There's Criticism and then there's Criticism

I finally read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, Infidel. It was troubling to read, both for its content and for the author's attitudes to her native land and faith. At one level, I completely understand her incredible anger against her own upbringing. We feel the oppressiveness of our own cultures far more than do outsiders to our cultures. The disillusioned Catholic or Lutheran has far more anger against his or her own faith than would a Hindu who has only a hazy idea of what Christian guilt or original sin is all about. Similarly, we as outsiders can only shudder at Hirsi Ali's childhood experience of circumcision and of the oppressive gender relations in Saudi Arabia. But our lives are not affected by it so we have only a partial understanding of these issues.
So why then am I not wholly persuaded of the utter horror of Islam, as Hirsi Ali would have us believe? Partly, because I am familiar with the work of other reformers of Islam. The most notable being Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. Now Badshah Khan was a Pashtun, a member of the same groups of people who live in Pakistan and Afghanistan, peoples now being pursued by NATO, the Pakistani armies (with lukewarm enthusiasam) as they are now great supporters of the Taliban. But less than a hundred years ago, these same Pashtuns became the best example of nonviolent resistance to the British, their leader the Frontier Gandhi, the living example of how any faith and any people can be harnessed for the cause of good.

The Frontier Gandhi worked tirelessly against medieval Pashtun practices as the veiling of women, their segregation from larger society, their powerlessness. He also campaigned against the daily violence and the gun culture that prevailed among his own people. He endured prison and torture for all these activities. But he was so powerful an influence among the Pashtuns that the day he died, hundreds of thousands of Pashtuns crossed the Afghan border to join other Pashtuns in mourning the passing of this great man. His Khudai Khidmatgars - red-shirted volunteers - have passed into legend as the reformist service-oriented league that captured the imagination of an entire generation of freedom fighters. Why did he succeed (albeit briefly, as after independence in 1947, he became a political prisoner of the Pakistani government)? Ghaffar Khan succeeded because his criticism was rooted in love for his country and his people, not in hate of these tribal people. This, I think, is the difference between him and the Hirsi Ali's and Irshad Manji's of the Islamic world. The Frontier Gandhi often said that it was difficult to love the Pashtuns, who are a notoriously violent and abrasive people. But in order to bring about change in these societies, he insisted that one has to love them. His whole life was a testimony of the power of love that enabled him to work amongst the worlds's most "unlovable" people.

Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji might make me nod in agreement at the plight of their status under Islam. But their ill-concealed hatred of their own people make me realize why they are not female avatars of the Frontier Gandhi. They have huge audiences among the non-Muslim western audience that applauds them but they have no standing at all among their own people, ironically, the very ones that they wish to change through the story of their lives. Are there any Muslim activists who do seem authentic to me? Yes, there are. For example there is Pervez Hoodbhoy, physicist in Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, who is a voice of reason. He is unafraid to criticize fundamentalists and their government patrons. So is Asma Jehangir, human rights activist in Pakistan. Why are they both more convincing to me than Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji? It is because they both live and work in the societies that they want to change and they have at the very least affection for the people to whom they want to bring change. Affection or even respect for Somalis or Muslims in general is not something that comes across in the books authored by either Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji.