Making Sense with Sam Harris - #50 — The Borders of Tolerance

Episode Date: November 2, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about Islamism, the migrant crisis in Europe, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content.

We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan will be known to many of you, but for those who don't know her, she was born in Somalia in 1969. She was the daughter of a political opponent of the Somali dictatorship, and she lived in exile, moving to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia and then Kenya. And like 98% of Somali girls, she was subjected to FGM, euphemistically called female circumcision, and came from a quite blinkered context of Islamic oppression, and then in a few short years, really, just recapitulated the full Enlightenment project in her own life. She escaped a forced marriage. She was being sent to marry a distant cousin in Canada. And rather than do that, she

got off the plane in Frankfurt, I believe, and fled to the Netherlands, where she was granted asylum and then citizenship. And in her first years in Holland, she worked as a maid and in factories and quickly learned Dutch and then began studying at the university. And wound up getting a master's in political science, worked as a translator for Somali immigrants, and began to witness this clash of Western liberal values and Islamic culture, in this case in Holland. Then eventually became a member of the Dutch parliament, where she was tasked to work on issues of immigration, to raise awareness about violence against women in that society and honor killings and genital mutilation and all the rest. And then in 2004, she became very well known because her colleague, who she made a film with about the

oppression of women under Islam, a short film entitled Submission, her colleague Theo van Gogh was murdered. And a note promising the murder of Ayan was pinned to his chest by his killer. And the amazing thing, and you can read about this in Ayan's books, In the Caged Virgin and Infidel and Nomad and Heretic. The amazing thing about her story is that it exposed just the complete inability of Dutch society to deal with this problem and keep her safe. And Ayaan remains a person with exquisite security concerns. And most unjustly, she is a frequent target of, quote, feminists and people on the left who object to her criticism of Islam. Here you have one of the most courageous people on earth championing the rights of women and paying an extraordinary price for doing so, and she's derided by people on the left as a bigot. One of the most frustrating things in my life has been to see Ayaan get criticized by imbeciles. As unpleasant as my encounter with Ben Affleck was on real time,

my encounter with Nick Kristof of the New York Times in the green room afterwards was worse, because Nick is among the army of seemingly enlightened liberals who can't figure out that Ayan is a true feminist icon and hero. So in any case, Ayan, though she is liberal in the classical sense on almost every question, has really only been supported, for the most part, by conservatives in the U.S. as someone fighting for human rights and the rights of women. And that has been a real disservice to her message. Nevertheless, she was voted in 2005 as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. And she has started the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation, the AHA Foundation, A-H-A. A link to that can be found on my website. And she's just an extraordinary woman.

Our time was somewhat abbreviated here. We had an hour to work with, but it was great to get her voice on the podcast. And so I now bring you Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I am here with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam, thank you very much for having me. Great to talk to you. As always, it's great to have an excuse to talk to you. Yes, same here. How do you describe what you do at this point?

I describe it as it's almost like running on a treadmill and never getting off. You know, for the last 15 years, I've been trying to educate the enlightened world on Islam and the threat that it poses to women, to people like me who have chosen not to believe in God, to Christians, to Jews, even to, and probably I would say mainly to those who actually are Muslims and believe in the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. I was trying to remember how we first got in touch. I think, if I'm not mistaken, and this is the only time this has happened in my life, I think I actually sent you a piece of fan mail. You sent me a beautiful letter. Yeah. A beautiful letter and your book. And that's how we met. Yeah, that's how I found out about you. It was just after you had written and the book was The End of Faith. Yeah, that's amazing. Because now one imagines it's just impossible to reach someone

with a letter. You can occasionally get people with email. But I remember reading about you in the New York Times magazine and just being totally blown away by you and your story. And then I just, I don't know how I got the relevant address, but I remember sending you a letter and that achieving a connection. It was really, it's fantastic that it happened. Yeah, it was, you sent it to the parliament in The Hague, the Dutch parliament. I was a member then. And it's astounding to me today, how on that very same platform, those issues that,

you know, a decade ago, we were talking about the rights of women, we were talking about Islamic extremism, we were talking about terrorism, how nothing, it seems nothing has moved forward except what way back then were warnings from my side and others are now unfolding in the Netherlands and on the European continent. If you now see how women are treated, not just Muslim women in Muslim households, but how because of, you know, a lot of men coming from Africa, from South Asia, from the Middle East, how they are now treating non-Muslim women. It is no longer safe in the public square in Europe, in Germany, in Sweden, in the Netherlands. it's no longer the kind of safety

