Bruckner, Islam, and Multiculturalism

Pascal Bruckner has a rebuttal on the subject of Multiculturalism and Islam responding to both Timothy Garton Ash and to Ian Buruma. He argues that, “The right to difference gets us very quickly to the difference of rights, with which believers may be preserved from contamination from impious – and so impure - ideas and behaviour.” Bruckmer writes that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a better role model for Islam than Tariq Ramadan because the most important thing is for Islam to look within and to reform their religion not just to renounce violence. Sugary excerpt:

It seems to me a blatant error to start talking with conservatives just because they don't openly call for the holy war. This amounts to renouncing reform of Islam, provided Muslims renounce violence. But preferring modern fundamentalism to terrorism runs the risk of having both: orthodoxy and extremists, men with beards and kamikazes, seditious preachers and bombs, plague and cholera. After all, the obscurantist regime in Saudi Arabia didn't prevent the emergence of Al Qaeda.
This position, dictated by fear and short-term preoccupations, was taken by the English Labour government - even they now question it. And it was taken by Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior, when he supported letting the fundamentalists of the UOIF (Union des organisations islamistes de France, very close to the Muslim Brotherhood) join the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman. What's at stake here is the possibility that Islam could engage - like Rome at the time of Vatican II - in a true aggiornamiento, and take a critical look at itself and its 14 centuries of history, in particular at its relationship to violence and its desire for universal domination.

The problem that I have with Pascal Bruckner is that he always seems to be working backwards that is to take an absolute and passionate position and then to adapt reality to his position. Although I too prefer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Tariq Ramadan, I don't make the mistake to believe the difference between the two is just about Islam. The most important question, which Pascal Bruckner avoids to answer, is whether the right to difference can only mean what he wants it to mean just in order to be able to reject in order of the values of the Enlightenment. The most important question is whether identities are flexible or unchangeable that is whether when there will be a majority of people who will not agree with Bruckner they will be allow to change society. If it is fine to say or rather to scream that some things are unacceptable and intolerable, but there comes a time when the focus of the conversation must change and become about what is acceptable and what is permissible. It is a conversation that Pascal Bruckner doesn't want to have. Bruckner is a sentimentalist who believes that Europe is La Joconde, the Mona Lisa and that change no matter how consensual and acceptable would make it less of masterpiece.