Infidel - 'the positions of the two women “can’t possibly be reconciled" '

From: Muslim Rebel Sisters: At Odds With Islam and Each Other

 

No element more thoroughly informs the work of both women than feminism; its influence on their thinking can hardly be overstated, and in this sense they might be considered crown jewels in the history of the modern women's movement. Yet because they are risking their lives for their beliefs — constantly, every day — they may have more in common with antitotalitarian dissidents like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn than with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. As feminists, Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji are demanding more than equality; they are very self-consciously challenging the foundations of an entire way of life.

"The most important explanation for the mental and material backlog we Muslims find ourselves in," Ms. Hirsi Ali has said, "should probably be sought in the sexual morality that we were force-fed from birth." Her first book, a collection of essays, was entitled "The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam." In the Netherlands, she devoted herself to helping Muslim women, in her words, "develop the vocabulary of resistance," and she continues the fight from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she is a resident fellow.

Ms. Manji, too, sees feminism as the linchpin for Islamic reform. "Empowering women," she says, "is the way to awaken the Muslim world." But she is not only a committed feminist (bad enough in the eyes of Muslim conservatives). She is also an open lesbian — a rebel twice over. The difference between them "really is between those outside of a faith and those still within it," says Ms. Manji's friend the writer Andrew Sullivan. "Hirsi Ali has abandoned faith for atheism. Irshad has taken the harder path, I believe."

The two women have known each other for four years, since Ms. Hirsi Ali interviewed Ms. Manji for a Dutch newspaper, and they discussed their continuing relationship in e-mail interviews. They immediately bonded — understandably enough. "I could not believe she was not an atheist," Ms. Hirsi Ali says, "and she could not believe that I had become one." When Time magazine named Ms. Hirsi Ali one of its "100 most influential people" for 2005, it was Ms. Manji who wrote the comment on her. Ms. Manji admires Ms. Hirsi Ali's determination to speak truth to power, saying that "Ayaan's defiant distrust of Muslim authorities can help generate debates that move us closer to honesty."

But, inevitably, the differences between them create tensions since, in their eyes, what is at stake is nothing less than the future of Islam.