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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"She arrived when tolerance had broken out here and a deafening silence fell over the land when she left". This doubly 'blasphemous' phrase I overheard in one of the animated debates that followed the high drama in the Parliament, when the ousting of Ayaan Hirsi Ali provoked the fall of the second Cabinet of the Christian-Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende. I wish to analyze the mimetic crisis that led to the sacrificial ousting of this Somalian refugee who left unceremoniously after having climbed in a record time to the high office of Dutch parliamentarian for the governing VVD-party (mostly dubbed as right-wing liberal). To this end, I shall briefly situate and analyze those extraordi­nary events. But rather than limit my story to that fascinating piece of political theatre, I shall also try and sound its social dimensions by focusing both on the conflicts in democratic multi-party politics and, undoubtedly more important, on the link between these tensions and the larger global scene, in particularly the dispute between the West and the Islamic challenge. As to the latter, I shall focus more specifically on the often ignored anthropological divergence in kinship matters, which I deem to underlie the controversy on the Shariah. In these three points, I hope to indicate how the Girardian theory can be enlightening.  

When tolerance broke out 

This bright Somalian refugee, who reached Holland in the summer of 1992, there to receive quite promptly asylum status and study opportunities, became part of the discordant scene that made The Hague such a nervous theatre of politics after the murder of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn. Her case came to a head when she wrote the script for the film "Submission" about domestic abuse against Muslim women, which eventually led to the ritual killing of the cineaste Theo van Gogh by a radical Muslim man, leaving no doubt about the true target of his act. Immediately, the high profile politician was given police protection, while she felt devastated that her friend and outspoken columnist had fallen victim to the hatred they both had provoked with their relentless critique of social woes among Muslim immigrants, who were not sufficiently taken to task on issues like wife-beating, honour-killing, forced marriages, child abduction and other crimes occurring in the growing ghetto's. It had been Pim Fortuyn's main appeal that he placed this issue on the agenda, thereby polarising politics and causing the stunning defeat of the social-democrat PvdA that ended the so-called 'Paarse Cabinet'.[1] 

Ayaan's amazing rise to notoriety and dramatic undoing can be summarised only briefly although it deserves an in-depth analysis from Girardian point of view. Her personal story leading to the asylum request in The Netherlands is intriguing and described in detail in her autobiography, which journalists got hold of prematurely, triggering her dramatic ousting. Daughter of a renowned Somalian clan and a father whose political activity ended in jail and an early death, Ayaan found her road to freedom against many odds. Her severe Muslim training that included painful beatings and the excision ritual, and the loss of her younger sister at the hands of such 'educators' left her traumatised. As a refugee in Kenya, she was able to attend a renowned girl school, but decided to flee when she was given to a clan cousin living in Canada in an arranged marriage without her consent. Having left for to Canada allegedly to join her husband she got off in Germany and fled to the Netherlands, which she knew to be hospitable. At her arrival she changed her third name from Magan to Ali, another of her ancestors, to facilitate hiding from her clan members. So she was registered as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her Somalian origin, her father's death and her own suffering from Muslim anti-feminist practices oiled asylum procedures. She soon got citizenship and study facilities in political sciences. A brilliant and fast learner as she was, she learned Dutch at a phenomenal speed and was soon recruited into the social-democratic party's scientific office called Wiarda Beckman. When Pim Fortuyn started criticising that party for being too soft on Muslim discriminatory and criminal practices, Ayaan realised that her own story would receive too little attention in her own party and moved over to the rival right-liberal VVD-party's Telder office. To grasp the significance of this move, we need to consider briefly the political setting of party politics in The Hague at the time.

The words I mentioned earlier on 'tolerance having broken out' not just refer to the curious coalition between two political parties that used to be fierce  opponents, but also hints at the wider ambience of what Fukuyama called the 'end of history' after the fall of the Berlin wall and its euphoric sphere of general indifferentiation. Any ideological antagonism seemed gone forever and Hunter's ideas on a clash of civilisation had not yet grabbed people's minds. Moreover the economic upsurge and the easing labour market that followed this optimist political mood drove the normally opponent camps of employers and unions together. In The Hague, this translated in the so-called Polder-model, a form of negotiations in which utilitarianism prevailed and opponents let ideology be bygones for the sake of pragmatic results. Both employers and unions needed an influx of new labourers, to swell the ranks not only of the unskilled labour force but also of the dwindling union membership. As for the social-democrats party, they were quite welcoming for Muslim immigrants as a counterbalance against the Christian-democrats, whose religious foundations they loved to shake. Indeed, 'tolerance' had captured the political high ground and the parties rivalled in picturing the other as intolerant. One of the main selling points was the willingness to let incoming migrants retain their cultural identity and especially their religious customs.

This setting, though, was not typically Dutch. All of Western Europe faced the task of managing a refugee inflow which was dreaded and solicited at the same time, amidst a high degree of indifferentiation. Not only was the leadership ambiguous and largely indifferent to problems that rose rapidly notably in the suburbs. The Hague curiously saw foreigners coveted by rival political parties that joined hands in moot partnerships. Priding themselves on Dutch age-old tolerance they chose to ignore the rising issues of ill-adaptation as they shifted the burden of conflicts down the social scale. It was Fortuyn's prime message that this head-in-the-sand 'Polder' model of 'Paars' politics created rubble on all levels, as tolerance overstepped its limits. He unmasked it as a hypocritical toy of bureaucrats who left ordinary citizens to carry the burden of a faltering integration in the suburbs and to care for the immigrants undergoing endless legal procedures in the asylum centres.

