A few years ago Ayaan Hirsi Ali was thrust into the worldwide news when a Muslim fantatic murdered Theo Van Gogh for a film Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali made. She is a Somali native, and a Dutch citizen. Her second brush with international fame came after she nearly lost her Dutch citizenship, despite being a member of parliament. All off this hullabaloo came about because Hirsi Ali publicly denounced major parts of Islamic culture and dogma as a person who was raised to believe it.
The first thing most people will notice about this book is Ms. Hirsi Ali’s striking beauty on the dust jacket. On one hand, this could be viewed as appealing to our baser instincts, and to be highlighting her physical attributes rather than her intellectual prowess. I usually have no problem using sex to sell things, but I can be sympathetic to this argument. On the other hand, I think the cover showcases two things we don’t see too often. Three things perhaps. The first is uncovered Muslim women (though by the time she wrote this book, she’d renounced Islam). Most of the time, we see images of Muslim women covered. Something like Benazir Bhutto wearing a scarf that hides very little is an unusual image of Muslim femininity. Hirsi Ali wears no head covering on the cover. It works as a further denouncement of how women are treated in Islamic countries.
Second is simply the fact that this is a Muslim woman. Aside from Bhutto, can you recall the picture of any Muslim woman? There may be one or two. By and large what we see of Muslims intellectually are the men. I can name several dozen off the top of my head, most dour self-important looking men at that. Few, even in the West, challenge the supremacy of men in the world’s third great monotheistic religion. Seeing a determined woman of that faith matter-of-factly looking into the camera, as she is about to tell her story in the pages within, is a different view.
The short version of Hirsi Ali’s story begins in Somalia. Her father fought the corrupt government there from exile in Ethiopia as a member of a rebel group. She moved from country to country, to other Islamic and African countries like Kenya and Saudi Arabia, and back to Somalia repeatedly. Mostly fatherless, she attended various Islamic schools but struggled with her own faith as she matured. While wanting to be Islamic, she also desired the freedoms accorded Western women. The cognitive dissonance flared, but did not resolve itself. After her father arranged a marriage to a man Hirsi Ali had not met, she fled to the Netherlands, where she claimed asylum under false pretenses, but eventually attained Dutch citizenship. She studied political science in college, and went on to champion women’s rights as a researcher in the Labor Party’s think tank. However, after 9/11 she was catapulted to prominence by her outspoken denunciation of some of the core tenets of Islam. That got her into parliament, and the film made with Van Gogh. However, several years later members of her own party threatened to remove her citizenship after Hirsi Ali’s asylum application falsifications were given prominence in the news. While she dodged that bullet, she did resign from the Dutch parliament and moved to the U.S. to take a position with the American Enterprise Institute.
I don’t know how much of Hirsi Ali’s story to believe. It’s not completely consistent, though this could be the result of faulty memory and a not-quite-linear telling of the story. In particular, throughout the book she has herself questioning Islamic precepts, but also toeing the line as well. It’s hard to tell which is the real Ayaan, though perhaps both are. It’s far from clear to me how Ayaan behaved as a child, even from her own words.
I really liked reading her story particularly form the point she escaped to the Netherlands. In her youth, she was torn between various pulls: her father, her mother, school, work, Kenya, Somalia, etc. It resulted in her having very little actual direction in her life. Not having direction before age one’s early twenties isn’t unusual though. Once she arrived in Holland, she began pursuing a political science degree. She had several steps to accomplish prior to that, but she had a long term goal. Seeing how the western European systems worked made her want to know why the Islamic systems did not, despite the fact they were supposedly ordained by god. She wanted to get to the bottom of that question.
The latter part of the book describing her political career reads like most other political memoirs, excepting the parts about going into hiding because of Theo Van Gogh’s murder and the attendant security (they believed she would be targeted next). The bits about political wrangling between party members were not the most riveting. Her work in the think tank prior to the actual political career is actually more compelling.
The back of my mind tells me that more people like Hirsi Ali, people who want significant change to come to Islam, will come to prominence out of the Islamic world. She is one of the first, but I think better will come. The fact that she has gone to work for the American Enterprise Institute indicates to me that her days of significant influence are probably past. And her influence has mostly been with non-Muslims. If Islam actually is to change, it will need reformers who market to Muslims rather than to westerners like Hirsi Ali.
Title: Infidel
Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Imprint / publisher: Free Press / Simon & Schuster
Format: Hardcover
Length: 353 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-10: 0-7432-8968-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8968-9
Subject: Politicians — Netherlands — Biography
Subject: Muslims — Netherlands — Biography
Subject: Refugees — Netherlands — Biography
LC classification: DJ292.H57 A3 2007