I used to take for granted. I remember coming in 1992 to the Netherlands and really marveling at how at 1 a.m. at night, friends of mine, girls, would take their bicycles and just they could go anywhere. And now that's all gone. And I will link to that article with this podcast on and learning topics that I really care about. I could take time off to do art, learn about music, literature, travel. I think I would lead the life of the average American woman or the average Dutch woman. And in fact, before I got into this, that's exactly what I was doing. I had found a job with a think tank in Amsterdam, and I had been asked by my boss to work on the issue of immigration. And I remember complaining and saying, well, are you asking me to do that

because I'm an immigrant? I'd like to do the European Union and ever closer integration. I'm fascinated by that topic. Please let me do that. And he said, you can always do that, but we only want you to do immigration now because it's a hot topic. So the answer to your question is I would be leading the life of, I think the average American woman or the average European woman, if it hadn't been for 9-11 and what happened afterwards. Do you think you'd still be in government? I mean, back then I wasn't in government. I had a healthy interest in politics, but I had no plans to become a politician. I was fascinated by ideas, and that's why I chose to work with

this think tank. It was a social democratic think tank. Sam, you have to understand that ideas such as social democracy and liberalism and all that, that was all new to me. And I had this hunger of, you know, wanting to find out more and discuss in depth how a small place like the Netherlands was able to be so wealthy and to be able to be so stable. I mean, I grew up in Somalia. I lived in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, in Kenya. To me, for a whole nation to live in peace with one another, to respect the rights of girls and women, this used to be just things that we heard about. It wasn't real for me.

And I was fascinated, and I still am. You know, how did these things come about? And now my big worry is how can we hold on to it? How can we hold on to these freedoms and to the notion of equality and the rule of law? How would you describe yourself politically at this point? I'm still a classical liberal. I think I'll always remain a classical liberal. I think I'll always remain a classical liberal. I always need to explain what that means to the average American because a liberal for an American is maybe someone on the

far left or the hard left or someone who reads the nation and believes in big government and emphasizes justice more than liberty. Politically, I would describe myself, I would say, perhaps right in the middle between the two parties. There are things about the Democratic Party that I do not like and I think are wrong, and the same applies to the Republican Party. So a classical liberal, a centrist, a libertarian. I love your work on reason. In that sense, I think I've been very stable in terms of religious sensitivity. And I'm wondering, and this also explains why you have been associated with classically conservative think tanks. Is this changing at all? Have you

made any headway on the left in the US in particular? I don't want to claim any progress that we now see on the left in admitting that Islam as a doctrine, as a civilization, as a culture, subjugates women and is a very intolerant doctrine. Where there is admission of that, I want to say that it mostly probably comes from those people on the left who are still willing to look at facts and allow the facts to change their minds. You know, with the rise of ISIS, even though there is a huge taboo in Western countries on the discussion of Islam, you can see for yourself when verses from the Holy Quran and the practices of the Prophet Muhammad are applied in practice, what that looks like,

you get the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria. And I think so many people on the left can see that now. And for those who are rational people, I think they're willing to have these facts change their minds. The internet has also helped a lot. You know, Saudi Arabia is a very closed society, and it's very difficult to see what's going on there. And people who were very happy to ignore what was going on there are now finding that it's extremely difficult, and all their mission work, their da'wah, their Islamic missionary work, that they have been propagating for at least the last four decades.

What we're now seeing is the outcome of that, and that around the world, not just in the Middle East. My continent, the country I come from, Africa, groups like Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh now, you've seen what's going on there with all the free thinkers and free bloggers being targeted and hacked to death on the streets. This is a direct consequence of the propagation of radical Sunni Islam. And people on the left can now see it. And those who want to see and learn, I think they're changing their minds, see it. And those who want to see and learn, I think they're changing their minds, and I hope that they are alarmed enough by it to know that sitting around and condemning it is not enough.

Well, you must get the frequent criticism, as I do, that, and this comes from both Muslim obscurantists and their liberal apologists, that you are promulgating the same interpretation of Islam as ISIS does, or as the extremists do, by drawing this linkage between ideology and behavior, and therefore you're giving it legitimacy. And obviously the President of the United States has taken this line that you really don't want to call ISIS or any similar group Islamic in any sense? What do you say to that? A number of things. I think the first thing is I know that these things are well intended.

I think that our President Obama, he really means well. He has good intentions when he refuses to associate Islam, the religion of, yes, is to associate Islam, the religion of, yes, one-fifth of humanity, with the outcome of that religion. Once you apply that doctrine, that's what you see. It's well intended. But what he's also expressing is a lack of respect for Muslims as reasonable individuals. The assumption that by pretending that what we see has nothing to do with Islam is an assumption. I hear it very, I'm trying to choose my words as carefully as I can. If you think that a human being who happens to be Muslim lacks reason, that a human being who happens to be Muslim lacks reason, if you think that that human being will lash out in violence, if you think of that human being as a child not mature enough to handle ideas, then you're going to talk to that human being and about that

human being in a way, I would say in exactly the same way that our president and many other Western leaders talk to and talk about Muslims. Here's where the world is upside down. You're doing all of this because you want to stimulate respect from the non-Islamic public for Muslims and not to be prejudiced against them. But how can you ever achieve that when you refuse to allow them onto this platform of reason? Because human beings, I believe, change their minds not because of the gun, not because of violence, but through persuasion.

