Hirsi Ali: «Daughter of the Enlightenment»

Apesar de o New York Times electrónico ser um serviço pago, a entrevista de Christopher Caldwell a Aysan Hirsi Ali circula por vários fóruns. Pode ser encontrada, na íntegra, ali. Seguem alguns excertos.

«Hirsi Ali was an obedient, serious girl. Her religious observance drifted between the devout and the fanatical. But this did not stop her growing realization that there was less scope for women than for men in her world, or her sense that Islam was to blame for it. A crisis came in 1992, when her father contracted her in marriage to a Somali-Canadian cousin she did not know. After a wedding ceremony in Kenya, she followed him on a flight to Canada. During a layover in Germany, scheduled for the completion of her immigration paperwork, she decided to bolt -- an idea that did not occur to her, she says, until she arrived in Europe.

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On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, Hirsi Ali was in her second week of work as a researcher at the think tank of the center-left Labor Party, a job she'd sought after a short corporate stint peddling drugs to doctors for GlaxoSmithKline. Although she now describes herself as an atheist (''I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter''), she had not at that point wholly lost her faith. The water-cooler talk that week was converging on agreement that it was simplistic to blame the attacks on Islam. Hirsi Ali begged to differ. She had been haunted by the letter left by the hijacker Mohamed Atta, in which he reminded his accomplices to pray for martyrdom. ''If I were a male under the same circumstances,'' she says, ''I could have been there. It was exactly what I used to believe.''

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She took the floor at a conference in an Amsterdam political club to say that what Islam needed was not understanding from others but its own Voltaire.

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''Submission Part 1'' the 11-minute film that Hirsi Ali conceived and wrote and that van Gogh directed, was shown on television soon thereafter. It presented four fictional episodes. All involved violence against women and the Koranic verses that had been, or could be, used to justify it. These verses were written on the skin of the actresses' seminaked bodies.

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Her defenders use the same term to praise her that detractors use to sneer at her: she is a ''model immigrant.''

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Until recently, the Netherlands adhered to a national policy cumbersomely known as ''integration with maintenance of one's own identity.'' It arose partly out of unspoken guilt over the country's failure to save many Jews under German occupation during World War II and partly out of a modish multiculturalism. But letting ethnic communities go their own way also had a long history in the Netherlands. The ''Pacification'' of 1917 formalized a system in which different groups -- Catholics, Protestants, secular citizens and others -- lived in separate institutional universes, or ''pillars.'' A Catholic would typically attend a Catholic school, read a Catholic newspaper, join a Catholic trade union and social club and vote for a Catholic political party.

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In 2002, Bolkestein's VVD persuaded Hirsi Ali to leave her Labor policy group to take a place on the VVD's parliamentary list for the next election. Some on the left greeted her departure with relief -- Labor usually competes with two other left parties for Muslim votes, and activists had threatened to withdraw support for Labor when Hirsi Ali began speaking out. Still, it is a natural question whether the VVD -- traditionally a businessmen's party -- is the right place for a Third World feminist.

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Until the arrival of Hirsi Ali, Dutch feminists tended to duck when there appeared to be a conflict between the rights of women and the culture of immigrants.

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''I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant,'' she says, ''while under their noses women are living like slaves.''

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Hirsi Ali claims a direct line of intellectual inheritance from the Dutch Enlightenment (...) She calls Spinoza her biggest Western inspiration.

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