Thursday, February 8, 2007

On Muslim dissenters

At Sign and Sight (tagline: "Let's talk European"), quite a storm has been documented since late January over Ian Buruma and his book "Murder in Amsterdam," about the killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.

French philosopher Pascal Bruckner kicked it off, writing in an article originally written for a German magazine. I find his critique more heat than light, but it raised an interesting point -- that Buruma's book (and the sympathetic review of it in the NYRB by Timothy Garton Ash) treated all sides of the Van Gogh story with respect and an attempt at understanding but gave something like short shrift to the Somali member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in their eyes has all but renounced Islam, thereby perhaps throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (TGA seems to have been especially critical of this, despite paying her other compliments: "[Her book] 'The Caged Virgin' is subtitled, in its American edition, 'An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.' It would be more accurate to call it a manifesto for the emancipation of women from Islam.")

Bruckner writes, with some throat clearing:

It is time to extend our solidarity to all the rebels of the Islamic world, non-believers, atheist libertines, dissenters, sentinels of liberty, as we supported Eastern European dissidents in former times.

Buruma gets in a few licks here: "Mr Bruckner is an important French intellectual, so I'm sure he doesn't have to be told this, just as I don't need to be lectured by him on the perils of cultural relativism."

Things progress from there.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:28 PM

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