Pascal Bruckner tar i et langt essay et oppgjør med Ian Buruma og Timothy Garton Ash for deres nedlatende og aggressive kritikk av Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Det er samtidig en analyse av Vestens tilstand stilt overfor den islamistiske trussel. Igjen er det ledende intellektuelle som svikter.

It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy.

Jeg har selv lest Ian Burumas bok «Murder in Amsterdam», som handler om mordet på Theo van Gogh, og kan gå god for Bruckners kritikk: det er en merkelig likestilling av Hirsi Ali og islamistene. Buruma kaller henne «opplysningsfundamentalist». Det er en strategi man drar kjensel på: å fremstille den andre som mindre sofistikert, som har gått fra en ytterlighet – islam – til en annen: en omfavnelse av Opplysningstanken uten distinksjoner. Det ligger ikke så lite nedlatende holdninger i Burumas beskrivelse. For som Bruckner skriver: Ikke på ett eneste punkt går Ayaan Hirsi Ali over grensen for skarp, rasjonell kritikk. Hun vil gå i Voltaires fotspor. Men Buruma sier at det blir feil. Hun kritiserer en utsatt minoritet, mens Voltaire gikk løs på en mektig institusjon (den katolske kirke). På dette punkt viser Buruma sin sanne farge, for islamistene er selvsagt fullt bevisst at de har en global bevegelse i ryggen. Burumas argumentasjon blir spesielt perfid når man tenker på bokens ledetråd: det er islamistenes kritikere som blir drept, ikke omvendt.

Timothy Garton Ash er en jetsettende skribent, syndikert i mange aviser, deriblant Dagbladet. Han har tidligere skrevet ting som viser at han gjerne vil telle med blant de som betyr noe, og angrepet på Hirsi Ali later til å være i samme gate. Garton Ash får seg til å skrive at Ayaan Hirsi Alis suksess nok skyldes hennes flotte utseende!

Men essayet er noe langt mer enn et oppgjør med disse to. Det er en gjennomgang av hvor Vesten står idag. For innbakt i Buruma/Garton Ash sin kritikk er en litt hånlig omgang med Opplysningstanken. Men det er denne tradisjonen vi står i, og den har en verdifull evne til å kunne reflektere over seg selv, skriver Bruckner.

Whether we like it or not, we are the sons of this controversial century, compelled to damn our fathers in the language they bequeathed to us. And since the Enlightenment triumphed even over its worst enemies, there is no doubt that it will also strike down the Islamist hydra, provided it believes in itself and abstains from condemning the rare reformers of Islam to the darkness of reprobation.

Buruma og Garton Ash er ikke alene om å rette en slik kritikk mot Hirsi Ali. Det er hennes gjennomborende argumenter som provoserer de som gjerne søker kompromiss og tilpasning.

It is her wilful, short-fused, enthusiastic, impervious side to which Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash object, in the spirit of the inquisitors who saw devil-possessed witches in every woman too flamboyant for their tastes. Reading their utterly condescending words, it becomes clear that the war against Muslim fundamentalism will have to be won first on a symbolic level, and by women. Because they represent the pivot of the family and social order. Liberating them, guaranteeing them equal rights in all fields, is the first condition of progress in Arab Muslim societies. Incidentally, each time a Western country has wanted to codify minority rights, it is the members of these minorities, mostly women, who have risen up in protest. The generous desire to be accomodating – like that of the Canadian province of Ontario which sought to judge Muslims according to the Sharia, at least for litigations of succession and family – or the proposition of a former German constitutional judge, Jutta Limbach, to create a minority status in the German Basic Law excusing Muslim girls from gym class, is experienced as a regression, a new imprisonment (10).

Bruckner slår fast noe viktig: Opplysningstanken gjelder alle mennesker. Den er ikke forbeholdt vestlendinger. Det er et synspunkt jeg slutter meg fullt ut til. Uten en slik idealisme kan vi ikke vinne kampen. En slik erkjennelse gjør ting lettere å forstå. Uten at man skal ignorere historiske forutsetninger av den grunn.

The Enlightenment belongs to the entire human race, not just to a few privileged individuals in Europe or North America who have taken it upon themselves to kick it to bits like spoiled brats, to prevent others from having a go. Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied – as is so often the case – by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn’t guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy. The members of these minorities are put under a preservation order, protected from the fanaticism of the Enlightenment and the «calamities» of progress. Those termed «Muslims» (North Africans, Pakistanis, Africans) are prohibited from not believing, or from believing periodically, from not giving a damn about God, from creating a life for themselves far away from the Koran and the rites of the tribe.

