Ali, Atheism And Islam

"Although she has the credibility of a witness as well as the moral standing of a victim, Hirsi Ali remains a bystander civilian in the great war of our times, whose broadest front is in the global South. That is, she proclaims herself to be an atheist.

Millions of Muslims reportedly convert to Christianity each year, mainly in Africa. Islam is stagnant in Asia while tens of millions become Christian. Yet all the Muslim apostates whose voices we hear are atheists - not only Hirsi Ali, but also Salman Rushdie, the celebrated author of The Satanic Verses, the Syrian poet Adonis, and the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq, author of Why I am not a Muslim and several compendia of Koranic criticism. Why do Muslim apostates gravitate towards atheism?

That is not true of other religions. Many Jewish converts achieved prominence in 20th-century Christianity - for example, the recently deceased Cardinal Danielou of Paris, the martyred Carmelite nun Edith Stein (now canonized), and the great Protestant theologian Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy.

But the name of no prominent Muslim convert to Christianity (much less to Judaism) comes to mind. It is easy to change what we think, but very hard to change how we think. Contrary to superficial impressions, Islam is much closer in character to atheism than to Christianity or Judaism."Spengler continues: "The implication that the West will crush Islam by force [as Ms. Hirsi Ali desires] borders on the absurd. Western armies, to be sure, could make short work of the military forces of any Muslim country, but what would they do then?


Would they order Muslims to abandon their spiritual life in favor of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the heroes of Hirsi Ali? The West cannot stop Muslims from burning in effigy the editors of a Danish newspaper in their own countries. Secular liberalism, the official ideology of almost all the nations of Western Europe, offers hedonism, sexual license, anomie, demoralization and gradual depopulation. Muslims do not want this. In Africa, Christian missionaries go to Muslims and offer them God's love and the hope of eternal life. But I am aware of no Christian missionaries active in the Muslim banlieue (outskirts) of the Paris suburbs or the Turkish quarters of Berlin. By contrast, there is indeed a war with Islam, and it is being won in parts of the world where Christians wage it on spiritual grounds. No Christian army has had to march in its support. Europe, meanwhile, is losing ground to Islam because it declines to fight. Hirsi Ali, to be sure, sympathizes with Judaism and Christianity, and allows that the two sister religions might be instrumental in countering Islam - but only because they are compatible with secular liberalism.....The pressing question is why Muslim apostates cling to the secular liberalism that has failed so thoroughly in Western Europe.


The trouble is that old habits of mind die slowly. That is not only true of Muslims. The sort of Eastern European Jews who hailed the false messiahs of the 17th century, for example, were attracted to the messianism of Karl Marx. Marxist intellectuals found it easy to convert to the so-called neo-Thomism colored by the Enlightenment rationalism of Francisco Suarez. Bolshevik brawlers in Germany in the 1930s often crossed the line from Red to Brown. And Muslims find it easier to be atheists than to be Christians or Jews."And more: "On the contrary, the absolute transcendence of Allah in the physical world is the cognate of his despotic character as a spiritual ruler, who demands submission and service from his creatures.

The Judeo-Christian God loves his creatures and as an act of love makes them free. Humankind only can be free if nature is rational, that is, if God places self-appointed limits on his own sphere of action. In a world ordered by natural law, humankind through its faculty of reason can learn these laws and act freely. In the alternative case, the absolute freedom of Allah crowds out all human freedom of action, leaving nothing but the tyranny of caprice and fate. The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.

Hirsi Ali has my unqualified admiration. The courage which guided her journey from Somalia to the Netherlands still prompts her to warn of the dangers before the West at great risk to her own life. I have a similar admiration for Orhan Pamuk, now in virtual exile from his native Turkey, and Rushdie, who remains in danger of a Muslim death warrant, and other Muslim apostates who refuse to be intimidated. Courage, Winston Churchill said, is the first of the virtues, for without it, one does not have the opportunity to exercise the others. Yet it is not the only virtue, and I hope that Hirsi Ali's journey takes her further, beyond atheism."