Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (PDF)

Description

Continuing her journey from a deeply religious Islamic upbringing to a post at Harvard, the brilliant, charismatic and controversial New York Times and Globe and Mail #1 bestselling author of Infidel and Nomad makes a powerful plea for a Muslim Reformation as the only way to end the horrors of terrorism, sectarian warfare and the repression of women and minorities.Today, she argues, the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war—are incompatible with the values of a free society. For centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation—a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity—is now at hand, and may even have begun. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness—not least by Muslim women—to think freely and to speak out.Courageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. And she calls on the Western world to end its appeasement of the Islamists. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” she writes. It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, not the opponents of free speech.Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not a call to arms, but a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global toleration. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, with jihadists killing thousands from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world’s number one problem.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book should be on the must-read list of every thinking individual in the Western World. It is a clarion alarm to wake up to a brutal and deadly but poorly understood threat. The murderers that she discusses as elements in Islamic State (IS), Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, suicide bombers and other militant groups are psychopaths. That these killers really believe that they are following the dictates of Allah is not questioned here. The Qur’an (as spelled in the book) and the Hadith have provided them with the only rationalization they need to pour out the hatred pounded into them daily from early childhood. Hatred for anything that deviates from their religious teachings begins in the home. The author writes, “The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had to work quite hard to persuade family members to denounce one another to the authorities. The power of the Muslim system is that the authorities do not need to be involved. Social control begins at home.” (Page 154) Hirsi Ali states that she is not extraordinary. That is probably the only misstatement in the book. Her writings and personal appearances reveal an uncommon courage in challenging a dangerous religion that has threatened her with murder and repeatedly perpetrated atrocities that clearly demonstrate that they mean what they say. She has spoken out with admirable courage that makes Western apologists for Islam look like the wimps that they are. Unilateral tolerance is dangerous. The author points out many times that murderous intolerance lies at the very heart of Islam. It is built into the very fabric of the religion. She asserts that militant Islam cannot be stopped with U.S. drone strikes. The foundation tenets of the religion must brought into question and reformed. She lists what she calls “five theses” (pages 74 and 235): 1. the status of the Qur’an as the last and immutable word of God and the infallibility of Muhammad as the last divinely inspired messenger; 2. Islam’s emphasis on the afterlife over the here-and-now; 3. the claims of sharia to be a comprehensive system of law governing both the spiritual and temporal realms; 4. the obligation on ordinary Muslims to command right and forbid wrong; 5. the concept of jihad, or holy war. Hirsi Ali divides Muslims into three groups that she calls Mecca Muslims (peaceful and law-abiding), Medina (militant) Muslims, and dissidents. She condemns the Medina group as the perpetrators of the ongoing atrocities that she describes in horrifying detail. She then expresses hope that the last group can stir people to bring about the changes desperately needed to bring Islam into the twenty-first century. The author’s optimism that Islam can be reformed, although an admirable and most welcome outcome, is also most unlikely. Sharia (religious law approved by a majority of Muslims – page 139), seeks to rule the world and drag mankind back to the seventh century. Islam, as she has portrayed it, finds a parallel in current Christian fundamentalism and Christian sadistic intolerance of centuries past. Virulent intolerance, stemming from whatever religious or political set of beliefs, is a psychologically defensive posture motivated by fear that questioning the smallest tenet of the faith throws open the entire doctrine to debate and threatens to collapse the whole belief structure. I question that backward, fatalistic, authoritarian and violent Islam could survive that exposure. It would cease to be Islam, the very word a cognate of submission.Michael Atkins, PhD

⭐If there is any single subject that Americans, and every other culture in the world, need to be clear about it is Islam. Americans by nature are inclusive and welcoming of a wide variety of cultures/religions, etc. But in this case one must be very clear as to what is going on and Ayaan Hirsi Ali gives the non Muslims of the world and inside look at what makes the Terrorists Tick! Obama and the intellectually lazy liberals of this country keep throwing out that insulting “Religion of Peace” quote like it means something. It does not! Terrorism and medieval practices are part and parcel of the faith of Islam, and Hirsi Ali points out very clearly that the moderate adherents of that faith who would truly like to see a reformation that would bring them into the current century are keeping silent because otherwise their very lives are in danger. Islam does not allow any criticism or questioning of any kind, so no moderate of Islam will say anything against even the most reprehensible and atrocious event promulgated by their brethren. If you want to understand what the truth about Islam today is, read this and other books by Hirsi Ali.

