Thanks to Linda Ward Selbie for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071214.wsaundersreck1214/BNStory/International/home

DOUG SAUNDERS
Globe and Mail Update

EDINBURGH — We may never know exactly why 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was strangled in Msissauga this week. Her father, Muhammad, has been charged with murder, and he is, by all accounts, a very religious man, whereas his daughter didn't want to cover her head in the style favoured by Muslims in his native Pakistan.

Whether her death was a direct result of this theological schism, or of some more prosaic explosion of family rage, is now irrelevant. It has become a story about the limits of tolerance. A national debate has erupted around poor Aqsa, and it is largely a debate about the place of extreme religious belief in a liberal society.

This happens to have been the central topic of a dramatic argument that has inflamed Europe's leading thinkers for much of this year and it would be useful to ship some of its rhetoric across the Atlantic.

A lot of people have been using the words "integration" and "multiculturalism" to discuss the Parvez case. These concepts, I would argue, are somewhat beside the point. Members of the family are, in most important respects, fully integrated and fluent Canadians. And they don't seem to have been stuck in a cultural ghetto; if there really were pressures inside the father's head, they didn't come from the varied and mostly secular people around them.

What we are really concerned about here is the question of how to deal with those in our midst who are antinomians — that is, people who believe the laws of God should trump the laws of man. Ever since we first built societies out of reason and mutual respect during the Enlightenment, the presence of religious true believers has been a problem. Should renunciation of spiritual authority be a prerequisite for membership in a free society?

Antinomians can be nothing more than charming nuisances, like William Blake, whose poetry was a long manifesto of antinomianism. Or they can be Osama bin Laden.

"What to say," Voltaire asked three centuries ago, "to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of heaven by slitting your throat?"

That quotation opened this year's debate, in January. It was used by French philosopher Pascal Bruckner to launch a long, wild attack on Dutch-American writer Ian Buruma (his essay, and the rest of this debate, can be found on the excellent Berlin website signandsight.com).

Mr. Buruma had just published a fantastic book titled Murder In Amsterdam, in which he returns to his native Holland to explore the slaying, by a Muslim extremist, of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.

The central figure in his book is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch activist and MP whose childhood in Africa resembled that of Aqsa Parvez in Mississauga, but who succumbed, embracing fundamentalist Islam, and was horribly abused by men.

Still, she was luckier than Aqsa: She fled, turned her back on the faith and in the end became an impressive and world-famous voice of anti-religious passion.

She occupies a largely heroic position in Mr. Buruma's book, but he notes toward the end that she has undercut her own cause: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali was no Voltaire," he writes of her more extreme provocations. "For Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church … while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe."

British writer Timothy Garton Ash made the point more strongly a few weeks later: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist."

That brief caveat launched a furious debate. To Mr. Bruckner, the suggestion that Ms. Hirsi Ali should have reached out to believers was apostasy: "How could we tolerate in Islam that which we no longer tolerate in Catholicism? ... Thus the defenders of liberty [i.e. Ms. Hirsi Ali] are styled as fascists, while the fanatics are portrayed as victims."

That was one of his milder comments. He ended with a rambunctious mixed metaphor: Mr. Buruma and Mr. Garton Ash, by suggesting that the religious faithful should have any place in a tolerant society, "are the symptoms of a fatigued, self-doubting Europe, one that is only too ready to acquiesce at the slightest alarm. Yet their good-willed rhetorical molasses covers a different tune: that of capitulation."

A dozen German, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish, French and British intellectuals then piled on, and soon became coiled in a misleading debate about "cultural relativism" and multiculturalism (though none of the original participants was either a relativist or a radical multiculturalist). "The question," Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson argued, "is whether irrationality deserves the same amount of tolerance as rationality." No, he concluded.

Mr. Bruckner scored a good blow: The creed of cultural "tolerance," he wrote, was in fact the opposite, since by tolerating "cultures" you are denying individuals the chance to exist outside of them; you are "denying them the freedom to liberate themselves from their own traditions. … Multiculturalism is a racism of the anti-racists: It chains people to their roots."

But Mr. Buruma offered a defence: "Does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don't like it, as long as they don't harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom."

Acts like Aqsa Parvez's death and the occasional instances of honour killings, he said, are atrocious. "But these are matters of law enforcement. Figuring out how to stop violent ideologies from infecting mainstream Muslims, and thus threatening free societies, is trickier. … If we wish to isolate and defeat religious extremism, we must have mainstream European Muslims as our allies."

At some point in the midst of this inch-thick pile of paper, Mr. Garton Ash notes that this debate is between the Enlightenment of Voltaire, which would have us all follow a universal reason, and the Enlightenment of Locke, which would have us all free to follow our private irrationalities. As ancient and European as it may sound, this seems to have become the Canadian debate.