Illustration: Paul Newman Source: Supplied

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has brains and beauty and is a gift to those of us who like our prejudices confirmed.

No, it's not some snarly ex-Trot sounding off on Spiked.com, or some male-chauvinist cleric putting Hirsi Ali in her place for daring to criticise Islamic dogma. It is, in fact, the impeccably liberal writer and publisher Hilary McPhee, writing in The Age in July. And McPhee goes further, describing Hirsi Ali as disturbing and delusional and more than implying that if she didn't exist, we in the West would have to invent her. Even her books, McPhee suggests, wear their single-word titles like brand names.

McPhee is not the only liberal to attack the Somali tractarian and memoirist in this tone of scorn and insinuation; the insinuation being, of course, that her views fall all the more easily on the ear for the fact she is so easy on the eye.

In 2006, Timothy Garton Ash -- normally a font of good sense -- wrote the following: "It's no disrespect to Ms Hirsi Ali to suggest that if she had been short, squat and squinting, her story and views might not be so closely attended to." "It's no disrespect" seems a strange way to preface a statement of such staggering condescension.

Garton Ash has since apologised for his comments about Hirsi Ali's looks and, indeed, for labelling her an Enlightenment fundamentalist. But many commentators on the liberal Left continue to regard her askance and some are even openly hostile. My guess is that they see Hirsi Ali as a sort of useful idiot of the anti-immigration Right and of those who seek to spin the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a moral crusade.

Perhaps they have the ghost of a point. Everyone, after all, is someone's idiot.

Take, for example, writer Paul Berman, a man in whom the noble tradition of leftist self-criticism finds its pedantic apogee. He was once called a useful idiot by the late historian Tony Judt on account of his support for the invasion of Iraq. He is, however, an astute observer of Islamic terrorism and left-wing trends and of the interface between the two.

In his latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, he turns the charge of useful idiocy on those within his own constituency who criticise the likes of Hirsi Ali while indulging apologists for fundamentalism such as Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan. It's an odd book, but one of no small value.

While Hirsi Ali is sometimes described as a latter-day, or African, Voltaire, Ramadan is a committed Muslim who, in 1993, was loudly campaigning against the staging of Voltaire's play Fanaticism, or Mahomet. Long a celebrity in the Francophone world, he has recently entered the Anglosphere as the go-to man for a progressive take on questions of Islamic doctrine. This entry was facilitated by British-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, whose profile of Ramadan in The New York Times is the starting point for Berman's book and a perfect example (in Berman's view) of the way in which liberal intellectuals tend to retract their bullshit antennae when faced with this seemingly affable character. For Berman, Buruma's profile was a travesty, the more so since its author had written so brilliantly about fanatical ideologies in the past.

Berman accuses Buruma, with some justice, of misunderstanding or misrepresenting the nature of Ramadan's salafi reformism, which is not a watered-down version of Islam but a species of fundamentalism in which foundational Islamic texts are read with one eye on the modern world. This approach goes back to Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ramadan's maternal grandfather. For Berman, Ramadan's modern rhetoric -- sometimes he sounds like an anti-globalist, sometimes like a liberation theologian -- is just a cover for his religious views, and it is always his religious views that come first. (Challenged by Nicolas Sarkozy to condemn the practice of stoning for adultery, Ramadan recommended a moratorium -- a position Buruma managed to defend.) He is, in short, a traditionalist whom everyone seems to have mistaken for a rebel.

As those who have read his books will know, Berman is an ideology wonk who is peculiarly alive to the battles of the past, especially the battle against fascism. In this book, he traces the points of contact between al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood, of which al-Qa'ida is a schismatic offshoot, and German National Socialism. For Berman, the controversial coinage "Islamofascism" is justified and necessary. The war on terror is the latest phase of a conflict that began in the 1930s.

Berman's book began life as an essay ("Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?") published in The New Republic. Even then it seemed a little long and much of the additional material, though fascinating from a historical perspective, does not advance the case against Ramadan or his liberal admirers.

For while his tendency to dismiss his critics as Zionists and members of the Israel lobby is not an especially healthy sign, no one, not even Berman, is suggesting Ramadan is a Nazi sympathiser. Perhaps the space would have been better used in a detailed analysis of Ramadan's books, in which there is plenty of evidence, not only of his double discourse but of his moral casuistry. (His latest book, What I Believe, is exemplary in this regard.)

The style is the man and Ramadan's style shows all the signs of a man who is floundering. But Berman's style is scarcely less irritating, swinging as it does from the needlessly exhaustive (the footnotes rise up through the text like damp) to the irresponsibly hyperbolic. Writing in the latter mode, Berman suggests that Salman Rushdie has metastasised into an entire social class. It's a nice line, designed to catch the eye, but it's also a hysterical claim.

Neither does Berman help his case by focusing so closely on Buruma's profile of Ramadan in The New York Times, the effect of which is to make him seem obsessive and even a little unhinged.

The title The Flight of the Intellectuals is clearly a nod to Julien Benda's 1927 pamphlet La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). But whereas Benda took a general approach to intellectual dishonesty, Berman seeks to particularise, eschewing the telescope for the microscope when really he needs to make use of both. It's as if Raymond Aron had decided to base The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) on a single article by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Berman's underlying point, however -- that certain liberal intellectuals are guilty of equivocation in the face of Islamic radicalism -- is surely not to be seriously doubted. Indeed, I think he's right to suggest that a sort of cultural masochism has interfered with the liberal Left's traditional priorities on this occasion and that some liberal commentators need to rethink allegiances.

Certainly a little solidarity with a woman who daily risks her life to bear witness to spectacular misogyny and religious intolerance would not go amiss.

After all, and unlike her single-word titles, those bodyguards are not part of Hirsi Ali's brand.

Richard King is a Perth-based reviewer.