After the 9/11 attacks on the New York Twin Towers and the only half-hearted regret many Muslim immigrants in the West had shown, while some even openly hailed the al-Qaeda success, the critique on them was not long in fomenting. In a secretly filmed outburst among his party leaders, Fortuyn voiced a fierce attack on the menacing Muslim lack of patriotism and disrespect of Western values. As a homosexual he felt particularly targeted. Meanwhile, the social-democrats continue to champion tolerance, notably through the popular mayor of Amsterdam, who as a Jew was able to harness much of the growing anti-semitism among Muslim youth. Meanwhile ever more columnists in different papers raised the tone criticising not just the Muslims and the half-hearted politicians, but the Islam and its Prophet as well. Among them, some friends of Ayaan (such as van Gogh, de Winter, Elian); and she herself also stepped up her campaign against the Qur'anic discrimination of women. She openly voiced her apostasy from Islam and shifted to a virulent atheism, following the philosopher Herman Philipse. 

The highly polarised local and general elections then gave the Fortuynist party LPF a landslide rise at the expense of the ruling parties some whom disgraced themselves by scoffing the victor. Polarisation went in overdrive soon after, when Fortuyn was shot by an environmental activist, which left his party in disarray, even as it had been chosen to participate in the new Cabinet led by the inexperience Christian-democrat Prime-Minister Balkenende. Confusion not only beset the party but also the three parties of the outgoing Cabinet, one of which had reluctantly agreed to sit in the new one. This right-wing liberal VVD-party was the one to which Ayaan had turned for being dismayed with the soft approach of her social-democrat friends. Her rising star gave the party a boost as she was in clear agreement with the more rigorous immigration policy that was being worked out by another party-favourite Rita Verdonk. But their fellowship would soon became the rod to attract the media's lightning and her ritual undoing.

Ayaan's holiness scapegoated

Having rapidly turned into an icon of feminist emancipation, not just by sheer brilliance or stunning beauty, but notably by her courage to speak out against patriarchal Muslim rules, Ayaan could hardly fail to whip up controversial feelings even within her own party. Since a majority of the Muslims loathed her criticism of Islam and the social-democrats continued to ogle the migrant poor, the scene became very tense, more particularly when the Fortuynist party disintegrated and a new cabinet had to be formed in which they were left out to be replaced by the left-wing liberal D'66. This offered chances to the social-democrats, now in opposition and still steaming about her desertion, to corner both Ayaan and their rival suitor, the former coalition partner. The murder of the cineaste Theo van Gogh, in response to her film on Muslim wife-beating, brought to Ayaan soon the role of the classical pharmakos, René Girard has  analyzed so brilliantly. Highly admired and praised, she came to be a value worthy to be slaughtered for peace sake.

Her Achilles heel was found by the journalist Zembla-team of the left-wing TV-group VARA.[2] As the curtailing of immigration and the huge backlog of asylum cases had become a government priority, to be dealt with by the hard-headed VVD-minister Verdonk, the Zembla-team set out to find cracks in Ayaan's own immigration case and citizenship. They found her brother in Kenya ready to testify that she was not threatened when fleeing to the West and that she had entered into the so-called arranged marriage on her own accord. Further, they pointed at her falsifying her identity by changing her third name from Magan to Ali. Given that Westerners take the last name as the most important (family) name, this meant that she had foibled her right of asylum. Their TV-program was called "The holy Ayaan" and it urged a deposed minister of the Fortuynist party, now sitting in the parliamentary opposition, to confront his successor Verdonk, who was forced to question the legality of her friend's citizenship.

It is beyond my scope to describe the merry-go-round of emotional outbursts and fake indignation of the ensuing debates, which were almost exclusively a female affair, with the socialists and their allies defending Ayaan against her party-ally, although they had provoked the piece of drama in the first place. The vicious insult of dubbing a declared apostate "The Holy Ayaan" and the less than edifying debates between the self-declared champions of a-religious politics, had all the hallmarks of a proxy lynching that was to result in her ousting and silencing, while no one was keen on being blamed for it. In itself this piece of theatrical brinkmanship which ended in the (not-unintended) fall of the Cabinet would deserve a Shakespearean re-staging garnished with ample innuendos and double-talk. A theatre of envy, Dutch style!

But to an anthropologist, there was much more afoot than a comedy of self-disgracing and envious hypocrites. There was a crisis in the official self-perception of the nation that had prided itself on tolerance. The silence that set in after Ayaan's departure was more eloquent than any speech delivered at the time. When almost a year later the Zembla-program was nominated for the newly established price "De Tegel" (The Tile) for the best journalistic product of the year, it was passed by silently, as should be done by any sacrifice having brought katharsis. So the question rises what had been achieved and what had been the underlying issue? As Ayaan eventually left Holland for the US, having retained her citizenship, the second Cabinet of Prime Minister Balkenende was in disarray. And whether she brought katharsis to the Dutch political frictions can not outright be answered in the affirmative. Those claiming that she brought the turmoil unto herself have clearly done so within girardian parameters. She rose to prominence like a comet, turning into an adorned pharmakos - as she hailed from a race that traditionally only produced slaves and amusing dancers, lovers or soccer stars - and then being ousted in a violent ritual. But her brave farewell speech that pivoted on her kinship, illustrated that hers was far from just an internal Dutch affair. Under the title of 'appearance of holiness' philosophers like Groot and several journalists have pointed out that she voiced an Enlightenment ideology which was akin to leftist ideals but was promoted mainly by right-wing liberals, to which her new boss (American Enterprise Institute) may also be counted. But this cannot fail to raise a few eyebrows about the Western political culture and its rivalling twins ideologies.  

Would-be peace between rivalling twins

The curious political formula of a 'Paars' (violet) government combining the erstwhile opponent socialist and liberal parties was hardly peculiar to the Dutch scene. Both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have hailed Prime Minister Wim Kok as the visionary for having spearheaded a new vista, often called Third Way, in which Thatcherite principles were adapted to more socialist objectives.[3] The victory of free market economics over communist systems was saluted by a reconciliatory rhetoric in which economic growth and consumerism served as lubrication for a scaling down of party rivalries. After 1989 this could readily be presented as the final fruit of what 1789 had all be about. Even the French socialists now joined in and praised what was first and foremost the victory of pragmatist capitalist in which humans were at the service of the world-wide machinery. The two rivalling political families became twins who were increasingly hard to tell apart. Ayaan - like a modern Jeanne d'Arc - became a mythical pawn in this civil yet tumultuous process of reshaping the Western political landscape, as she symbolised hopes of a young and energetic world society with an emancipated women participation and a reduced role for any ideological or religious groupings.

The junior partner in Wim Kok's 'Paars' Cabinet had been the driving force behind this a-religious social-liberal model, which proved rather conservative due to a purely pragmatic so-called Polder-model approach, based on: forget about ideals and do business as best you can. This created a twinship between opponents through a deliberate indifferentiation which pivoted on a common enmity towards religious (i.e. Christian) influences in public life. A curious ambiguity showed when the formal hospitality to Muslim immigrants clad n in a cloak of tolerance clearly adopted Christian themes of charity and biblical care of foreigners, but aimed at undercutting Christian dominance in politics. Muslims became the comrades one loved to hate and any Muslim complaint of discrimination was readily led on to the main enemy of agnostics and Muslims alike: the dogmatic Christians.

This triple love-hate pattern of alliances and enmities - in which one side was itself an unlikely amalgam of three rivals - was bound to evoke a mimetic crisis when the flow of migrants swell and when qualms about the new millennium rose all across the West. The sudden shift in patterns of tolerance after 9/11 landed opposing religions into one basket as sources of tension and intolerance. While Christians argued ever more explicitly for a partnership with the 'moderate' parts of Islam, criticism of Islam grew more adamant by the day among the secularist champions of the Enlightenment principles in Holland as well as abroad. Ayaan and her friends were in the forefront of this, notably after the murder of Theo van Gogh. But just what was their target and what did Muslims perceive as the fight that raged against them?

Issues like wife beating, homosexuality, female dress, cartoons on Mohammed seem rather unrelated, except for allegedly being the object of God's law. But, although some would lump all book religions together as alien to the Enlightenment's rationalist secularism, no one can ignore that Islam and Christianity are eager to stress that the law has an entirely different meaning to either of them. They are like twin brothers who inflate differences that seem quite marginal to others, leaving the question what is the actual relation between them, since they both stress their similarity and yet emphasize the differences incessantly, while recalling their historic clashes? Are theological issues such as the Trinity or the saving cross truly what separates them, or should one rather look at their social model and perception of life? I would argue that the two have deepened animosity concerning a social aspect that is seldom spelled out, but which spoke loud when the Dutch secularists and Christians alike protested at a suggestion of the Minister of Justice Donner that democracy also implies that the shariah should be introduced if a majority vote so decides.

If we seek to grasp the rivalry between the West and Islam we must weigh this gut-level gasp about the shariah and how it relates to the theological differences? The items mostly mentioned in this matter, apart from the summary juridical penalties, are mainly to do with what Westerners mostly consider personal matters: apostasy of the faith, marriage arrangements, homosexuality, female dress, honour killing, excision, wife beating. These seem far removed from theological debates on the Christ's divine sonship or the monastic ideals of asceticism. And yet we are to look precisely at these links to find out where the rivalry and intolerance derives its fuel from.

We know that Mohammed was aware of the controversial religious practices and beliefs in the monotheistic beliefs around Arabia. Jewish, Christian, Manichaean and other parallels abound in his teachings and the link with the torah, the psalms and the gospel is even explicitly spelled out in the Qur'an and these parallels tend to support rather than to weaken its message. Two striking exceptions stand out, though, which concern the role of Jesus and the ascetic ideals of monastic life. That Jesus as God's Son could atone for human sins and redeem all by his death on the cross is radically rejected as is also the suggestion that living an ascetic celibate might be a spiritual ideal. The imagery that is being rejected here as resolutely as modern Westerners reject the shariah is the notion of a mediated bond of salvation between man and God via a Redeemer Christ. But at this point we should raise the question if the provocative action of Ayaan with her many supporters and the revulsion at the idea of shariah-rule are not more than just another proof of the age-old Dutch commerce-driven and anti-churchy love of freedom, which spawned the 14^th-century Devotio Moderna in the Hanze-town of Deventer and the 17^th-century Radical Enlightenment around Bayle and Spinoza.[4] Is this just a matter of tolerance championed by a densely populated nation that prefers commerce above preaching? Or is one rather to discern a rivalry between two opposing applications to social life of a twin communion in centralised thinking inspired by a shared monotheism? Although the secularist protagonists claim to oppose any form of religious dogmatism, the question rises how their rhetoric fits so easily in the discourse of Western openly religious politicians defending 'our' way of life. How did Western libertarian tolerance arise from a Christendom that fought the Muslim onslaught for many centuries?  

Thorough-bred intolerant tolerance

I wish to argue that the Christian-Islam stand-off over the centuries has led both sides to undo, in opposing sense, a basic aspect in human kinship structures, leading each to a claim of universalism that avoids vulnerability and professes a fake tolerance. In two earlier studies I have suggested that the controversy between them is linked to a curious linguistic development and opposite options that sprang from there, as worded typically by two scholars during the inversion of their relative power.[5] 

Little attention is paid to the linguistic curiosity that Gospel (or good-spell) translated a particular Hebrew use of the semitic radical bsr that had arisen in the post-exilic period of the second temple and notably in the spirituality of Deutero-Isaiah. This bsr had come to mean a redemptive message, akin to the salvation religions that had arisen in Persia in clear affinity with notions of spiritual purity in Zoroastrianism and deliverance (moksha) in Hinduism and Buddhism. While Gnostic and Manichaean influences pushed this idea of a spiritual salvation to a climax, early Christianity tried its utmost to find an answer and give the earthly reality its due. Through the efforts of Augustine in particular, this use of 'spell' (as tiding of redemption) came to be linked to the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross, whose blood was said to wash people's sins and bring deliverance. But René Girard has shown convincingly how controversial a sacrificial reading of the cross was in relation to the biblical message as he explained how both the Gospel and the letter to the Hebrews pivoted on the divine refusal of blood sacrifices in favour of the offering of a purified heart. In this he joined the qur'anic rejection of the crucifixion, yet stayed clear of the ongoing sacrificial practices at work in the Islamic tradition. My hypothesis would be that the sacrificial logic at work in the Christian and Muslim rhetoric took on an opposite meaning, but remained equally directed to avoiding the vulnerability that their religious insights had basically in common with the so-called primitive kinship-based religions found in non-centralised societies. 