Bruckner lander på en form for sekularisme som må være fundamentet i en moderne verden. Det er utrolig hvor mange som i norsk debatt ber om større plass for religion i det offentlige rom, fra dominikanermunker til sosialantropologer. Dette er en «Irrweg», en falsk og farlig løsning, selv om den kan høres besnærende ut. Bruckner sier: vi har slåss så hardt for de sekulære verdiene. Skal vi gi avkall på dem så lett?

Bak multikulturalismen ligger i virkeligheten et nedlatende syn på andre kulturer. De er ikke modne nok til modernitet!

Multiculturalism is a racism of the anti-racists: it chains people to their roots. Thus Job Cohen, mayor of Amsterdam and one of the mainstays of the Dutch state, demands that one accept «the conscious discrimination of women by certain groups of orthodox Muslims» on the basis that we need a «new glue» to «hold society together.» In the name of social cohesion, we are invited to give our roaring applause for the intolerance that these groups show for our laws. The coexistence of hermetic little societies is cherished, each of which follows a different norm. If we abandon a collective criterion for discriminating between just and unjust, we sabotage the very idea of national community. A French, British or Dutch citizen will be prosecuted for beating his wife, for example. But should the crime go unpunished if it turns out that the perpetrator is a Sunni or Shiite? Should his faith give him the right to transgress the law of the land? This is the glorification in others of what we have always beaten ourselves up about: outrageous protectionism, cultural narcissism and inveterate ethnocentrism!

This tolerance harbours contempt, because it assumes that certain communities are incapable of modernising. Could it be that the dissidence of British Muslims is not only a function of the retrograde rigorism of their leaders, but also stems from a vague suspicion that all the consideration show to them by the state is little more than a subtle form of disdain, basically telling them that they are just too backward for modern civilisation? Several communes in Italy are planning to reserve certain beaches for Muslim women, so they may bathe unexposed to male eyes. And within a few years the first «Islamic hospital,» complying in all points with the prescriptions of the Koran, may open in Rotterdam. Anyone would think we are reliving the days of segregation in the southern United States. Yet this segregation has the full backing of Europe’s most prominent progressives!

Islamistene lar venstresiden og andre forståsegpåere gjøre jobben for seg med å utvide grensene i det offentlige rom for religion og særbestemmelser. En gang vedtatt er de svært vanskelig å reversere. Ting som kan virke uskyldig i seg selv kan få store konsekvenser.

Yet now political leaders in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, shocked by the spread of hijab and burqa, are considering passing laws against them (12). The facts speak against the appeasers, who enjoin Europe to fit in with Islam rather than vice versa. For the more we give in to the radicalism of the bearded, the more they will harden their tone. Appeasement politics only increase their appetite. The hope that benevolence alone will disarm the brutes remains for the moment unfounded. We in France also have our Jihad collaborators, on the extreme left as on the right: at the time of the Muhammad cartoon affair last year, deputies of the UMP proposed to institute blasphemy laws that would have taken us back to the Ancien Regime.

The superiority of the French model (copied by the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal) is a result of the victory over obscurantism and events like the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. How could we tolerate in Islam that which we no longer tolerate in Catholicism? Secularism, which incidentally is written into the Gospels, is based on a few simple principles: freedom of religious affiliation, peaceful coexistence, neutrality of the public space, respect of the social contract, and the common acceptance that religious laws are not above civil ones but reside in the hearts of believers.
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Today we observe with consternation as the British government and its circle of Muslim «advisers» flirts with the credo: better fundamentalism than terrorism – unable to see that the two go hand in hand, and that given a chance, fundamentalism will forever prevent the Muslims of Europe from engaging in reform.

Yet fostering an enlightened European Islam is capital: Europe may become a model, a shining example for reform which will hopefully take place along the lines of Vatican II, opening the way to self-criticism and soul-searching. However we must be sure not to speak to the wrong audience, styling the fundamentalists as friends of tolerance, while in fact they practise dissimulation and use the left or the intelligentsia to make their moves for them, sparing themselves the challenge of secularism (15).
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It is astonishing that 62 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy. They maintain it is best to cede and retreat, and pay mere lip-service to the ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet we are a long way off the dramatic circumstances of the 1930s, when the best minds threw themselves into the arms of Berlin or Moscow in the name of race, class or the Revolution. Today the threat is more diffuse and fragmented. There is nothing that resembles the formidable peril of the Third Reich. Even the government of Mullahs in Tehran is a paper tiger that could be brought to its knees with a minimum dose of rigour. Nevertheless the preachers of panic abound. Kant defined the Enlightenment with the motto: Sapere aude – dare to know. A culture of courage is perhaps what is most lacking among today’s directors of conscience. They are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation!

Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?