⭐HereticBy; Ayaan Hirsi Ali(Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now) I have watched her in a debate, the subject of which was “Is Islam a Religion of Peace” there were knowledgeable speakers on both sides. At the end the audience was requested to deliver their conclusion. Overwhelmingly it was that Islam is not a religion of peace. One of the most compelling points was when the audience were reminded that to attend the event they were submitted to checks such as we go thru at Airports. She has written three other books, the one I read and reported on was “Infidel”. She repeats some of that in this book as necessary to assure the reader that her background gives her credibility to write as she does. In reviewing other articles I have written describing my thoughts on how evil this religion is today, I will not restate these facts. If you are not aware you should be. Pretending it is not true is not the correct thing to do. Rather I will mention that she does report in the last chapter that she has reason to hope that the Muslims of the world can turn away from violence and become a respected part of humanity. There is no denying that much of what is written in the Old and New Testament contains support for actions which today we cannot accept, but that is exactly the point she is making. While Christian and Jew adherents have rejected these writings the Muslims as a group have not. Taking the world back 700 years and forcing these rules on people today will only continue the carnage being seen in countries all over the world especially in Western nations that have provided generous benefits to refugees from the Middle East. Those who willingly sacrifice their human lives for eternal bliss in the hereafter are tragic figures in my opinion. All you and I know is the here and now of our existence. To throw that away is irrational. She mentions the names of a number of Muslims trying to encourage people to reject Jihad as the way to preserve their religious beliefs. I recommend this book to any who wants to learn more about what is happening today.Jack B. WaltersApril 30, 2017

