed to pray or read or increase in knowledge, prevention from prayer, expression of culture and contact, exercise and so forth) and under the permanent drone of non-Muslim litany, without access to Muslims and, possibly, with permanent access to other faiths, like Christianity and Hinduism, and torture, every time the person attempts to realise a Godly thought.  So it's quite impossible to stamp out or crush Islam.)


MORE LINKS
  • https://twitter.com/AyaanHirsiAli (NO TWEETS)
  • https://twitter.com/SecularAfrican 
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali is our "idol", if ever we had one. We believe all the values we unremittingly stand for, she pretty much approves of.
  • http://omidsafi.religionnews.com/2014/04/11/question-asking-brandeis-ayaan-hirsi-ali-islam
  • https://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php/articles/5046 (Hirsi's eloquent but probably also disingenuous response to Brandeis' reversal) 
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali 
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ho3BpnpAagQ
G  Mohamed Jiwa
habaripoacoolnews
edited 18:42h 3rd May, 2014, 5TH May, 2014