The reading of bsr as tiding of spiritual redemption pivoted on a split in an all-Semitic root which, according to biblical theology, got divided into a Hebrew word for tiding of deliverance and one for healthy life, bodily wellbeing and sensual enjoyment. This split is missing in most Semitic languages, and in my hypothesis, this caused Mohammed to voice his objection to the idea of Jesus' redemptive death and to the practice of ascetic monasticism with stress on celibacy. To him the good-spell (Injil) was less about people's spiritual escape from cosmic evils than about the building a community submitting to God's law of ordered family life and justice. Faced with the acrimonious quarrels about the identity of Christ as the mediating Son of God, he followed that linguistic unity of bsr as message of wellbeing in faithful submission to God's law, of which he declared Jesus to be a prime messenger.

It has been argued that the Bedouin-based Muslim faith rejected the more personalised salvation religion that came to flourish in the urban centres of the Roman empire and in the rather unsettle conditions of post-exilic Israel, being subject to constant turmoil and oppression. Whatever the sociological conditions, it can safely be stated that the stress on the individual has been outspoken in Christian spirituality as opposed to the weight given to family coherence in Islam. It cannot be denied, indeed, that the aversion to a Muslim shariah rule mainly targets the kinship order with its paternalistic model, symbolised by the arranged marriages, honour killings, imposed female veils, excision and wife beating, which Ayaan so relentlessly tackled.

The Muslim objection that these are marginal aspects in a religion that chiefly aims at social peace and justice has little impact, because both societies have in effect chosen an opposite strategy in name of the one transcendent God. I have earlier linked the opponent patterns to the core notions presented by the innovating researchers ibn-Khaldun and Cusanus at the time when Western predominance was in the making. The new historical research by Mohammed ibn-Khaldun, which pointed at fluctuations in rising and declining empires, set out from a typical Muslim perspective by viewing the asabiyyah or filial attachment to the clan and spiritual community (Ummah) as the prime force of any power. On his part a few decades later, Nicolas of Cusa, in urging a renewed unity and mental 'concordance' in the Western empire, set out from the opposite Christian notion of an individual search for the transcendent in the coincidentia oppositorum. The latter can be understood only within the model the Western Church had worked out on the basis of the dogma of salvation by Christ's sacrificial death (which the subsequent Reformation did not annul but rather solidified). This dogma got a strong sociological imbedding via Church law, not only by the sacramental role given to priestly class, but more particularly by the key position the Church held in marital affairs. Taking celibacy as an ideal of Christian spirituality, marriage itself was to be viewed as a relation to the divine in a personal bond to another believer (or, with dispensation, to another person seen as a hopeful convert). Here marriage and sexuality itself had become a purely personal affair between a soul and its Redeemer, rather than a sociological tool of earthly order.

This social difference was linked to a dogmatic opposition and it grew ever more profound as the confrontation got political and material aspects. As the Western shipping was able to circumvent and undercut the Arab monopoly on Asiatic trade, the emerging nation states of the (mainly Protestant) Europe headed by Holland and England (and their Western colony, the USA) took the religious symbols of Christ's saving blood as an ideological base for capitalism (as Max Weber has been keen to point out). But too little has been said in this context about the rise of sexual individualism. It has been remarked that the rise of tolerance in the 17^th century Holland and adjacent areas had no liking for the sexual libertinism which Muslim authors have scathingly blamed on Christianity's idea of sacramental mediation. Yet, it must be clear that the medieval church law was bound to result in an ego-centric view of sexuality, in which homosexuality, anti-conception, IVF-fertilisation and advanced genetics were the natural outcome of the individualised relation with the Transcendent, which Protestantism strengthened rather than weakened, even when it opposed the priestly mediation.

In sum, the mutual animosity between these two twin-faiths has led to a stand-off in which the one stresses total fidelity to the patriarchal group that also mediates your religious adherence, from which you are never to apostate, while the other stresses an individual's duty to find one's way and happiness in the open market of unlimited options. It cannot escape our attention that the sexual and marital issues hold a central position in these matters. Westerners feel that procreation is basically a matter of the individual dealing with genetic technology, whereas Muslim views rather subordinate sexuality to procreative sides of the asabiyyah, to one's duty to keep God's ummah healthy and wealthy. But it would seem that both sides have thereby given sway to a type of universalism that contains a degree of intolerant tolerance through the juridical reading of their respective traditions.

With respect to the shariah, Westerners voice fears that the universalistic claims of Islamic laws breed an intolerable intolerance with its abysm in the honour killings and death penalty for apostasy. But they are unawares of their own intolerant form of individualism and of its roots in the Church's law on kinship affairs. As spelled out before, the stress on the spiritual deliverance by Christ's sacrificial blood and the ascetic ideals going with it has brought the medieval Church to develop a sacramental system in order to avoid the Gnostic option of outright spiritualization. But this proved to be a half-hearted solution, since the sacramental system did place the individual at the centre, albeit in dependence on priestly mediation. Given the fact that the sacrificial order had thoroughly been undermined by the evangelic message, as Girard has so brilliantly ascertained, that this mediation was bound to be unmasked as largely political, favouring a system in which the individual and his/her rights of protected liberty were paramount. In terms of kinship and sexuality, this meant that the Church's canon law had instilled in people the awareness that not family interests, but they themselves ruled their sexuality in response to God's calling and the sacramental system. But no sooner had the latter unravelled following that Reformation and other political rebellions, or the universal rights of the individual became a value that imposed itself with intolerant force. The libertarian struggles ever since the 17^th century have amply been illustrated this drive, which has an intolerant streak to it as can be seen in many areas. Any attempt of the authorities to limit liberties in order to stem abuse - be it in the control of alcohol or drugs, euthanasia, abortion or game shows with body parts - is a priori suspect of being authoritarian and religiously motivated. This relentless drive for 'tolerance' gets a symbolic value in the kinship order and sexuality. Indeed, any criticism of free sex or homosexuality is deemed to be a social evil to be stamped out in the name of freedom. Seeing sex as subordinate to its procreative purpose has become the most abysmal 'intolerance'. That homosexuality is a contradiction in terms escapes all due to this intolerant tolerance which presents the apex of the drive to individualisation, started by the Church's canonical rules, whose extreme rules on the forbidden degrees of 'incestual’ bonding had the unforeseen effect of a stark individualism. I speak of 'incestual', because this term came to symbolise the limit to libertinism just as homosexual rights epitomised the pinnacle of human rights for which Ayaan and her fellow columnists stood firm. No sooner had the latest Cabinet been sworn-in or the focus went to the obligation of civil servants to officiate at gay weddings whatever their own moral views. Human rights tolerated no back-peddling on such acquired rights of same-sex union, free IVF, etc. It is not difficult to see how this represents the extreme consequence of a so-called enlightened liberty for the individual who should not be limited by any imposed limitations, whatever source they come from, since the State is obliged to ensure that no person is blocked from realising one's full potential through forces beyond the personal control.

