Ayaan Hirsi Ali houdt de Amerikanen Spinoza voor
In het verlengde van haar recente boek Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, heeft Ayaan Hirsi Ali
een essay in het zomernummer (juli-augustus) van Foreign Affairs, getiteld: “A Problem From Heaven. Why the United
States Should Back
Islam’s
Reformation.”
[Het essay is op de website van het magazine te lezen].
Zij analyseert allerlei recente uitspraken over de omgang met IS en de islam meer in het algemeen en doet de suggestie dat de Verenigde Staten en z’n bondgenoten hetzelfde doen als ze ten tijde van de Koude Oorlog deden, toen ze intellectuele dissidenten ondersteunden om zich uit te spreken tegen het duivelse Sovjet systeem. Zo zouden ze nu moslim-dissidenten moeten ondersteunen in hun verzet tegen de dominante interpretaties van de Koran en/of het moslimgeloof.
En dan brengt ze in wat ze weet over Spinoza en de radicale Verlichting:
“Like Christians and Jews centuries ago, Muslims today must
critically evaluate their sacred texts in order to reform their religion. That
is not an unreasonable request, as history shows. Of course, history also shows
that the path to religious reform can be bloody. By the mid-seventeenth
century, Europe had been ravaged by a century of warfare between Roman
Catholics and Protestants. But the result was to create the room for the
genuine freedom of thought that ultimately made the Enlightenment possible.
One of the most important of these freethinkers was Baruch Spinoza, a brilliant Jewish Dutch philosopher. For Spinoza, the Bible was a collection of loosely assembled moral teachings, not God’s literal word. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community, and a council of the Dutch Reformed Church called his Theological-Political Treatise “the vilest and most sacrilegious book the world has ever seen.” One of Spinoza’s contemporaries, Adriaan Beverland, was even jailed and then banished from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland for questioning the notion of original sin. Yet both men died in their beds. And it is their ideas that prevail in the Netherlands today.”
* * *
In het daarop volgende essay krijgt ze meteen commentaar:
William McCants: "Islamic Scripture Is Not the Problem. And Funding Muslim Reformers Is Not the Solution." [Cf.] Maar dat stuk is alleen voor subscribers te lezen.