And if you want to persuade most Muslims to reform their religion or to give up at least those parts, such as jihad and sharia, that are violent and oppressive, you just have to be explicit about what this doctrine says. Not doing so means you're simply discriminating against them. You don't take them. It's the prejudice of law expectations. Yeah. And ironically, you're doing absolutely nothing to come to the aid of the most vulnerable people in those communities. So you're not empowering reformers and women and everyone else who can't really find their voice because there's no safe context in which to do it. Yeah, it's incredibly frustrating to not have this talked about.

It's frustrating because here I am trying to say, okay, I got out of a context where my rights were compromised and I felt that I was not in control of my life. and I felt that I was not in control of my life. And in the West, in the Netherlands, and here in the U.S., I have found a life where I am in control of my destiny. Now, I find it my duty, as you do, and I think as many, many people here do, that you can't just turn away from the others, the other girls and women who are in that context. But how on earth can I explain the subjugation that they're submitted to, the child marriages,

the forced marriages, the honor killings, without talking about the religion, the doctrine, the culture that has brought that forth? On that point, how do you address the rights of women, say, in majority Muslim countries, and even in the Muslim community in the West, when women themselves are often the oppressors, or at least collaborating in oppression? And how do you deal with someone like Dalia Mujahid, who just went on The Daily Show and celebrated the hijab as a sign of female empowerment and got absolutely no pushback. This has to be fairly bewildering. I mean, it is fairly bewildering for the liberal non-Muslim who looks at this and says, well, what is the reality here? We're being told by women in veils that this is their choice and that it is a sign of, you know, colonialist arrogance to judge that anyone wearing the veil, whether it's to take to public platforms, to discuss it and to air

what exactly it means to be forced to wear the veil. I've written about this a lot and I discuss it. And that's, unfortunately, again, through the internet, I have found a connection with women who choose not to wear the veil. They write to me, they call me, they talk to me. There's the AHA Foundation. And they explain, they relate to my experience. And they explain to me that they are not like Dalia Mugahid, that all these women who are covering themselves from head to toe, and who are saying that they speak for Muslim women, don't really speak for them. That if they didn't fear for their lives, if they didn't fear that they would be ostracized

in their own communities or that their parents would beat them up, lock them up, take away whatever little rights that they have, they would have spoken out to themselves if they had these platforms. What would you say to Dahlia? Have you ever addressed Dahlia or someone like her in a public platform where there's video that I could point people to? When I just published Heretic, the last book, I was with her on a discussion on MPR. And I think the way MPR did it, they first interviewed her and then they interviewed me. Very early on when I came to the US in 2006, 2007, I was at the Brookings Institute

and she and other women were there defending the hijab, defending the position of women and the status of women in Islam and saying that all the excesses that we see are exaggerated and committed by a fringe who are not truly Islamic. So I have had discussions with her, but I've come to the conclusion that I don't need to convince Dalia Mugahid to change her mind. I need to get as many people as possible to see for themselves what is done to women in the name of Islam. I need to remind them that that treatment of women is not going to stay only within Muslim households and Muslim countries when the world is globalizing as it is. And everything I've been saying so far, we see it now in Europe. There are gangs of Muslim men in Sweden, in Germany, in Britain,

who are singling out non-Muslim women, sometimes blonde women only. Now tell me how, I know that's misogynistic, but how is that not racist? How is it not racist to organize, for men to organize themselves as gangs and only target one group of women based on their skin color and their hair color? And you say target for sexual abuse, rape? For sexual abuse, yeah. Do you have a sense that this is being fairly reported on in Europe? Or is there a kind of politically correct suppression of this news? Because in the initial wave with the Cologne catastrophe, there were reports that this was actually being suppressed.

And people were, I mean, there was even this extreme case of someone in, I believe it was the German government, some woman in the German government had herself been raped by three migrants. And when she reported it to the police, she initially lied about their identities because she didn't want to give further cause for racism in her culture. So she said that three German men had raped her. To speak honestly about the problem, there's this social impediment of an understandable one, especially in a place like Germany, that you don't want to give voice to any kind of global animus toward immigrants or toward any one group of people. What's the level of discussion there? I mean, I'm following events there, especially in Germany right now.

And what I see is that there is on the side of the establishment. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.