Obviously, the two societal projects at the centre of the global controversy behind the Ayaan affair were polar opposites, due to the key ideals of total asabiyyah on the one side, and the free personal choice on the other, which might either be linked to Christ's redemptive action or to the secularist ideals of enlightened liberalism. But these poles rooted in opposite yet equally distorted views on kinship's role and eventually in the controversy about the idea of original sin and its redemption. The rejection by Islam of the Christian view of salvation has had societal effects on both sides leading to a similar, yet apparently opposite form of denial which needs analysing. The Christian discourse speaks of an original disobedience by Adam which is redressed by Christ's total obedience on the cross. When Pelagius suggested that man could follow Christ on this way of obedience, the Church by mouth of Augustine stressed that only the mediating grace earned by Christ sacrificial atonement could raise man above the dire state of sin and that this required a total unification with him in faith, which was ideally symbolised by the ascetic celibacy, not as an achievement but as a gift. This construct pivots on the (political) notion of obedience, but it emerges ideally as a social concept of an a-sexualized union with the Absolute. We know Islam's outright rejection of three sides of this construct: Adam's sin affecting his offspring, Christ's sacrificial death, and our ascetic union to him. Yet it maintained the primal idea of disobedient insubordination to God being the deciding issue. I would argue that the Christian individualistic underrating of the kinship side of life, and the Muslim overrating it by making the male control of the kin group absolute are just two sides of the same denial. Later I wish to suggest that a new reading to the biblical Gen 3 story of the Fall (and its qur'anic parallel) may lead us out of this quandary that has brought the rationalists to reject both versions of monotheistic faith.

From early Enlightenment on, the Church's hierarchy was blamed for authoritarianism that many would now criticise imams for. True, some authors then saw Islam as a rational alternative to crush this authoritarianism, but most remarked that for all their claim of universalism and salvation both traditions were deemed intolerant propagators of fables, as Spinoza would have it. They were each other's mirror image in what one might call an individualistic and holistic version of the same rejection of a basic form of vulnerable communication. We must now see if this 'intolerance' is beyond reprieve.

Regaining one's true vulnerability  

The aim of any political system is said to be the protection of the vulnerable people in the face of hostile others. Ever since the Enlightenment - so highly acclaimed by Ayaan and her associates - the nation state has been portrayed as the protector of the individual against a tyranny, of which religious irrationalism and blood-and-soil kinship ties are claimed to be both the epitome and the source. Before we look at the true communication we seek to regain, we need to note that this care of the individual does not stem from the Enlightenment exalting Greek rationalism, but rather from the warning voice in God's name, raised by the biblical prophets against absolutist and oppressive tendencies on the political side. God delivering his people and urging leaders to have a pastoral care for the poor and weak is the core biblical message, which great Jewish authors like Marx and Freud translated in their particular ways and which Girard has analyzed as the anti-sacrificial logic. This said, we must try and recuperate the original word (logic, sophia) from which the Christian and Islamic practice had deviated, largely in an age-long mutual animosity.[6]

Those who call on the State to protect people against religious fanaticism curiously ignore the contradiction between this call and their claim that any centralised power (to which they appeal) roots in the religion (which they loath). What is more, they also ignore an anthropological trait which Girard convincingly pointed up in his views on any religion's ambiguity and which has been provocatively worded in Pierre Clastres' work La Société contre l'État, showing how the true purpose of cultural traditions and religious practices in particular lies in protecting social communication against centralisation of power. Clastres, as an keen student of Lévi-Strauss' structuralism, tried to show how all social rituals rely on a will to keep an exchange going via a gift and counter-gift communication the aim of which is to prevent the horizontal from changing into a vertical submission to power. His description of this hazardous exercise reminds one of the ambiguous Girardian model of (sacrificial) violence set to harness the greater social violence of an all-out mimetic crisis. The often discussed controversy between Girard and a structuralism that  views myth as the application of some universal model engrained in the brain would come to play here. Girard might agree with Louis Dumont in that the egalitarian oppositions structuralists speak about should rather be read in a hierarchical sense. But I wish to bring this idea to fruition by returning to the kinship studies with which Girard appears to avoid as he declared the scapegoat mechanism gender neutral. In keeping kinship concerns far from the domain of myth and ritual, all these authors might well be repeating the twofold deviation from true communication lurking behind the stand-off between the two religions of the book.

