Reason and Religion: a Life-Time Curriculum

WILNA MEIJER

REASON AND RELIGION: A LIFE-TIME CURRICULUM

INTRODUCTION I retrospect, I can see how Protestant in nature my explicit farewell to the religion of my forefathers was: it was itself actually a confession

In her mid-thirties, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote the autobiography, Mijn vrijheid (2006). The title refers to the individual freedom she gained vis-à-vis the traditional Islamic background of her youth. The contrast between, on the one hand, her life at that time as an, intellectually as well as politically very important person in Dutch public life, and, on the other, the life of her grandmother, a Muslim woman in rather primitive circumstances in Africa, is indeed massive. The autobiography ends at the point that her time in the Netherlands is drawing to a dramatic close. Death threats have followed her short movie Submission, a fierce criticism of the position of women in Muslim communities, that she presented on Dutch television in the summer of 2004. In November that year, Theo van Gogh, producer of the movie, was in actual fact murdered, and Hirsi Ali is forced to go into hiding. She is soon to decide to move to the US where, once more, her career goes uphill in no time. I admired Hirsi Ali – for her courage, her independence, her intellectual vigour, her brilliant public performance, her impeccable Dutch, for the way in which she, after arriving at the age of 23 in the Netherlands, lived the far from easy life of a migrant and reached in about 10 years, with hard work and inimitable input, the top of Dutch political life. And yet, reading the autobiography, I felt the desire to read her future autobiography. The one that actually appeared in the meantime (2010), is once more highly critical of Islam and of multiculturalism in Western societies. Will the future autobiography I hope she will write after another 20 or 30 years of life, show new developments? I am curious whether she will in time change her attitude towards religion in general, and especially towards her original religion. I changed in this respect, in the course of my life, as I will try to show in this article. The development over the years of my thinking in my discipline, philosophy of education, has been of influence in my personal relation to religion; probably this holds vice versa as well.

DISTANCING FROM RELIGION Although I can certainly in most respects not compare myself to Hirsi Ali, I do personally recognize the way she criticized and distanced herself from the religion of her forefathers and explicitly developed her own, individual position regarding that heritage. A logical, analytical criticism of religion, concentrating on arguments for and against the existence of God, as developed by the Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse in his ‘Atheist Manifesto’ (2004) inspired her to leave Islam behind, or at least gave her arguments to justify that decision. Hirsi Ali wrote an interesting foreword for a revised edition to this manifest of Philipse, in which she expresses the hope that it will function as a ‘short-cut to enlightenment’ for other Muslims, as it did for her personally. This is what she says: When I was confronted with the Atheïstisch manifest by the philosopher Herman Philipse for the first time in 1998, I didn’t even look inside. My boyfriend at the time gave it to me, because our discussions on religion always ended in an argument. At the moment I saw the title on the orange- brown cover, I screamed ‘haram!’ and threw it into a corner of the room, me, a virtuous Muslim woman. But in 2002, our relationship had broken up long before, I asked him if I might borrow it. I can hardly think of a book that has had a more liberating effect on me. (…) The turnabout was caused by the September 11, 2001. I read the letter, written by Muhammad Atta in which he requests the help of Allah in order to be able to accomplish his terrible deed. I thought, yes indeed, if one is a Muslim one has to be able to do something like this, if Allah so wishes, because one must obey Allah always. But how could Allah wish for something so horrific? Can a good god really exist that drives Muslims to such a monstrous crime? (…) After a few months of indecision I asked my ex-boyfriend if I could borrow the Atheïstisch manifest by Herman Philipse. How simple and clear is the argument of that book, and how guiltless the world became for me after reading it! Allah doesn’t exist, other gods don’t exist either, or hell! When I had finished it, the heavens did not cave in on me and I didn’t become paralysed or insane for invoking the wrath of Allah. And so, all those threats were sheer nonsense. It was an immense relief and instead of damned I was enlightened. No doubt erudite philosophers raise many clever objections to Philipse’s argument, but I am convinced that he is right on the whole. I want all 1.2 billion Muslims to read the booklet and I tried to persuade the author to write a much simpler version for export. Unfortunately he refuses because he believes he has already watered down the philosophical wine too much with popularising water. Sometimes intelligent people can be incredibly short-sighted!’ (Hirsi Ali, in: Philipse, 2004, pp. 9, 11-12) I too concentrated on the relation of reason and religion, when I made the explicit decision to leave my ancestral religion behind – in the next section I will tell this part of the story of my life. And, as Hirsi Ali, I too experienced it as enlightenment

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