Leftist Forsakenism
A new genre of the essay is coalescing. It took a single installment to signal the ingathering, but that's the the way it is with new genres--the ideal example illuminates the category retrospectively. This is the genre of Leftist Forsakenism. Here's how it works.
A well-respected leftist intellectual of the hardheaded anti-totalitarian stripe confronts a newly celebrated victim of totalitarianism. The first ought to have a natural affinity for the second on the basis of shared convictions about free expression, secularism, women's emancipation, scientific inquiry and the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment. The intellectual begins to digest the collected writings of the victim, feeling the dull ache of recognition for the depredations of a reactionary ideology commingled with a disturbing sense of alienation from the prey. The victim has surely been through hell but has perhaps failed to do justice to the persecutors. Might the victim be mistaking experience for historical analysis? Also -- and this is the insect of insecurity buzzing around the intellectual's psyche -- isn't the victim putting the rest of us in harm's way by speaking so candidly about a common enemy, which abides not by the rules of discourse and argumentation but by a psychotic determinism? The intellectual grows very unsettled indeed and treats the victim in a very predictable fashion.
Some light praise, more accurately described as condescension, is offered for undeniably self-evident traits such as bravery, "articulateness," charisma, pleasantness of demeanor or countenance. Then, as if to toss a penny into the fountain of intellectual good faith, the intellectual proceeds to summarize the victim's terrifying ordeal and to offer some sympathy for its having had to be gone through by such an obviously intelligent person. But, alas, for such an obviously intelligent person, the victim has succumbed to the zealotry of opposition and made many blunders in the newfound role of Cassandra, not least of which is allying with too many "conservative" elements. Finally, the intellectual casts down the victim -- often with the unrionic use of the word "ironically" -- as just the sort of totalitarian from which the victim has managed to escape.
If this sounds a wearying process, just imagine yourself to be Arthur Koestler in 1948.
As if it hadn't been enough to suffer a Francoist prison spell in Malaga, each night hearing the torture and execution of his fellow anti-fascists in adjoining cells and wondering when his turn would come, the Hungarian genius behind Darkness at Noon had to then suffer Simone de Beauvoir: "He hate the Communists so fanatically that he's able to team up with the worst reactionaries, write for conservative journals and approve right-wing policies while continuing to hobnob with the people at Partisan Review. This is exactly the attitude we denounce in Le Temps Modernes."
That the over-esteemed author of The Second Sex once, out of both pity and exhaustion, had sex with Koestler may have added to her jaded impression. But only slightly: Beauvoir would go on to write a farcically misinformed account of the Chinese Revolution that portrayed Maoism as just the sort of "third way" Communism that both she and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre had been seeking after Stalinism--exactly the attitude they denounced in Partisan Review. Indeed, among the backhanded compliments that the Left has traditionally offered its prodigal sons or heretics is the sneering accusation that they've abandoned one side in a world-historical struggle for the other, thinking themselves now aligned with the victors. By this logic, the subject of an essay belonging to the Leftist Forsakenist school is motivated not so much by sincerity of thought as he is by convenience and a kind of crowd-pleasing moral cowardice.
With Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the problem is slightly different in substance but almost exactly the same in disingenuous style.
Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash have assailed this Somali apostate from Islam for being an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," Buruma's witless coinage since co-opted and abandoned by Garton Ash, who has reasonably climbed down a bit from his unreasonable platform of execration. As I've written before, if this term carried any meaning at all to being with, then we would not have expected to find Hirsi Ali, in her second memoir Infidel, rhapsodizing about the architectural majesty of the Golden Mosque in Saudi Arabi and the solemn beauty of the foot-bathing ritual of its attendants. A fundamentalist is never so generous: the equivalent would be for Osama bin Laden to write somewhere that the fossil record has its charms, too.
Now comes Nicholas Kristof in a dud New York Times critique of Hirsi Ali's latest memoir Nomad, dismissing her as a mere "provocateur," a term which implies that her motive is incitement rather than persuasion. Her crime, according to a columnist who has for years been trying to draw his readers' attention to a Koranically rationalized program of extermination waged by Arab Muslims against black Muslims in Sudan, is of "denounc[ing] Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry."
This is a clause that I find senseless, potentially feeding illiteracy. One can no more be a bigot of a religion than one can be a racist against a Pepsi can. Kristof offers no evidence that Hirsi Ali does not like Muslims or holds them, either en masse or individually, in any kind of suspicion because no evidence for this assertion anywhere exists. What she doesn't like is the theology to which Muslims purport to subscribe often in a state of semi-ignorance or obliviousness as to the chapter-and-verse moral and intellectual realities of that theology's core texts. The proof of this proposition -- that most Muslims are not especially learned or adept exegetes of their own faith -- is in Hirsi Ali herself, an ex-member of the Muslim Brotherhood and former champion of the Salman Rushdie fatweh who only ever bothered to master those texts after she abandoned Islam altogether. By daring to uncover something about her prior faith, it was she who became the target of a lethal bigotry against women who read and hold their own opinions. Hirsi Ali must now travel with a 24-hour security detail and yet she comfortably maintains that she's no more or less likely to befall a jihadist attack than any other unguarded inhabitant of the West. This is provocative only in its staggering modesty.
Kristof's Lite-FM put-down is nevertheless more palatable than those of Buruma or Garton Ash, both of whom were nastier in their tones and imputations. Buruma accused Hirsi Ali of employing a ghost writer, a claim for which he offered no substantiation though which did imply that that an African women who speaks in perfectly formed English sentences in public venues can't manage to record her own life in print. Garton Ash wrote that if she more resembled Rosie O'Donnell and less resembled a runway model, her books would not become bestsellers and she'd find herself less of an international celebrity. (This is the misogyny of the anti-misogynists, to borrow and refashion Pascal Bruckner's great phrase for the leftist forsakenist's vilification of Hirsi Ali.)
It's almost cruel to find fault Kristof when he so obviously claims the universality of cuddliness as his political worldview. What couch-tripping Furies haunt the janjaweed of Sudan who can muster the strength to observe:
"I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny," Hirsi Ali thinks to herself. "I am feeble in faith because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman -- because I don't want to be like you." What she says aloud is: "When I die I will rot." (For my part, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali's family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: "I love you.")
Would those three simple words have been uttered before, during or after Hirsi Ali's mother looked on approvingly as her young daughter's clitoris was abraded by a rock wielded by her own grandmother?