What follows can be no more than a working hypothesis that takes its lead from a seminal and perspicacious study by Scubla relating Lévi-Strauss' formula of mythological analysis to both the work of René Girard and of the mathematician René Thom.[7] In this he links the former's focus on myth to Girard's emphasis on ritual showing how both indeed are action-oriented in the sense of viewing religion as a crisis-solving deed using binary oppositions that can be related to Thom's theory of catastrophe and double cusp. This is not the place to summarise that analysis, but rather to propose a line of research which might take this further, but has been ignored for dubious reasons that one may suspect of being linked the above-mentioned presentiment against kinship affairs as a source of irrationality. I would call this in itself an irrational prejudice and recall that all anthropology and structuralism in particular describes the ordening of sexual procreation as the very source of any cultural structuring and that the latter tends to repudiate (or rather: transcend) rationalisation. Ordered procreation as a total social fact, in the sense of Marcel Mauss, subsumes the entire symbolising potential of humanity which centres in the discovery of sexual difference, its ritual acceptance in initiation rites and its control via the incest rules that impose a vulnerable communication. That vulnerability will prove to be a key factor to break the stand-off that haunts us.

Allow me a few lines about Banda views (in the CAR, Central African Republic) on three significant facts.[8] They openly state that people break up in clans (each with their name, totem, food taboo, hunting ritual, and protective spirit) so as to be able to marry one another. Children are deemed to pertain to the pre-natal realm up to the moment of their initiation, a ritual of cutting of the prepuce (female part of the boy) and clitoris (male part of the girl), after which they are called to enter the marital patterns. The actual marriage is viewed as the leaving of one's paternal homestead with its ancestral altar for sacrifices to cross the menacing inter-communal space and take the risk of unification with another unit deemed to be the most likely source of witchcraft. In other words: an adventure of pure bravery and vulnerability.

For all intents and purposes, this précis of the kinship drama can be seen as the primal setting of human kinship and culture, as a mixture of myth and ritual, to which the Lévi-Straussian canonical formula may be applied for analysis. The key operating factor here is, of course, what Lévi-Strauss noted as the incest rule, which remains operative in any kinship variant, even where close relatives (like cousins or even half-siblings) are wedded. Without going into the technicalities of the kinship logic, we may link up here with our questions about the Muslim and Christian stand-off. For both seem to reduce the Banda type of venture to the minimum, the former by stressing cousin marriage to strengthen the family line and the latter by declaring any relation irrelevant for the personal choice in sexual affairs. This proves to be mainly rhetoric in both cases, because all sides reject the very possibility of incest. Without making it too technical we must reflect briefly on this interesting fact.

Lévi-Strauss' main thesis has it that kinship is not about the membership of a linear group but about how exchanges between units are organised irrespective of how membership of a unit is established. This was stressed once again in his contribution to the 'texts offered to Louis Dumont' in which he ponders the enigma of marriages within close degrees of relatedness (we might think of the so-called Arabic cousin marriage).[9] This was written at the time when he returned to the analytic formula studied by Scubla, who explains how very prudent the author was, applying his formula only to the domain of mythology and without risking presumptuous applications to the domain of ritual or kinship. It might seem quite audacious therefore to go where the master would not tread. Yet I wish to suggest that the kinship is the field that might not only bring together the domains of myth and rite, which feature so prominent in the stand-off between Girard and structuralism, but even lead us to a common ground in the clash between Islam and the West by helping us in re-reading religiously the Fall in Gen 3 from a kinship point of view. But clearly I can only offer some rough outlines of this line of research.

Girard's reproach to structuralism that its mental constructs and egalitarian oppositions ignore the hard fact of agonistic sacrificial practices at work in rituals is only partly true. Scubla stresses the circular two-pronged nature of the canonical formula Lévi-Strauss who is aware that it is at work not just in myths, but is all social processes: the emergence of a problem due to indifferentiation is solved by the imposition of differentiation by some sacrificial means, leading to a new problem of indifferentiation. Here we readily recognise the agonistic understanding of the gift-giving discovered by Marcel Mauss as an equalising ritual in time, which is constantly challenged by the evidence of an eternal return of the enigma of inequality demanding ever new sacrifices. Myth and rite meet in the application of that problem-solving formula that faces the enigma of time as it culminates in the facts of transience, of death and its conquering by procreation. It is here that kinship and the myth of Adam and Eve in Eden comes in with its gender hierarchisation.

The indifferential status of the immortal male-female (hermaphrodite) union is brought to the actual state of sexual differentiation, linked to both procreation and death, which is deemed to be the true yet regrettable reality and which is effectuated due to the sacrificial cut in social equality. This sacrificial cut is symbolised in most traditions by the menstrual blood which 'proves' the female inferiority to the man (who lords it over her Gen 3:16), but which all know to be a lie in the same way the victimising of the scapegoat is a lie. It has often been said, that the Gen 3 story about the fall in the garden of Eden is about the discovery (and moral criticism) of sexuality. This does apply, but in a different, more agonistic sense, which brings the system of kinship arrangements into view and inverts the normal ritual-mythological order.  

The general ritual-mythological pattern is about justifying the present differentiation by approving the sacrificial remedy to the state of indifferentiation, as Girard has abundantly illustrated. To some extent Gen 3 fits this scheme, but the sacrifice is clearly rejected by the story itself. Indeed, the villain causing the crisis is not the enticing snake and even less the seductive Eve, luring Adam into eating, but rather God who imposed a ruling which analysts usually leave outside the equation. He forbids not just any fruit, not just any knowledge, but the knowledge of good and evil as a tool of discriminatory judgment. No doubt, the disobeying of this order at the satanic enticement is presented as the trigger to the miserable state that follows. But the core of the story lies in the 'discovery' of sex (from the Latin sectare, cutting apart). After Adam's stroll with God is stopped due to his hiding for being 'naked', his sexual (sectarian) state is effectuated by his cutting loose from his same-flesh (homocarnal) partner. God's interdict, which appeared so meaningless and arbitrary, now shows its deep meaning. The sexual differentiation is confirmed both in terms of myth and (sacrificial) rite, following the canonical form. Yet, it is not seen as justified, but rather as a vice humankind is to be delivered from.

