Editor’s Note: The following piece is adapted from “Preserving the Values of the West,” the remarks delivered by Ayaan Hirsi Ali upon accepting the 2016 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education alongside her husband, Niall Ferguson. It is reprinted here with permission.
The specific example I would like to address today is the relationship between men and women. All cultures have strong views on marriage, family, divorce, promiscuity, and parenting. Not all cultures are similar or interchangeable, however.
Within Islam today, I believe that we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims in the world based on how they envision and practice their faith, with important consequences for women.
The first group is the most problematic — the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on Shariah, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.
I call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad when he was based in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for Shariah law as a divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in jihad. There is no equality between men and women in their eyes, either legally or in daily practice.
The second group — and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world — consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance toward non-Muslims.
I call this group “Mecca Muslims,” after the first phase of Islam and the peaceful Qur’anic verses that were revealed in Mecca. In this group, the position of women is contested.
More recently, and partly in response to the rise of Islamic terrorism, a third group is emerging within Islam: Muslim reformers — or, as I call them, “modifying Muslims” — who promote the separation of religion from politics and other reforms. Although some are apostates, the majority of dissidents are believers, among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence. Reformers generally favor equality between men and women.
The future of Islam and the world’s relationship with Muslims will be decided by which of the two minority groups — the Medina Muslims or the reformers — can win the support of the rather passive Meccan majority.