Jul 7, 2021
Listeners may recall the clash between two of Western liberalism’s sacred cows that unfolded in France last year as part of the so-called “affaire Mila”. This 16-year-old online socialite was met with a ghastly downpour of abuse upon sharing on Instagram her dislike of Islamic mores. So far, so reprehensible, you may think. Except that Mila’s impetuous words of blasphemy were soon invoked by hordes of anonymous users who subjected her to an open season of misogynistic and sexually predatory abuse, against which France’s politically correct ethos, always mindful to eschew charges of Islamophobia, seemed despairingly unable to react. The affair captured Europe’s uneasy balance between women’s unfettered emancipation on one hand, as incarnated by the outspokenly feminist Mila, and on the other the dissolvent forces of multiculturalism, which on the pretense of tolerance for the worldviews and lifestyles of Muslim immigrants, seems too willing to jeopardize the right of women to enjoy the sexual freedoms and gender equality that liberalism admittedly affords. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has lived and worked at the heart of this contradiction. Born in Somalia, she emigrated to the Netherlands fleeing an arranged marriage, sat in the Dutch parliament, and pursues to this day her advocacy of women’s rights and criticism of Islamic fundamentalism in the US, where she is a fellow at the Stanford-based Hoover Institution. Ayaan’s latest book and the topic of our conversation is Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021)—enjoy!
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