Tarek Fatah: "Muslims Won't Listen to Hirsi Ali"

He's right, of course. There is no way a true believer would listen to a female apostate, a chick who, as Fatah writes, "has referred in the past to their Prophet Mohammed as a 'pervert' and a tyrant."
 
For Fatah, a Muslim who rejects "political" Islam but who still reveres Islam's founder, that makes Hirsi Ali "guilty of invoking...sharia to pass judgment on Prophet Mohamed as a pervert and a tyrant."
 
Actually, it seems as though it's Fatah who wants to have it both ways. He wants to separate mosque and state, but he also want to continue revering Islam's founder despite his questionable actions, ones recounted in glorious and gory detail in Islam's holy writings.

No matter. Fatah rightly points out that Hirsi's book really boils down to an academic exercise, a manifestation of her new life in the West:

As she acknowledges to the reader:

"I am now one of you: a Westerner. I share with you the pleasures of the seminar rooms and the campus cafes. I know we Western intellectuals cannot lead a Muslim Reformation. But we do have an important role to play." 

I would suggest that the role she has to play is the same one she has played in the past: raising non-Muslims' awareness re Islam and what Muslims believe.

As such, her appeal to what she calls "Mecca" Muslims (Muslims who don't go in for the violent M.O. Mo adopted when he decamped from Mecca to Medina) may be helpful for an infidel's understanding of the faith. However, it is unlikely to gain traction with ordinary Muslims, who do not know the pleasures of the seminar room and campus cafe, and who have no interest in playing the effete Western parlor game of "Mecca" v. "Medina" Muslims (why do so when genuine divisions--Shia v. Sunni--already exist?).

These Muslims are about as likely to follow Hirsi Ali's recipe for "reformation" as they are to lend credence to the words and thoughts of...Mr. Tarek Fatah.