Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Wiel Eggen

Ayaan, the issue of Magan and the exorcising of kinship

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ABSTRACT 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali entered the Netherlands during an economic boom in a welcoming ambience of ‘indifferentiation’, in which employers and unions applied the famous Dutch polder model and immigrants were an asset. Having worked her way up the political scene, though, she got the role of a classical pharmakos when times got rougher. As she shifted allegiance from the socialist family to the right-liberal VVD-party during the upheaval surrounding Pim Fortuyn, she became a pawn in a conflict that inevitably led to her sacrificial ousting.

Her tackling of Muslim family structures led her erstwhile friends on the left to embarrass both her and her new soul-mates on the right. A leftist TV-documentary Zembla exposed her as having shifted her name from one ancestor (Magan) to another (Ali) at the time of her asylum application, thus forcing the VVD-Minister Verdonk to declare her position illegal and to expel her for falsification of identity. At the height of this frenzy ritual – in which she was both a hero and villain, while her foe-friends used her to trip up the Minister and the Cabinet – and when things took a curious turn putting her both in-and-out, Ayaaan delivered a farewell speech, using a quasi-biblical genealogy to expose that Western duplicity of reducing kinship and human identity to a mere (patronymic) registration.

She thus placed the various rivals on one muddy stage; for, both political blocks of Western democracies – dubbed left and right – suddenly proved at one in a common loathing of kinship-issues. Indeed, when the Minister of Justice, shortly after that event, suggested that democracy means that the Shariáh should be introduced if a majority would opt for it, this raised an uproar betraying a mimetic rivalry between the two Abrahamic traditions which, so I argue, has to do less with historical or colonial grievances than with the opposing views on kinship as the foundation of human identity.

Western Christianity has widened the postexilic Jewish split of the Semitic root *bsr into two concepts indicating the ‘somatic’ or ‘spiritual’ bliss respectively (Eggen 2000). By declaring faith / reason man’s key aspect, it pegged human identity firmly on the latter. Whereas fruitful kin-ties formed the Semitic base for any salvation, the former got suppressed and gave way to the ideal of a liberal-egalitarian fraternity which resembles only superficially the Muslim ideal of the Muslim Ummah. In fact, Islam adamantly opposed the ‘monkish aceticism’ as an ideal. So, the mentioned protest betrayed a deep rift between rival monotheisms. I shall argue that Ayaan’s ousting ritual intended to obfuscate and conjure a cultural crisis opposing these rival branches of Abrahamic faith which, by under-valuing and over-valuing the kinship factor respectively, have blocked any easy road to reconciliation.  

Although René Girard’s theory tends to downplay the kinship factor and label the mimetic crisis itself as gender-neutral, I would argue that his theory might help both sides to reach the vulnerable position of grasping how the Adamic arch-rivalry has driven them both to extreme positions from which they seek deliverance. The gender-neutral transcendental Ego of the Western Enlightenment has taken the Muslim male-centred, communal identity as the rival it loves to hate ever more fiercely; and vice versa. But is there not a revelation they both have been entrusted with for the deliverance of humankind?