⭐This is a very valuable book which gives a much needed insight into the Muslim mind and Islamic world. It is lucidly written, extremely well informed and benefits from a depth of personal experience as well as academic background. I have passed the book on to friends who all thought the same.Despite the extreme sensitivity of the subject and the polemics that surround it this is not a partisan book but a balanced presentation with the author managing to maintain a commendable stance of rational detachment and analysis. Her main thesis is that the problems that arise from Islam – particularly in its extreme form – can be corrected through reform and are largely a result of Islam never having had a Reformation comparable to European Christianity.I have three main problems with this thesis. One, acknowledged by Ayaan herself, is that no reform movement in the history of Islam has ever succeeded in the past and the very nature of Islamic thinking is that any attempt to initiate one is of its nature heretical and to be crushed. The current fate of Raif Badawi is itself indicative of what happens to anyone who might even suggest that some reform may be necessary or cannot quite comply with everything demanded by what, after all, is a very complex and disparate religious tradition: the illusion of a ‘simple’ orthodoxy beguiles clerical power structures and in turn is a fundamental part of the problem.Secondly, the precedent of the Reformation is not what it may seem in its outcomes. This merely led to the violent fragmentation of Christendom and decades of unspeakable savagery which was only resolved by temporal powers separating individual belief from public policy based on rational principles and human rights – the leitmotiv of the Enlightenment. Accompanying this – from the time of Spinoza – was the reformulation of our understanding of God, transforming monotheism to monism and relegating beliefs to states of mind rather than objective reality (unlike seventh century Arabian tribesmen we now fully understand how humans created monotheism in the Hellenistic period of post-exilic Judaism). It is this that is the real challenge to Islamic religion in the light of modern understanding: separating what are undeniably commendable ethical values and cultural traditions from their traditional theological underpinnings. This is the sort of post-Christian thinking espoused by the Sea of Faith network and is the real consequence of the Reformation: God and religion are to be seen as human creations in which wisdom is not supernaturally dispensed from on high but inseparable from the poetic genius of humanity.Thirdly, all this could be largely secondary (and irrelevant) in the light of a much greater challenge which Ayaan does not consider at all: environmentalism. Without a fundamental change of mindset on behalf of everyone this now threatens to swamp all other issues and the sustainable future of humanity itself. In Syria we see not only a religious conflict of extreme ideologies but also one which has been triggered by regional environmental collapse: a decade of drought leading to the collapse of farming, migration to increasingly overpopulated towns with no employment, increasing social unrest and resentment at oppressive government exacerbated by religious divisions and ideological radicalization: interestingly increasing desiccation has paralleled the rise of Isis. This could well be a harbinger of twenty first century life. Of the many voices calling for a completely different mindset there are those, like Thomas Berry and Lloyd Geering (both clergymen), who point out that this issue has been all but ignored by traditional religious teachings. The focus now, must be on nature as the new source of ‘revelation’ and the recognition of the oneness of life – monozoism. Without this new mindset the future for humanity looks increasingly bleak and the religious teachings from the past – which have played no small role in creating the current situation – simply irrelevant.On a more general level, for any religion claiming to be based on revelation modernity presents particular problems. We now know enough about psychiatry and states of mind to understand that putative revelatory experiences are a fairly normal part of what makes us human; some would argue, like Dr David Horrobin in The Madness of Adam and Eve: How schizophrenia shaped Humanity, that they are a distinctive feature of the working of the human mind, particularly in states of stress or extreme circumstances, such as malnutrition and isolation. So we have St John the Divine in his cave receiving the dictation of the Book of Revelation, St Anthony of Egypt (the founder of Western monasticism) in his cave plagued by graphic dreams, or St. Joan of Arc receiving angelic ‘voices’ urging military action, of Joseph Smith receiving the revelation from the angel Mormon, Handel ‘seeing’ the heavens open and receiving the inspiration for the music of ‘The Messiah’. Though, as Freud said there are no ‘untruths’ in psychiatry, we understand such states of mind as entirely subjective or veridical hallucinations. In so far as they may contain useful information they are an expression of the immense creative potential of consciousness which some scientists now even claim creates the reality we know.Two things are common to such states of mind. One is the amount of detail they can conjure up – usually provided by an angelic intermediary – just as Ayaan relates of the enormous amount of detail Muslims seem to have about the next life: where has all this come from and why is it so obviously a projection of male fantasy and suppressed sexuality? (No doubt Freud would have something to say about this!) Secondly, anyone who questions such divinely sourced ‘information’ is seen as a threat or evil prompting extreme and often violent reaction: again, Ayaan notes just how incredibly paranoid and violent Muslim reaction can be to any challenge to their beliefs: the more insubstantial the foundation, the more violent the reaction. She rightly characterizes the fundamental problem for Muslims in the face of Modernity as being one of cognitive dissonance, through which two contradictory and mutually exclusive views of the world drive the individual to extreme behavior (‘radicalisation’). Sadly, as this is not a rational state there is no rational solution and any attempts to provide one, such as the arguments in this book, are doomed to failure. What is needed is education – education not as imparting information or dogma but education as enriching our perception and feeling – and also therapy; but then whose going to provide therapy for 1.4 billion people, some already approaching with Kalashnikovs and suicide vests?Critical thinking, on which Ayaan places so much emphasis, reveals that human origins and history are in no way specially privileged: we create our own reality – God, language, culture and worldview comprise a totality which have evolved within our own past conversations amongst ourselves. Like every other ‘reality’ it will in time crumble and pass away; everything is transient as we are; everything pours itself out and passes away for ever. In the meantime we should ‘pour ourselves out’ for the benefit of all in kindness to all. Such solar living, one day at a time, is our only ‘purpose’ and meaning.

⭐In my opinion, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an expert critical thinker. She worked hard to become highly educated and well read. She has again written about the subject that she fully understands in an engaging way. ‘Heretic’ is another page-turner.Ms Hirsi Ali has been (and is still) on a personal journey that I think would defeat many, yet hers is nonetheless a success story. She shares her experience and ideas honestly and openly with the reader.Ms Hirsi Ali has attracted many unpleasant labels from certain quarters: apostate; heretic; infidel. She has also upset many western and liberal (politically correct) apologists. She was not long ago de-platformed at an American University congress! With considerable resilience, she nonetheless continues to insist and demonstrate that intolerance must not be tolerated whenever it presents.In the face of many challenges, it seems to me from the tone of this book that Ms Hirsi Ali retains an affection for much of the religion she feels she had no option but to reject. Her plea for reformation, or renovation, of Islam from within is passionately delivered. Perhaps this is based on a genuine wish to see the future of Islam fully harmonized and integrated with the modern West, rather than heading towards an inevitable collision course with it.I look forward to reading her next volume ‘Prey’.

