Goddamn.

[lawnrrd]

Maybe the most shameful thing about our age is that the true heroes have to be searched for. One hero I have found is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia, raised as a Muslim, and educated in Saudi-financed schools. She sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, in her early twenties, and about ten years later renounced Islam for atheism. She was later elected to the Dutch parliament, although she left that body after questions arose about the circumstances in which she got Dutch residency.

She collaborated on Submission with Theo van Gogh, who was murdered for it, and has spent much of the past few years living in hiding.

Tomorrow's New York Times will include a review, written by Hirsi Ali, of a book on the West's reaction to Islam. (Hirsi Ali wrote the review; someone else wrote the book.) In her review, she writes:

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

[The author] is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from [the author's]. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

It has been a long time since I read something like this, something that gets everything exactly right. So long, in fact, that, without noticing, I had come to expect only things that are exactly wrong about everything, from those who are exactly wrong about everything.