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| Front of dust jacket |
Our intellectual omnivore's latest collection could be his last (he's dying of esophageal cancer [note: Hitchens has insisted that he's living with it, not dying of it]). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays, and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow, and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises."Ridiculously wide range" is admiringly ironic, of course. The first two essays I read were about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ezra Pound.
We can be fairly sure that the "original intent" is not in any way pacifistic, because immediately after he breaks the original tablets in a fit of rage, Moses summons the Levite faction and says (Exodus 32:27-28):Hitchens concludes the essay with a quiet statement of some ethical principles for today:
Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.The whole book of Exodus is...littered with other fierce orders to slay people for numberless minor offenses (including violations of the Sabbath) and also includes the sinister, ominous verse "Thou shalt not suffer [permit] [Hitchens's comment] a witch to live," which was taken as a divine instruction by Christians until relatively recently in human history. Some work is obviously needed here: What is a first-degree or third-degree killing and what isn't? Distinguishing killing from murder is not a job easily left to mortals: What are we to do if God himself can't tell the difference? [p. 417]
It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not." But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihad-ists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form. [pp. 421-422]Here endeth the reading for today.
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| Christopher Hitchens |
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| Jonathan Franzen |
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| Antonio R. Damasio |
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| Sam Harris |
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| Jonathan Safran Foer |
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| Stieg Larsson |
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| Richard Dawkins |
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| Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
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| John Le Carré |
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| Philip Roth |
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| Martin Cruz Smith |
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| Daniel C. Dennett |
The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation was set up in 20081 as a charitable organization to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West, especially in the United States, against militant2 Islam and harmful tribal customs. Its aim is to investigate, inform, and influence against several types of crimes against women, including the denial of education for girls, genital mutilation, forced marriage, honor violence, and restrictions on girls' freedom of movement._______________
The AHA Foundation seeks to raise awareness in America that some of these violent practices against women are increasingly carried out in the United States. The foundation also exists to provide girls and women in distress with information and assistance, by creating a database of people and institutions qualified to deal with cases of maltreatment and abuse. [p. 275]
Sahra [her half-sister who has lived in England for years but still wears "the jilbab, a long black robe that covers your hair and all your body past your ankles and wrists, but not your face"] may choose to enroll Sagal in a Muslim school, where she will be isolated from the values that underlie success in Britain. Most of her fellow students will come from homes where English is a second language. Some of her teachers will have been selected more for their piety than their ability as educators, others for their willingness to cooperate with the norms of the Muslim school. Some teachers will have applied out of a strong sense of idealism; others will have been motivated by a combination of some or all of these factors. Education will be by rote learning and submission, not inquiry and an open mind. [emphasis mine]
The uncritical Muslim attitude toward the Quran urgently needs to change, for it is a direct threat to world peace. Today 1.57 billion people identify themselves as Muslims. Although they certainly have 1.57 billion different minds, they share a dominant cultural trend: the Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad. A nebula of movements with al Qaeda-like approaches to Islamic precepts has enmeshed itself in small and large ways into many parts of Muslim community life, including in the West. They spread a creed of violence, mobilizing people on the basis that their identity, which rests in Islam, is under attack. [p. 205]While I grant that the West has provoked the Islamic world in a number a ways, including support for the creation of Israel ("seen in the Muslim world as theft and arrogance," according to my friend Ken—himself culturally a Jew), and also grant that, "when they are ready to discuss their grievances at a political forum, we need to listen and be fair" (as Ken recommends), we must not overlook the menace of the jihadist worldview itself, of which Hirsi Ali paints a much more detailed, starker picture in her 2006 book, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.
Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn't be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion—which are to be a better and more generous person—without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.The point, though, is that, however much we might want more, we are not going to get it. An individual's project in facing la condition humain is as it has always been: Deal with it.
After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heartland often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim version, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother's angels and djins.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. [pp. 479-480]
In March 2005, Time magazine informed me that I would be named one of its one hundred "most influential people in the world today." I went straight out to buy a copy of the magazine, of course, but I was weeks early; that issue wouldn't come out until mid-April. So the magazine I bought wasn't about me, it was about poverty in Africa. The woman on the cover was young and thin, with three small children. She was wrapped in the same kind of cloth my grandmother used to wear, and the look in her eyes was hopeless.And I, not nearly so strong as this valiant young woman (about my daughter's age), feel that I need to read something light (maybe a John D. MacDonald "Travis McGee") for a respite before I read her sequel, this year's Nomad, which we are warned by one reviewer might read less "as a coming-to-America emotional journey" than "as an anti-Islamic screed."