⭐Im a liberal. This book has opened my eyes. I am distressed at how the left seems to apologise for sexism, racism and homophobia when it comes from Muslims. This is a must read for our times. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a hero of our times. Thank you for the wake up call.

⭐Every literate Muslim should read this book from beginning to end, and then think about it. The author has had so much experience of Islam that she knows more about it than you do.She was brought up in Somalia, where she says that her grandmother worshipped the Koran (like an idol) because she could not read it, noR could she understand the Arabic of what she had remembered. They moved to Mecca, where the public enforcement of Sharia Law was a common sight, including “thieves having their hands cut off, amidst great spurts of blood”. The native Meccans despised them, for various reasons including their relatively dark skin.Then, having moved to Kenya, she was increasingly approached by the evangelising Muslim Brotherhood as a susceptible teenager, and her contemporaries began to take Islam more seriously,But she asked too many questions, and became an apostate, never a really good idea for Muslims wanting to live an easy life. She describes herself as being by nature a “protestant”, which fits in well with her idea of Islam needing a reformation to produce a new modern acceptable version of Islam, rather along the lines of the suggestions made in Richardson’s “West Meets Islam”.Such ideas develop when she moves to the Netherlands, finds she can discuss things freely there, and even becomes a member of parliament. Such a woman knows more about Islam than we do, and needs to be taken seriously. Read it.She is so frank. “Much Islamic State propaganda is like a YouTube upload of a time-travel trip back to the seventh century”. Things need to change forward into the 21st century, not backward into the 7th century.

