Other people on Pankaj Mishra’s list of influential anti-Islamic witch-hunters (Comment, 1 September) can speak for themselves, but please let me state clearly what I have several times stated before: that I am not against Islam, but against Islamic extremism. I regard Islamic extremism as the biggest threat that Islam faces. I only wish I were influential, so that I could do more to get this surely very simple point across: Islam, like most religions, is well supplied with textual incitements to violence that nobody takes seriously except the violent, who are looking for an excuse. In other words, the menace lies in the extremism, not in the religion.
Doesn’t Pankaj Mishra feel the same? It isn’t always easy to detect what he really means under the rhetoric: writers who don’t realise that a collection of words like “triggers a tsunami of vitriol” is a hopelessly mixed metaphor are apt to leave their readers puzzled. But as far as I can make out, he genuinely thinks that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a right to protest against her childhood injuries, as long as she accepts that such injuries are inflicted by “patriarchal cultures” and not by her religion. Hirsi Ali blames the religion, which she wants dismantled.
As it happens, I agree more with him than I do with her. The abolition of Islam, in my view, would not be desirable even if it were possible. What Islam most needs to do, however, is to find ways for its vast majority – more than a billion people all over the world – to express their condemnation of a murderous minority. We are prepared to accept that silence does not mean indifference or tacit approval. But if silence means that those who say nothing about atrocities generated within the Islamic culture are worried that they will help anti-Islamic forces in the west then they are mistaking their real enemy.
No western government wants to persecute Muslims. There are private citizens in the west, extremists on their own account, who would like to persecute Muslims, but they do not have their hands on the levers of power. Whether in the Islamic countries or in those western countries which have a significant Islamic component to their population, most of the people who want to persecute Muslims are Muslims. Most of the Muslims who get persecuted are women. To that hideous anomaly, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is perfectly understandable when she takes a root-and-branch attitude. After all, a root-and-branch attitude was taken to her: she was a female, so she suffered.
Perhaps Pankaj Mishra could answer a simple question. It is the same question that Nicolas Sarkozy, before he was President of France, once asked Tariq Ramadan when they were on television together. Sarkozy asked Ramadan whether he condemned the stoning of women. Ramadan, so much admired by Pankaj Mishra, said he couldn’t answer until the subject had been discussed by the imams. Would Pankaj Mishra care to answer, or is he, too, waiting to be told?