It threw me back to Somalia, to Kenya, to poverty and disease and fear. I thought about the woman in that photograph, and about the millions of women who must live as she does. Time had just named me to their category, "Leaders and Revolutionaries." What do you do with a responsibility like that?
...
Sister Aziza used to warn us of the decadence of the West: the corrupt, licentious, perverted, idolatrous, money-grubbing, soulless countries of Europe. But to me, there is far worse moral corruption in Islamic countries. In those societies, cruelty is implacable and inequality is the law of the land. Dissidents are tortured. Women are policed both by the state and by their families to whom the state gives the power to rule their lives.
In the past fifty years the Muslim world has been catapulted into modernity. From my grandmother to me is a journey of just two generations, but the reality of that voyage is millennial. Even today you can take a truck across the border into Somalia and find you have gone back thousands of years in time.
People adapt. People who never sat on chairs before can learn to drive cars and operate complex machinery; they master these skills very quickly. Similarly, Muslims don't have to take six hundred years to go through a reformation in the way they think about equality and individual rights.
When I approached Theo [the Dutch film-maker who was murdered for his involvement in the production of the short film exposing the treatment of Muslim women] to help me make Submission, I had three messages to get across. First, men, and even women, may look up and speak to Allah: it is possible for believers to have a dialogue with God and look closely at Him. Second, the rigid interpretation of the Quran in Islam today causes intolerable misery for women. Through globalization, more and more people who hold these ideas have traveled to Europe with the women they own and brutalize, and it is no longer possible for Europeans and other Westerners to pretend that severe violations of human rights occur only far away. The third message is the film's final phrase: "I may no longer submit." It is possible to free oneself—to adapt one's faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.
I am told that Submission is too aggressive a film. Its criticism of Islam is apparently too painful for Muslims to bear. Tell me, how much more painful is it to be these women, trapped in that cage? [pp. 349-350]
Ellen and I started talking about love, courtship, and virginity. To me, as a Somali, being a virgin meant being excised, physically sewn shut. I had already figured out that Dutch people didn't do that [!], so I asked, "How will your husband find out whether you're a virgin or not? Isn't there a test?"The retired Secret Service agent and I wondered together whether America's own secular, democratic culture makes it difficult for Americans not to be foolishly optimistic that we can walk into places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and do anything constructive, even in the short run. He opined that, five years from now, it would be about the same in Afghanistan as it is today.
Ellen replied, "Of course not. He'll know I'm a virgin because I say I am." My question seemed weird to her, so she asked, "You have a test?" I told her: we are cut, and sewn shut, so the skin is closed, and when a man penetrates you there is blood. There can be no pretending.
Ellen and Hanneke were disgusted, appalled. They asked, "And this happened to you?" Yasmin and I both said yes, and Yasmin, who was a snob, added, "If you're not cut, you're not pure, are you?" Very innocently, with her big blue eyes wide, Ellen asked, "Pure from what?"
Pure from what. Pure from what, exactly? I thought about it for a long time, and realized I had no answer. It wasn't completely because of Islam that we were cut: not all Muslim women are excised. But in Somalia and the other Muslim countries, it was clear that the Islamic culture of virginity encouraged it. I knew of no fatwa denouncing female genital mutilation; on the contrary, suppressing the sexuality of women was a big theme with imams. Boqol Sawm and the other ma'alims [Qur'an teachers] had always preached endlessly about how women should become aware of their sexual powers; they must cover themselves and stay indoors. They went into minute detail about this, yet somehow they never got around to saying that it is wrong to cut girls and sew them up.
What were we being kept pure from? Somebody owned us. What was between my legs was not mine to give. I was branded.
I found I had no answer for Ellen. I just gaped at her and said, "It's our tradition." And because Ellen truly was a believer [a Christian], she said, "But you believe God created you, don't you?" I said yes, of course. Ellen said, "So the way God made us is the way God wants us to be. Why shouldn't we stay like that? Why does your culture feel we should improve on God's work? Isn't that blasphemy?" I stared at her. There really seemed to be something to what Ellen was saying.
Ellen said Dutch women were never circumcised, and neither were Dutch men. Yasmin curled up her face in disgust at that. The minute we left, Yasmin started rubbing her skin; when she got home she washed for hours. "I sat in their house and ate off their plates, and they are not purified!" Yasmin said. "She is filthy. This whole community is filthy."
