Tue, May 9, 2006 at 4:53:36 pm
Miss Kelly turns in an excellent report on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s appearance at Harvard’s JFK School of Government: Ayaan Hirsi Ali: ‘I Really Wonder What You Are Doing Here at Harvard’.
The Q&A afterwards demonstrated the forces that Ayaan is working against. Most questions were to her were fairly hostile: How can an atheist reform Islam? What is your agenda? Why are you speaking about Islam when you are not a theologian? Isn’t what you’re doing extreme and dangerous and how is it serving the cause? Why should a Muslim listen to you? Aren’t you setting up a straw man argument, saying that Muslims are either good Muslims or they’re Osama bin Laden? Why are you only harping about Islam? What about the Hindu texts?
Ayaan was unflappable and graceful in her responses.“I speak about Islamic texts because that is what I know. Religion is public, ideas are public. It is necessary and urgent to review, revise, and discuss Islam as a body of ideas. It is time to examine the links between reliigon and values.”
One business school student (Muslim male) asked “If Islam is so oppressive to women, how can you explain that Muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia have had women prime ministers?” Her response to that was deadly: “In some Muslim countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, under sharia, women are forced to wear hijab, adulters are stoned (mostly women, not the men), daughters get half the inheritance that sons do, and a man can easily get a divorce, while it’s very difficult for women to get divorced. In secular Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia, fundamentalist Islam is on the rise. Twenty years ago, Indonesian women did not go around in hijab, now it is commonplace. There is an attitude of denial in the face of a great deal of empirical evidence about the oppression of women. Anyone who denies this evidence is personally contributing to the subjugation of women.” (That means YOU, Dude).