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March 6, 2007
Anne Applebaum's op-ed in the Washington Post entitled The Gall To Speak Her Mind is about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her journey from tribal Somalia, through fundamentalism, and into Western liberalism and about reason, faith, multiculturalism and the integration of millions of Muslim immigrants into European culture in Infidel.
She argues there is no place for tolerance of religious fundamentalism within a nation based on enlightenment principles. The implication is that Muslims need to abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers and that a necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion. What is rejected is a large tolerance for cultural diversity in favour of a "liberal monoculture," in which Muslims adopt Western values.
Taken up by Pascal Bruckner in Sign and Sight, wit has sparked a debate about the Enlightenment and multiculturalism that has relevance to debates in Australia over arguments that Muslim migration is more problematic than previous groups of migration because a group of Muslims are intent on annihilating the West, and because many Muslim leaders who have been embraced as moderates are anything but moderate. The implication of this conservative argument is that it is only Islam and only Muslims who are dangerously fundamentalist, who oppress their own and who must be kept in check. Little is said about Christian fundamentalism. So the causes of unrest amongst Muslims is their religious background.
The religious background of Muslims is enough to label them as anti-social, fanatical or even terrorist. In other words, a whole group of people are labelled as undesirable because of their religion.This conservative discourse cast both Muslims and the faith to which they are notionally linked as being, at worst, inherently evil, and, at best, completely unable to integrate into modern western society. Interfaith initiatives and multiculturalism are misguided because we are dealing with an inherently irreconcilable group of people who would abuse the system for their evil objectives.
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