Before we consider how the undoing of this quandary has dominated the three Abrahamic religions, we may let ourselves be instructed on the kinship issue by the Banda (in the CAR). As mentioned before, in their perception the in-law family is the prime suspect of any case of witchcraft, yet the entire thrust of the cultural system is to urge an initiated (and circumcised) youngster to leave the paternal homestead and ancestral altar)and cross the menacing mbundu (savannah) in search of that partner in total vulnerability. Indeed, the Banda language has the curious kinship term by which (classificatory) brothers and sisters call each other mutually koba (sibling of opposite sex), in which we recognise the verb ko, meaning to cut: they are to cut asunder to face the dangerous other in sheer vulnerability. The entire cultural melange of emblems and ritual codes (not to mention the endless literal array of trickster stories about the hilarious anti-hero tere) speak of this almost daily. Kinship and intermarriage forms the core of Banda society, triggered as it is by the incest rule that 'cuts' siblings 'asunder'. In fact, any (sacrificial) ritual, story telling and juridical settlement revives a similar pattern that is in each individual's mind: the hazardous adaptation to the totally other in marital confrontation.

I have deliberately chosen agonistic terms in this formulation, because the Banda are ever aware of their vulnerable obligation to match two branches of reality due to the incest rule. Yet they seem equally aware of the devious nature of this cutting onus, as they stress that the marks of clan-identity are artificial: "just to make marriage possible". The circularity Scubla noted in the structuralist form could not be expressed more clearly. The Banda 'cut asunder' into agonistic units so as to be able to 'unite with the adversary'. The cultural contradiction of the agonistic exchange - engrained in the incest law and underpinning the kinship order - looms large over history. Lévi-Strauss places it at the spot where Girard features the sacrificial knife that solves the mimetic crisis of appropriation. Taking the Banda view of the agonistic marital exchange as our guide, we seem entitled to converge these two, provided the incest rule is restored to its operational role so as to express people's basic and vital vulnerability.  

Vulnerable kinship, the key to tolerance  

Coming to compare the Banda views to what drives Islam and Christianity, we realise that the latter two in terms of kinship contradict that vital vulnerability, albeit in opposite sense. The one makes sex a mere personal affair if not a matter of competitive commerce, and the other subjects it radically to the asabiyyah in a patriarchal system. While both remain fiercely hostile to notion of incest, this appears basically as an evil of political ilk. That incest endangers the patriline in the one case, or damages some DNA- line in the other, appears less weighty to them than the civil order. The meddling with genes is no taboo, provided it is done under laboratory surveillance, and the reason of the State may offer permits in both systems. Which refers us back to the anthropological case in the biblical story of Gen 3 (and its qur'anic parallels in Q 2:31-37 and 20:115-123). Even though Q 2:37 and 20:122 speak of instant redemption by God so that Islam avoided the enigma of an hereditary sin from which Christ's cross was to save us, the basic message appears similar. Both traditions are ambiguous about the true mistake - by obfuscating the true meaning of the divine interdict - and speak of Adam's disobedience in search of power and eternal life. While Islam tend to translate this into polytheistic worship of alien deities, neither of them can hide that they speak in terms of male dominance and political order. Neither the total asabiyyah-submission to the patriarchal set-up nor the (less obvious) male dominance of the individualist domain even attempt to remedy the historical differentiation which the Qur'an expressed as mutual enmity (Q 2:36 and 20:123) and that appears in the Bible as Adam pouring blame on Eve, who passes it on to the next in line (Gen 3:12-13). The status quo is condoned and neither tradition leaves a doubt about the true focus of its political intent.

The question rises if the gender enmity of Q 2:36, as the source of strife during people's short sojourn on earth, is willed either by Allah God, or rather by the addressee of that divine discourse, the would-be king Adam whose story this is? Is the redemption that both traditions announce more than the narrator settling for a de facto subordination and thus the denial of true vulnerability? Does the analysis of this myth according to the Lévi-Straussian formula just lead to a hierarchical differentiation to which the Christian and Muslim salvation story offers only a post-mortem solution? Or, is there any way that these two religions might stand up and work out a common understanding of what appears in their books as a proto-evangelium, offering a third option beyond their respective terms of submission to authority and fake egalitarianism?

When kinship is enters the social debates, two themes come up spontaneously. One is the linear principle of tribal belonging, which counts as the root of all authority or State formation, despite structuralism convincing unravelling of this idea.[10] Secondly, and very much in keeping with the first, kinship is identified with abuse of power and corruption.[11] I argue that these two views confer with our two religious responses to the gender divide by confirming the domineering story as the core of what happened at the beginning of time. In line with Girard's analysis, though, I wish to argue that the sacred books do more than explain mythologically how the scapegoating and that enmity came about. They describe the actual differentiation as an evil discord that underlies all cultural exchanges. Although both religions stress that this evil is to be overcome, We cannot attribute the actual Muslim and Christian solutions to the real revelation. This rather follows the Banda vision of kinship as the exchange between rivals, as a marriage between foes, as a wizard and witch united, i.e. the call to hold out with your absolute other, whom you should see as the very purpose of your life as a man or woman. The agonistic core of kinship proves to be its key conviction. Although this would deserve a very lengthy elaboration, we may now try to pull together, from a Girardian point of view, an impressive number of exegetical and anthropological elements, so as to give a new reading of the enmity both Gen 3 and Q 2 speak about, and which is to be related to the wedding scene in the final chapter of the Apocalypse.

Girard himself pays ample attention to Kain's killing of his brother Abel as the evidence of murderous violence. But there is a much more dramatic scene of crushing violence already in Gen 3. The offspring of Eve will crush Satan's head. War is at the heart of the new reality, and the imagery is not without bearing on the language used in present wars, in which both call each other Satan. But let us not forget that we are in the realm of kinship and gender animosity. We recall that to Lévi-Strauss, following the lead of Marcel Mauss, marriage is a variant of war and of agonistic exchanges. It is significant to hear Jacques Derrida and Alain Caillé stress that giving in totally altruistic sense is impossible.[12] And we also recall that to Emmanuel Levinas any human encounter requires submission to the Other's primacy making ethics the prime philosophy. In following the Banda insight and agreeing with Lévi-Strauss that the (agonistic) marital exchange is the source of all culture and symbolic differentiation, we get another reading of the story of salvation than what either the Islam or current Christianity presents to us.

