Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Message to the West

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the world’s most effective critic on Islam’s treatment of women and has continued to speak out despite threats to her life from extremists.

The packed audience at the CBC’s Glen Gould Studio this week, didn’t quite know what to expect when invited by the Donner Canadian Foundation to hear Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak about Islam.

Hirsi Ali is probably the world’s most effective critic of Islam’s treatment of women, and the religion’s essential difference from Christianity and Judaism. She is also the person most threatened by Jihadists, or Muslim extremists, with a fatwa out for her assassination, that requires her 24-hour protection.

Beautiful, poised, cheerful, she doesn’t give the impression of someone under a perpetual death threat. A riveting speaker, her “lecture” on Islamic philosophy was without rancor or bitterness, but was enlightening to enthralled infidels.

As she explains it, Islam is a philosophy of death or the hereafter; Christianity and Judaism are philosophies of the present, or this life. In other words, in Islam this life is a preamble or testing for the afterlife, with “eternity” the goal. In the West we want to get through this life as happily and comfortably and peacefully as possible.

In Islam, “heaven” is well defined. It is the real life if you can make it there – still tough on women, but great for men (with all those expectant virgins waiting). To Christians heaven is ill-defined, nice and “somewhere up there,” but not spelled out. The West lives for today, not the hereafter. Islam believes each person has an angel on the left shoulder who keeps a meticulous record of all sins (forgetting prayers, eating pork, drinking alcohol, indulging in illicit pleasures, being pally with infidels, etc.).

Another angel on the right shoulder keeps a record of all the good things done – praying five times a day, giving to charity, being kind, avoiding temptation, etc.

After death, another angel balances the good and bad, and if more sins than good deeds have been recorded – off to hell you go, where pain and hellfire await.

A reason why so many young, middle-class Muslims are seduced into terrorism or become jihadists, is that “martyrdom” wipes out records of sins committed. Young Muslims lured into the temptations that abound in the West, can atone by seeking a martyr’s death against infidels.  Thus, suicide bombers, terrorists.

In that sense, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has no fear of annihilating Israel with nuclear weapons and dying himself, because that would make him a hero in the afterlife – a big shot in Paradise.

Islam is a philosophy that’s hard to fight with tolerance and kindness. We in the West tend to think if we are nice, friendly, cooperative and tolerant, others will appreciate us. Not so. To Islam, temptations in the West are recorded as sins.

The 1.5 billion Muslims in the world are ever increasing, partly because Christians aren’t proselytizing, and Judaism doesn’t seek converts. Islam is always seeking converts and intensifies its creed. Saudi Arabia spends untold millions advancing an interpretation of Islam (Wahhabism) that doesn’t differ much from Al Qaeda’s.

Hirsi Ali wishes Western culture and philosophy would openly challenge the afterlife appeal of Islamic philosophy, which is essentially Arab and has altered the cultures of Indonesia, Malaysia, and wherever it has spread. Mohammed, who was illiterate, depended on revelations from Allah, who brooks no dissent and whose creed is anchored immutably in the seventh century.

The Koran is Islam’s constitution – and it is unchanging and was originally written in Arabic. Most scholars depend on translations of the Koran.  The way we are going is not encouraging.

As if to give substance to Hirsi Ali’s apprehensions, New York’s Manhattan Community Board has approved a $100 million project to build a mosque on the site of the World Trade Centre. “To bridge the great divide” between Americans and the Muslim community, according to  Feisal Abdul Raul, in charge of the project.

Kinfolk of the 3,000 who died in 9/11 oppose the plan, but Manhattan Borough president Scott Stinger says the mosque is evidence that “what we reject is bigotry and hatred.”

Foolish, foolish, foolish. What a mosque on the site of 9/11 will do is confirm to Muslim extremists and al-Qaeda, that they have won, that they were right, that their cause has been advanced. Ignored is the reality that one cannot appease those who will not be appeased.

Our tragedy is that the world has only one Ayaan Hirsi Ali.