⭐Just a few words, Ayaan has been so much vilified from all directions for talking about a ‘Reformation’ in islam that I decided to write this short review (read the book some years ago). Yes it is true that she overestimated the importance of the Christian Reformation in the making of Modernity (and an Islamic ‘return to the basics’, already done before, is of course a catastrophe) but what she actually sketches in the book itself is nothing else than a counterpart of the Radical Enlightenment in Europe (with all respect we can draw some lessons from that part of history relevant to our days regarding Islam, if even this is an example of ‘Whiggish history’ then let’s better dump Reason altogether). What counts is that Islam needs indeed a REFORM, in fact Ayaan’s proposal is at least a legitimate direction of research. The rest is small talk.True this reform is nothing else than a transformation of islam (possible this is one reason of why she tried the ‘Reformation’ card instead of talking directly about a radical Islamic Enlightenment, to make the idea more palatable to muslims) but how else can one react rationally to the evidence of the last 70 years when Islam moved strongly toward the past in spite of the fact that muslims were left alone to ‘clean their own rubbish’*? How much longer to continue with the ‘dialogue’ narrative, as done in the last at least 70 years, when in fact Reason is far from being rehabilitated in the Islamic world, something which makes very difficult even for rational muslims to accept the necessary important concessions (the same ‘no one has the right to change…’ is omnipresent in muslim discourse, even at the level of Hadith there is small change compared with the Middle Ages)? A healthy dialogue implies important concessions from both sides, or this is not what comes from the muslim side (rather we have to act as dhimmis via all sort of never-ending concessions to keep them happy, with very little in exchange; this being actually what the Islamic law requires from us). A request for important reform is common sense i’d say, I don’t think it is an accident of history that Islam still does not have an equivalent of Liberal Christianity and Reform Judaism, even after a long exposure to Modernity now (in other words inerrancy of the Revelation needs to be dropped). Desperate times call for desperate solutions*.Can now this be done? I’d say that yes as much as the Enlightenment value of Reason is made popular among muslims (unaided Human Reason can be more important sometimes than even what is clearly written in the Quran, that is inerrancy dropped, acting only against literalism via the famous now so called ‘progressive re-interpretations’ is not enough), we need a ‘critical mass’ of muslims who to be the counterpart of Liberal Christians and Reform Jews. Of course i’m afraid this is not possible without putting Islam under critical scrutiny, at least at the level seen in the Biblical criticism, the vain hope of those supporting the postmodernist visions of history, too much relativism there unfortunately, that a ‘dialogue’ without much criticism is the solution fail to take in account the intrinsic nature of Islam, finally how it treats Reason itself (by the way too much postmodernism is one of the main causes of why the Western civilization moved from one extreme, colonialism, to another one, Saidism, from Edward Said of course, I’m afraid not ‘anything goes’ at the levels of cultures, we can actually make some objective differences between them without falling in colonialism or discrimination, we can definitely talk of progress, albeit a healthy fallibilism should always be there).In fact history shows that the modernization of Islam, albeit shallow, has rather been the result of not making concessions to it (true, excesses were made) and of showing that it cannot ‘work’ as a foundation of the modern state. There was a time when the Westernizers-modernists were much more influential in the muslim world, when even quite many muslims lost faith in the capacity of Islam to be at the basis of the state, not surprisingly before the excesses of cultural relativism. We can do it again. In a perfectly fair way this time, via rational criticism of Islam (protecting Islam from criticism is definitely not a secular right of muslims; finally not our fault that it is how it is, indeed very little internal logic from its basic tenets to a doctrine of divine inspiration of the Quran not based on inerrancy, with Reason itself severely downplayed in religious matters**). The alternative may well be at least an Europe without some key values of Enlightenment, the half-sharia states characteristic to the Islamic world now may move to the West in some circumstances. No one rational wants this to happen so let’s better prevent instead of deluding ourselves that this is an impossibility, freeing the rational people in Islam, who have to hide now, being actually a much better alternative than just hoping that the passing of time will somehow (no one knows exactly how) solve everything.NOTES* the current paradigms in the fields of Islamic studies and history do actually make a prediction (in spite of the popular view that history is not a science), if islam was that ‘tolerant’ and ‘progressive’ in the Middle Ages as suggested by these conjectures then we should expect to see a modern Islam (valid even for some of the old Orientalists). We do not see that I’m afraid even after 70 years, all we have is rather a severely degenerative ‘research program’ which hint that we need something else. Ayaan’s proposal for example** Bernard Lewis makes very clear the rift between Islam and the other 2 Abrahamic religions in this matter, a stumbling block in the way of sustained progress:”Arthur Jeffery’s book was entitled Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’an: The Old Codices, 1937. To his horror, his study was immediately denounced and publicly burnt by order of the leading Muslim religious authorities at Al-Azhar Mosque and University. Professor Jeffery…had excellent relations with the people at Al-Azhar, and was the more startled and horrified by their reaction to his book. He pointed out that what he was doing was no different from what the most pious Christians and Jews do to the texts of the Old and New Testaments. To which they replied, “But that is different. The Koran is not like the Bible. The Koran is the word of God.” By this they were not merely casting doubt on the authenticity or accuracy of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. They were pointing to the profound difference between Muslim perceptions and Judeo-Christian perceptions of the very nature of scripture. For Christians and Jews, the Bible consists of a number of books, written at different times and in different places, divinely inspired, but mostly committed to writing by human beings. For Muslims, the Koran is one book, divine, eternal and uncreated. It is not simply divinely inspired; it is literally divine and to question it in any way is blasphemy.”Finally the unaided Human Reason has always been much more important in Christianity and Judaism, we must never forget that Job argues with God when he perceives injustice, something basically impossible in Islam where God is not Reason but Willpower, he defines morality how he pleases and can change it to the contrary upon his inscrutable Will, to claim that morality is in his nature (the case in Christianity and Judaism, morality can be understood directly via Reason) is to limit his powers. There is a reason that people are seen as mere ‘servants’ of God in Christianity and even Judaism while in Islam they are ‘slaves’ of Allah. I’m afraid the ‘dialogue’ conjecture leads nowhere if we do not take the big differences like these in account.

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