I thought about it. Ellen wasn't filthy, and neither was Holland. In fact, it was a lot cleaner than Somalia or anywhere else I had lived. I couldn't understand how Yasmin could perceive Holland as evil, even though all around us were Dutch people treating us with kindness and hospitality. I was beginning to see that the Dutch value system was more consistent, more honest, and gave people more happiness than the one with which we had been brought up. Unfortunately, many of these Dutch ideas seemed not to be congruent with Islam.
I replied, "Yasmin, you know what? You'd better get used to it. Because your teacher in school is not circumcised, the person cooking your lunch is not circumcised. If you want to remain completely pure here you will have to lock yourself away and never have any contact with a white person."
But Yasmin said, "There is a difference, and that is why the Quran tells us never to make unbelievers our friends." [pp. 216-217]
koan \KOH-ahn\, noun:Maybe the only way I'm going to essay my announced analogy between Sudoku and religion is to exploit the stress of just throwing caution to the wind and publicly meditate the question. It'll either be illuminating, or not.
A nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded, the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating.
Koan is Japanese, ko "public" and -an, "matter for thought." It enters English through Zen Buddhism before achieving a more general sense.
What is puzzling about the analogy between Sudoku puzzling and puzzling over religion?At any rate, after my announcement eight days ago, the idea of an "elaborate analogy" between Sudoku and religion has at times seemed elusive. (Maybe that's why I've been procrastinating.)
5 | 9| 1[Let's stipulate that each of the nine 9-cell squares is a quadrant, in its general sense of "major part," even when there are not four major parts.] Without looking at any other part of the board, you can see that the middle cell in the third quadrant must contain a 5, because each of the three quadrants must contain a 5, but each row can have only one, and there's nowhere else for the 5 to go but in the middle row of the third quadrant:
7 6| | 9 8
9 | 8 5 | 2
5 | 9| 1Ticking off the "gimmes" in a puzzle is like being able to immediately dismiss religious statements that are obviously wishful and without substance. "I prayed that we'd land safely." Praying or not praying will have no effect on the landing. "Everything happens according to God's plan." There is no such plan.
7 6| | 9 5 8
9 | 8 5 | 2
| 3| 9Either of two cells (x) could host it:
| 2 | 8
6 8 | | 3
| x x 3| 9...until we look at the quadrant immediately below it:
| 2 | 8
6 8 | | 3
- - -| 9| - - -The 8 in the first column of that quadrant forces the 8 in the quadrant above into the second column:
- - -| | - - -
- - -| 8 5 | - - -
| 8 3| 9Sudoku strategy must widen itself in that way to account for constraints at all levels.
| 2 | 8
6 8 | | 3
first contact with Somali girls from Somalia. One of these girls was Jawahir, who was quick, pretty, rather excitable. She was about twenty-five and had come to Nairobi to marry one of Farah Gouré's truck drivers. She was waiting at Farah Gouré's place for her husband-to-be to return to Nairobi from a five-month trip through southern Africa. Ali was a dependable employee, and Fadumo [Farah Gouré's wife] needed Jawahir to feel happy in Nairobi; if Jawahir were miserable she might persuade Ali to return to Somalia with her. So Fadumo asked me to show Jawahir around town and keep her company.
...Jawahir didn't read books—she was illiterate—but she was really amusing.
A whole group of us met for long, giggly girls' conversations in the afternoons, while the older people napped with the children. The talk centered on Jawahir's impending marriage and the various prospects for other people's marriages. And of course we talked about circumcision. All these girls knew they would be married soon; it was inevitable that we talk about our excisions. This was what we had been sewn up for. [emphasis mine]
The talk was mostly boasting. All the girls said how tightly closed they were; this made them even more pure, doubly virginal. Jawahir was particularly proud of her circumcision. She used to say, "See the palm of your hand? I am like that. Flat. Closed."
One afternoon, gossiping about another girl, Jawahir said, "If you're walking past the toilet when she's in there, you can hear that she isn't a virgin. She doesn't drip. She pees loudly, like a man."
We discussed our periods, too, the essence of what made us filthy and unworthy of prayer. When we were menstruating, we weren't allowed even to pray or to touch the Quran. All the girls felt guilty for bleeding every month. It was proof that we were less worthy than men.
We never actually talked about sex itself, the act that would take place on the marriage night, the reason why we had been sewn.
...On other afternoons Jawahir used to ask me to read to her out loud from the books I carried everywhere...all of them had sex scenes. I would read them to her, and she would sniff and say, "It's not like that for Muslims. We are pure."
Jawahir's wedding took place at Farah Gouré's house....
...For a week after the wedding Ma wouldn't let me go to see Jawahir: she said it wouldn't be proper. So it wasn't until the next weekend that I visited her. Jawahir sat on the sofa, gingerly shifting her weight from one side of her bottom to the other. Finally I asked her what it had been like, having sex.
