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The Truth and the Walls It Creates

Ayaan Hirsi Ali interviewed by Reset:

You defined Mohammed a tyrant and a pervert. You are absolutely free to think and say anything you want, but maybe this kind of somewhat provocative language is useless, isn’t it? It could create walls and clashes, not favouring a dialogue. Your story is a terrible story and everybody should know that, but maybe this language could be an obstacle for moderate Muslims.

The prophet Mohammed married a six-year-old girl, had sex with her when she was nine, and there are millions of Muslim men today who follow in his footsteps. When I say he was a pervert, this is what I mean. Now, my opponents say “you will create walls if you call him this way”. What I say is that for these poor little girls who are 9, 10, 11 or 12, the wall already exists. In my views, provoking people to see what is happening behind this wall does not mean erecting walls, but trying and letting these walls tumble down. When Bin Laden, the Saudi Kingdom and Ahmadinejad want to establish theocracies today in the name of Islam, they are following the example of the prophet Mohammed. That is why I call him a tyrant. If we want to provoke people to think about this tyranny and how it comes about, it is good to bring Mohammed down to our level and say: “what he did was normal in the seventh century, but today we do not like it anymore, we do not find it normal, we do not like tyranny”.

Allan Bloom once recalled, in The Closing of the American Mind, how a simple question could yield encyclopedias of moral casuistry. Ask a contemporary American classroom if British civil servants in India were right to stop the practice of sati, whereby widows would throw themselves onto their dead husbands's funeral pyres, and you'd be met by yowls of enlightened protest: "But those civil servants shouldn't have even been there!" Yes, but what about intervening in a tribally coerced act of self-immolation? At some point, the colonial theory abandons you and you're forced to make a decision: allow a gruesome suicide to proceed, or try to prevent it from doing so…

I'm sure I'll get aggrieved comments just for linking to this interview, much less pulling that particular excerpt from it. Allow me then to ask: Is anything Hirsi Ali says factually untrue? Did the prophet Mohammed not marry a 9 year-old girl, and should 9 year-old girls continue to be married to older men — in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere?

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