The Brown Memsahib Effect

Issue 9 Jan / Feb 2005

A new wave of Islamophobia has been unleashed in Holland. The spark this time was the murder of Theo van Gogh, a racist right wing fi lm maker. A string of mosques and Islamic schools have been set alight. The Dutch media have denounced the Muslims as ‘criminals’ and ‘truants’. A web based book of condolences for van Gogh had to be closed down because of racist abuse. Dutch Muslims now live in fear of their lives.

Holland is conventionally seen as relaxed, tolerant country. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Dutch were the most brutal and inhuman of all colonial powers. They perpetuated unspeakable atrocities on their colonial subjects such as the Indonesians. When I lived in The Hague during my student days I found the country to be deeply racist. So the rise and rise of the extreme right wing in Holland is not much a surprise for me. It only requires a small trigger for an avalanche of prejudice and bigotry to surface.

Collaborating with Van Gogh is a women called Ayaan Hersi Ali. Born in Somali into an elite political family, Hersi Ali suffered genital mutilation and other abuses from her family. She escaped from forced marriage, went to Holland where she ritually denounced Islam, became a champion of women’s right, and was lionised by all and sundry. As the voice and leading light of the VVD, an extreme right wing racist party, she has spent the last few years whipping up hatred against Islam and the Muslim community of Holland.

Replica Richard Mille

Ali’s charge against Islam is simple. All Muslim women are systematically abused; and all Muslim men beat their wives. Female circumcision and incest is the norm throughout the Muslim world. There is ‘absolutely no toleration’ in Islam, which is an oppressive, chauvinist creed. And she should know: she was a victim, and a Muslim, herself.

This is also the message of ‘Submission’, the nine-minute film she made with Van Gogh. A naked woman, her face covered with a veil, is praying. The text of the Qur’an is projected on her breasts, navel and thighs. Recitation of the Qur’an is mixed with a voice-over which tells us she has been forced into marriage and raped by her uncle. We soon learn that this is not just a story of a woman, but the entire narrative of Islam itself.

‘Submission’ is a crude amalgam of every lustful image in the Orientalist lore - from colonial picture postcards of naked Muslim women with only fl imsy veils over their faces to the depiction of prayer as a backward and grotesque ritual. And Ali herself is a neat mixture of an arrogant but self-loathing individual who cleverly uses every Orientalist trick to tap into the subconscious of a racist society to further her ambition. Is it any wonder that, within a decade of arrival in Holland, she has become a powerful politician? Where have we seen this before?

The West has always feted brown sahibs who demonised Islam as ‘authentic voices’. They could say, and get away with things that respecting white folks could not utter in polite company. Islam could be demonised in the guise of ‘high art’. Whatever Muslims may think or say about The Satanic Verses, it is represented as a literary accomplishment. V S Naipaul’s fascism and pro-BJP leanings, and his Hindu fundamentalist opinions and distortions of Islam could be ignored because he writes ‘so beautifully’.

But what are we to make of a string of brown memsahibs who are joining their brown sahib brothers in painting Islam with all the colours of evil? How is one going to justify Tasleema Nasreen, for example, who writes semi-literate pulp with no other pretence than to denigrate Islam? Or Norma Khouri whose bestselling ‘memoir’ about nasty Muslims killing their sisters in the name of honour, Forbidden Love, has been exposed as nothing but a pack of lies. Or the endless stream of over hyped books about being trapped in Saudi harems, escaping from the clutches of the Talibans or slavery in Africa – all of which are nothing more than crude propaganda designed to turn their authors into celebrities.

I find the western elevation of the antics of brown memsahibs rather insulting. There are three assumptions at work here. First, we Muslims are so stupid that we do not know that the whole exercise has now become a well-trodden route to instant global fame and fortune. Second, we are so ignorant that we do not know that some of our sisters are oppressed and abused in the name of Islam, and so callous as not to be doing anything to fi ght and expose such practices. Third, only the mediocrities promoted by the West in the name of women’s rights are capable of doing anything about it, or qualifi ed to tell us and the West what to do about it.

There is a clear distinction between fi ghting for women’s rights and demonising Islam: one cannot become a platform and an excuse for the other. People like Hersi Ali are not a solution but part of the problem. They pander to the worst prejudices of western society. They compound the injustices and make it all the more intractable. In the end, they disgrace the very West whose values they pretend to uphold.

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