Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam and the Netherlands

Alexander Linklater:

What Hirsi Ali found herself confronting was the central feature of social organisation in the Netherlands, known as "pillarisation". It is a principle that dates back to the 17th century when Amsterdam was Europe's busiest mercantile centre and when common sense dictated that, if business were to thrive, religious differences had to be set aside and antagonistic groups kept physically separate. Article 23 of the Dutch constitution, which established rights for the setting up of separate schools and institutions, is itself a central pillar of the Dutch system, and, in the 1960s, was conveniently reinterpreted as the standard of a new multicultural orthodoxy - officially expressed as "integration with maintenance of one's own identity". It was in this respect that Dutch society found itself in seeming harmony with the new Muslim populations who began to arrive from the 1970s - partly from the former colony of Surinam, but mostly from Morocco and Turkey. Muslims wanted their own schools and mosques, and the Dutch government happily provided for and funded them. Just as there had been Catholic, Protestant and secular "pillars" in the Netherlands, there could now be a Muslim one too.

Hirsi Ali's recommendations to the Labour policy unit were blunt and radical: close all 41 Islamic schools, put a break on immigration and change article 23. Jaws hit the table. The reaction she got indicated how badly she had started trampling on taboos. Job Cohen, who would emerge as one of the key bridge-builders in Dutch-Muslim relations, suggested that Hirsi Ali focus on integration. Influenced by the events of September 11, however, she began to publish articles arguing that Islam was not capable of integrating into a society that was itself not very good at integration. Furthermore, she concluded, if you looked into the condition of women in Muslim communities you found an intractable problem, one which liberals and multiculturalists refused to address. "I called it the paradox of the left," she says. "On the one hand they support ideals of equality and emancipation, but in this case they do nothing about it; they even facilitate the oppression."

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