If you’re looking for a defining image from the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, which ended on Monday, there are plenty to choose from: laughter rippling across the front lawns of the Diggi Palace hotel as Alexander McCall Smith recalled the travails of his fictional female detective from Botswana, an electric evening performance by the Tamil singer Susheela Raman, a moving speech on the power of literature by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan. But none was as arresting as the unannounced (for security reasons) appearance of the controversial Dutch-Somali writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Speaking to a packed hall, with her burly bodyguard unobtrusively off-stage, Hirsi Ali spoke about Islam—and its problems with individualism, women’s rights and sexuality—with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians. She described the faith she was born into as “a dangerous, totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion”. She argued against the moral relativism that has prevented Western intellectuals from scrutinizing Islam as they do Christianity and Judaism. She asked why it seemed impossible to have a sober discussion about the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad without riling Muslim sentiment, and made the case for bringing the Enlightenment to the blighted lands of West Asia and Muslim South Asia. Hirsi Ali touched upon India only briefly, to contrast the country’s success with the dismal state of neighbouring Muslim-majority Pakistan.
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9:56 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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