What's wrong with islam?

Sunday, August 21, 2005

When you meet her on a pleasant Friday evening in Toronto, it's hard to believe that certain people want Ayaan Hirsi Ali dead. She is a delicately built woman with an unfailingly courteous manner. But even here, on a visit to one of the world's safest cities, she's surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards in body armour. To certain Muslims, this beautiful, fearless black woman is the Salman Rushdie of our times. To them, she is a blasphemer, an apostate, a menace to the faith — and it would be an honour to kill her.

"I am here because I think the rights of Muslim women in the West are threatened," she says. The threat comes from two directions. One is a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which declares that women must submit to both God and men. The other is the Western multiculturalist trap, which declares that group rights are more important than individual rights, and that all cultures are equal.

It is this trap that Europe's secular democracies find themselves in today. And it is this trap that has led Ontario to open the door to private sharia (Islamic law) courts, which can now be used to settle family disputes for any Muslims who want to use them.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, 35, is a Dutch politician who has become famous for her fight against Islam's oppression of women. She says Ontario's decision to allow sharia courts is a terrible precedent and a disaster for Muslim women. "Canadian law," she says, "is now offering some Canadian men the opportunity to oppress us." She believes in the strict separation of religion and state. She believes that the religious law of any faith — Muslim, Christian, Jewish — invariably oppresses women. And she believes that the promised safeguards, such as the right to appeal any decision to a secular court, are a load of hooey for women who live, as many Muslim women do, in a closed society. "What is freedom of choice when you depend on your family and clan for everything?"