She evaded the question. I was holding one of Halwa's Harlequin paperbacks and she grabbed it and asked, "What is this filthy book you're reading?" I said, "Come on, you know all about it now, tell me what it's like." Jawahir said, "Not until you read this book to me."
It was a mild enough book, about a man, a woman, a doomed romance, one or two sexy bits. But when the man and woman kissed, he put his hand on the woman's breast, and he then put his mouth to her nipple. Jawahir was horrified. "These Christians are filthy!" she squeaked. "This is forbidden! For Muslims it's not like that at all!"
Now Jawahir really had to tell me what sex was like. She said it was awful. After the wedding ceremony, they went into the bedroom of the flat that Ali had rented for them. Ali turned off the lights. Jawahir lay down on the bed, fully dressed. He groped under her dress, opened her legs, took off her underpants, and tried to push his penis inside her. He didn't cut her with a knife, just with his penis. It took a long time, and hurt. This resembled the stories that Sahra had told me. [Sahra had had to be taken to a hospital to be prepared for her own husband, who had been unable to rend her scar tissue.]
Every night it was almost as painful, and always the same: Ali would push inside, move up and down inside her, and then ejaculate. That was it. Then he would stand up and take a shower to purify himself; she would get up and shower, also to purify herself, and apply Dettol to the parts that were bleeding. That was Jawahir's sex life.
...
I already knew what Sister Aziza [Ayaan's Qur'an teacher] would say about sex and marriage. She counseled many young married couples. Women often told her how horrible it was for them to have sex. Sister Aziza used to respond that they were complaining only because they had read licentious, un-Islamic descriptions of sexual experiences in Western books. We Muslim women were not to copy the behavior of unbelievers. We shouldn't dress like them, or make love like them, or behave like them in any way. We should not read their books, for they would lead us off the straight, true path of Allah.
A woman couldn't break a marriage because it was awful or boring: that was utterly forbidden, and the way of Satan. "If your husband hurts you," Sister Aziza would tell these women, "you must tell him that, and ask him to do it differently. If you cooperate it will always be less painful. And if he's not hurting you, then count yourself among the lucky ones." [pp. 111-113]
I found these excerpts on the web and quote them for convenience. I've read passages far more revealing (especially of Arab Muslims, and Saudi Arabians in particular). (Look at a map to see how close her native Somalia is to Saudia Arabia.)
- The man, who was probably an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan, picked up a pair of scissors. With the other hand, he caught hold of the place between my legs and started tweaking it, like Grandma milking a goat. "There it is, the kintir," one of the women said. Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement. "It's just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, it's almost finished." When the sewing was finished, he cut the thread off with his teeth.
- This was Saudi Arabia, where Islam originated, governed strictly according to the scriptures and example of the Prophet Muhammad. And by law, all women in Saudi Arabia must be in the care of a man. My mother argued loudly with the Saudi immigration official, but he merely repeated in an ever louder voice that she could not leave the airport without a man in charge.
- We had already learned part of the Quran by heart in Mogadishu, although of course we had never understood more than a word or two of it, because it was in Arabic. But the teacher in Mecca said we recited it disrespectfully: we raced it, to show off. So now we had to learn it all by heart again, but this time with reverent pauses. We still didn't understand more than the bare gist of it. Apparently, understanding wasn't the point.
- In Saudi Arabia, everything bad was the fault of the Jews. When the air conditioner broke or suddenly the tap stopped running, the Saudi women next door used to say the Jews did it. The children next door were taught to pray for the health of their parents and the destruction of the Jews. Later, when we went to school, our teachers lamented at length all the evil things Jews had done and planned to do against Muslims. When they were gossiping, the women next door used to say, "She's ugly, she's disobedient, she's a whore—she's sleeping with a Jew." Jews were like djinns, I decided. I had never met a Jew. (Neither had these Saudis.)
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969 [the same year as my daughter], Ayaan Hirsi Ali gained international recognition as the controversial member of Dutch Parliament who wrote a short film attacking Islam, called Submission Part 1 (can be seen on YouTube).In the film, images of bare women’s limbs are scrawled with verses of the Qu'ran which—Ali has said—denigrate and subordinate women. As a result of the film, its director, Theo van Gogh was killed in cold blood on the streets of Amsterdam, a note jabbed into his chest threatening Ms. Ali (and the United States to boot) with a fate like van Gogh’s. Van Gogh’s last words were, “Can’t we talk about this?” After the incident, Ms. Ali spent several months virtually kidnapped by her security team.
