The subtitle isn't adventitious - the central strand in this book is a call for the insights of the Enlightenment, and most particularly the primacy it accords to reason, to be brought to bear on Muslim thought and society, both from within and without. Essentially, it's polemic - ferocious and engaged, if not all that sophisticated - in that cause, wedded to an uncompromising argument for an integrationist approach in Western societies and a particular concern for the position of Muslim women, illustrated with often horrifying anecdotes of female mutilation and oppression.
Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, but now resides in the Netherlands, where she's a member of the national parliament and (though I'm not entirely sure about this) no longer identifies as a Muslim; she had also collaborated with Theo Van Gogh on a film before he was infamously shot and killed on the street by Islamic extremists. I don't for a second doubt that she knows that of which she writes, but I was nonetheless nagged by a couple of misgivings while I was reading The Caged Virgin.
The first was that, despite the vast disparity between her background and experiences, and mine, Hirsi Ali is, for many relevant purposes, essentially the same as me - by which I mean that she has absorbed and internalised the basic values of the West and Western society. One may well argue that these are in some meaningful way the 'best' set of values now or historically available to us - I suspect she would argue this, and I'm sure from reading this book of the scorn she reserves for 'moral relativists' (unsurprisingly, a term she doesn't clearly define or grapple with, but what she means by it is clear enough from the context) - but nonetheless I felt that, as a result of that shared intellectual heritage, I wasn't being pushed enough to accept the basic premises of the book; what I really need to read is an intelligent defence of a contrary position to hers, written by someone steeped in Muslim values and not taking Western assumptions as a starting point. (Forgive the waving around of broad-brush ideas like 'Western values' here - there's nothing to be done about it at this high level, and besides, they're useful shorthand at this high level, we all know it.)
My second cavil is equally fundamental, and builds somewhat on the first (if pulling me in a slightly different direction, and it's this: Hirsi Ali suggests that an important part of the solution is interventionist legislative (+ executive + societal) action to integrate Muslims into the Western societies in which they live - suggesting, for example, compulsory regular checks of all Muslim girls to ensure that they haven't been subject to genital mutilation. At risk of falling into that cultural relativism which Hirsi Ali so abhors (although, let's be honest, I'm not really afraid of this, for reasons already implied above - there are far more sophisticated formulations of the position than those which she seems to assume), the problems with this kind of approach, applied uncritically, are too many and too obvious to bear listing (the cultural violence which it would entail, affecting not only 'culture' but also the individuals implicated in and effected by it to their various extents, not to mention the absolutist streak running through it). I'd be prepared to entertain proposals in this vein, but to me that flavour here is too insensitive and 'slash and burn', as heinous as the prevailing situation may be. There are no easy answers, but that goes both ways - and sometimes the best option of a bad lot isn't the one which seems immediately to move most swiftly to the end result we want.
(a gift from Laura of a while ago)