The anthropological literature abounds with studies on the parallel between marriage and war, violence and even cannibalism, making the killing and absorption of the Other the equivalence of marriage.[13] Banda affines are the enemies from beyond the plains that have to be confronted; they are the epitome of witchcraft I have to brave. The enmity that Q 2:36 speaks of, and which Adam expresses by declaring his partner the culprit of the primal disaster, is the most common theme of mythology. Wedding is the acceptance of that challenge to face the other across the borderline of identity.[14] In Banda terms, one might therefore call a wedding the union of a witch and a wizard, whose unification is the crux of all human culture. But, obviously, this rivalry is not the last word the sacred books tell us about the drama of a sexuated humankind. Differentiation is not the happy end of the myth, even if one is to take it deadly serious.

We now turn to the Apocalypse in order to rectify a misreading of the notion of redemption which has led both Islam and Christianity to an opposite, yet similar distortion of kinship in favour of the male dominance. While Q 2:37 shows God redeeming Adam straight after the sin, granting him the (guided) dominance he craves, the Christian story points to a saving sacrifice and mediation by the incarnated Son of God. The misreading of his saving event as a sacrifice to culminate all sacrifices has led the Church to become both a bulwark of male clericalism and the source of relativist individualism. René Girard has amply criticised this reading of the sacrifice as found in the Letter to the Hebrews, which tends to turn the Cross into a plan designed by God to receive satisfying atonement.[15] If we link the Eden drama to the final vision of the Apocalypse in the light of the central fact of the Cross, we arrive at the following scene: the new Adam (Jesus) undoes old Adam's sacrificial ousting of the partner by forgiving the killer's enmity and taking the murderous 'witch' as his bride. The two key notions after the Eden disaster are the readiness of Jesus to forgive and wash the enemy in his blood, after which the Spirit causes the bride to say: "come' (Ap 22:17). Pondering the agonistic aspect of the exchange mechanism that pivots on the incest-rule, we may now conclude that the heart of the revelation concerns the undoing of Adam's sacrificial scapegoating, not so much by a mediating atonement and even less by the inversion of the signs, but by bringing vulnerability to its height. Jesus is wedded to his murderous bride who stripped him and nailed him to the cross, because he had exposed her moral nakedness. In an apocalyptic meal in which he becomes food for the hungry witch, the two celebrate an all-forgiving union in which she agrees to do the same. The bridal meal in which the one willingly becomes the other's food becomes the key religious symbol, as is made clear especially in the Orthodox liturgy. I wish to suggest that their imagery of extreme mutual vulnerability, in keeping with the Banda agonistic model of exchange, may help to solve the clash between the twin monotheist traditions that have been at loggerheads for centuries.  

Not without interdividual re-ligion  

In her farewell speech, Ayaan recited her genealogy to explain the name shift from Magan to Ali, but also call attention to the strange way in which both traditions deal with a person's identity. I now wish I wish to sum up our findings in a few rough strokes. by joining a recent suggestion by Ayaan. As she went to Rome to promote her autobiography Infidele, Ayaan indicated to a Dutch radio station that her atheism was not hostile to all religion, provided it does not mean an irrational submission to an autocratic God known only from ancient texts. In the Catholic tradition she saw a credible model, since it had a mechanism for constant, centrally guided reform and rational re-reading of old symbols. Her position appeared to join other ex-Muslims calling on both religions to join forces in an agonistic, yet caring reform to offer a solution to the imminent cataclysm, since they are "nearest in affection" (Q 5:82). The calamity they refer to is the dangerous fault line the two traditions now contain in terms of their social-economic models that both rely entirely on the maximisation of fossil fuel consumption.

The Muslim world has majority possession of the world's fossil fuels and maximises its demographic reproduction on the base of that consumptive flow, following the divine calling to let "the best of all nations" outnumber the infidels. The West has a similar social model based on fuel consumption, not so much to outnumber others, but to control them by imposing managerial rules. In the latter model, the individual has every right to post as a victim of whatever discrimination and to receive satisfaction through an ever increasing consumption. Both models therefore rely on an unsustainable fuel consumption that is bound to falter for various ecological and political reasons. But we need to see is that a similar misreading of the sacred texts underpins both.

The Islamist revolt against Western hegemony at least has the merit to showing up the inherent contradiction on both sides. Western rationalism and individualism prove dangerously contradictory, for as the rational is hailed against religious illusions, it is also vilified by others for leaving out the equally important emotional side; and in turn, the idealist talk of Man as Ego forgets about the fact that people live in a constant mimetic exchange that makes any idea of the individual evaporate as a romantic lie. But the Islamists own reform pivoting on martyrdom for the blissful hereafter, contains a similar misreading of the Prophet's message, as the Danish cartoons correctly sought to point out. 

Girard's arguments against the sacrificial religion and the false individualism need no repeating. But the question remains if there can be a self-confirming approach which is at the same time total submission. Can the Western and Muslim project merge to undo the distortion of the sacred message that has deepened on both sides due to their competitive history? Can they accept a common calling bring a redemption that does not consist in shifting the blame unto a sacrificial lamb, but to accept being the lamb that needs to love and honour the marital other as the prime reality, however alien and hostile? It has been Levinas who developed the insight that responding to the challenge of the other's face is the very beginning of my being. Referring this back to the both the Banda vision and the Eden myth, we may state that the undoing of the Eden mishap requires giving up that judgmental mechanism that puts males all over in control of the forces of fertility because they refuse to accept there is no God who imparts authority but only a constant voice calling to reread (re-legere, religion) reality and give oneself as food to its life-giving source. The God of both the Bible and the Qur'an is the one asking Abraham, not so much to kill Isaac as to give up his hold on reality and recognise that reality is based on an interdividuality which makes the ethical response to the Other the prime philosophy of radical vulnerability.