The Price of an Entrance Ticket to Western Society: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heinrich Heine and the Double Standard of Emancipation

Abstract

Current public debates on Islam mostly revolve around the question of whether, and to what extent, Muslim immigrants should be required to adjust to the values of the modern societies in which they live. Such debates echo similar debates concerning the ‘Jewish Question’ that were conducted during the processes of Jewish emancipation in many European countries throughout the nineteenth century. In both cases there were/are controversies dealing with religious dress, circumcision, ritual slaughter, the language of sermons and the content of religious texts. In such debates, apologists for Muslims or Jews frequently criticise far-reaching calls for infringements on the right of religious minorities to profess their religion and culture as veiled forms of antisemitism or Islamophobia. In some cases they could be right, in others they could be wrong. What I would like to discuss here, however, is the limited understanding of Islamophobia and antisemitism that is implied in these debates. Understood as the motivation behind calls for assimilation, antisemitism and Islamophobia may easily be taken to be phenomena whose central—and unacceptable—feature is the demand for Jews or Muslims not to be who they really are—to compromise their inner selves. Such an understanding, however, does no justice to the complexity and venom behind forms of antisemitism and Islamophobia that are related to processes of emancipation. In this chapter, the stories of two figures whose works and lives were closely connected to their emancipatory journey, Heinrich Heine and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, will serve to reveal this complexity. Both of their lives were devoted in large part to their expressed wish to acquire an entrance ticket into a non-Jewish or non-Muslim society to which they felt a true affinity, and to an extent (Hirsi Ali more than Heine) rejected the religious traditions from which they came. Yet both became, I will argue, victim to a certain kind of stereotyping that had everything to do with their attempts at emancipation. My main point will be that this was a stereotyping that not only asked them not to be themselves, but—ironically and impossibly—also expected them to remain true to their despised otherness, to be their supposedly authentic selves. I will call the cause of their predicament ‘the double standard of emancipation’. The significance of uncovering this double standard lies not only in its benefits for our understanding of antisemitism and Islamophobia, helping to debunk its stereotypes, but also in the way in which it helps us to make sense of the sometimes captivating ways in which those targeted by it, like Hirsi Ali and Heine, behave and act.