Moderate Liberal Islam

rom conflict and displacement in the Horn of Africa. He was transformed into a fanatic at Feltham Young Offender Institution, West London, where Somalis are one of the largest minority groups.

Omaar contrasts Yassin’s life and beliefs with those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch Parliament. From a well-off family of dissenters, Hirsi Ali had a traditional but relatively privileged life in Somalia. To obtain Dutch citizenship, she claimed to have arrived directly from the violence and chaos of Somalia, omitting details of her family’s comfortable residences in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya.

In the Netherlands, she converted to liberal secularism. She joined Pym Fortuyn’s right-wing VVD party, flirted with neo-fascism, declared Islam to be a “barbaric” religion, and fought to stop Muslim immigration.

Through her statements, Omaar shows that Hirsi Ali acted as a handmaiden of hate and played a crucial role in the dehumanisation of [the] Muslim community. Both she and Yassin are zealots, albeit of different kinds. Why is it, Omaar asks, that we rightly condemn one form of zealotry but put the other on the pedestal?

So here we are, a couple of voices of moderate liberal Islam, and they can’t see any moral difference between a man who plans to murder infidels in the name of Allah, and a woman who’s spoken out forcefully and with great courage against the treatment of women in Islam. Indeed it’s quite clear where their sympathies lie: poor Yassin, a victim of circumstances with no real responsibility for his actions – “transformed into a fanatic at Feltham Young Offender Institution” – and Hirsi Ali, “a handmaiden of hate”, who’s played a crucial role “in the dehumanisation of [the] Muslim community”.

Hirsi Ali’s crime (apart from her “conversion” to liberal secularism, an interesting way of describing her decision to leave Islam) has been to speak the truth: something, apparently, that these moderate liberal Muslims can’t tolerate.

Update: Christopher Hope isn’t impressed with Omaar’s book:

Never have books explaining Islam been more needed. And you might have expected much from a Somali-born, Oxford-educated Muslim and leading BBC journalist, especially when his book is the second in a two-book deal for which Penguin paid around £600,000. Unfortunately, Rageh Omaar’s book on growing up a Muslim in Britain, interspersed with asides about his homeland, the Iraq war and the general Wickedness of the West, is a crushing disappointment: bland, platitudinous, muddled, lazy, factually unreliable and morally reprehensible. […]

Most shocking of all, though, is a chapter in which Omaar lumps together Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the celebrated Somalian feminist and anti-Muslim polemicist who was until recently a Dutch MP, and Yasin Hassan Omar, one of the failed July 21 suicide bombers. While both are driven by identical “bigotry and hate”, argues Omaar, Ali is protected by something called the “liberal fascism” of the West. To draw moral equivalence between a woman who has only ever used words to attack what she views as a repressive and outmoded ideology, and a man who set out to kill and maim as many innocent people as he could, is frankly a disgrace.