Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Page A

behavior, but who now saw fit to brand me as a traitor to their faith because I no longer wanted to be a sham Muslim. Many secular non-Muslim intellectuals were also quick to dismiss me as a “traumatized” woman working out my own personal demons. (Some continue to make that patronizing claim, like the eminent American journalist who once speculated that my family was “dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.’ ”)
    I was stunned and disheartened to discover that, in this particular debate, one of the core principles of Western liberal achievements—critical thinking about all belief systems—was not to be applied to the faith I had grown up in.
    Why I Am Not Exceptional
    For years I have been told, condescendingly, that my critique of Islam is a consequence of my own uniquely troubled upbringing. This is rubbish. There are millions of impressionable young men and women like me who have succumbed to the call of the Medina Muslims as I did when I was sixteen. And I believe there are just as many who now yearn to challenge the ultimately intolerable demands that ideology makes on them. In this chapter, I have briefly recounted the story of my early life not because it is exceptional but because I believe it is typical.
    Take the case of Shiraz Maher, an idealistic young man who was studying in Leeds, England, on September 11, 2001. Maher had spent his first fourteen years in Saudi Arabia, where the act of wearing a Daffy Duck T-shirt with the words “I Support Operation Desert Storm” (to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait) earned him a lecture on the American plot to establish military bases on “holy soil.” In 2001, having learned his lesson, he joined Hizbut Tahrir—Arabic for “The Party of Liberation”—which advocates the creation of a caliphate, and duly rose to become one of its regional directors. Maher later described Hizbut Tahrir’s philosophy: “It applauds suicide bombers but believes suicide bombing is not a long-term solution.” 1
    Where had he learned this philosophy? The answer is that in 1994 Maher had attended a Hizbut Tahrir conference in London where Islamists from Sudan to Pakistan came to talk about forming a caliphate. At the time, no one in the West objected, if indeed they noticed, and certainly no one within the immigrant Muslim community resisted. The result, according to Maher, was that soon the “idea of having an Islamic state had been normalized within the Muslim discourse.” 2 This message was spread by a new wave of preachers, who laid an uncompromising emphasis on Muhammad’s message in Medina about what Islam was and how it should be practiced. As within my own Somali community in Nairobi, young Muslims in the West were quite easily seduced by the Medina Muslims and their violent call to arms.
    Just as I left Islam after 9/11, Maher left Hizbut Tahrir after the 2005 bombing of the London Underground. (He didn’t personally know the subway bombers but, like him, they came from Leeds.) My mind had been opened at Leiden; Maher, by contrast, says he had encountered a more pluralistic view of Islam as a graduate student at Cambridge University. Today he is a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, King’s College London, researching the lives of young jihadists.
    The problem is that, right now, too many young Muslims are at risk of being seduced by the preaching of the Medina Muslims. The Mecca Muslims may be more numerous but they are too passive, indolent, and—crucially—lacking in the intellectual vigor needed to stand up to the Medina Muslims. When individuals are lured away from their midst by preachers calling for jihad and those individuals then commit an atrocity crying “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), the Mecca Muslims freeze in denial, declaring that the atrocity is un-Islamic. This attempt to decouple the principle from its logical outcome is