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INFIDEL {{Ayaan Hirsi Ali}}
A Somalian who moved to Saudi Arabia, then Kenya, pledged to be married to her cousin at the hand of her father flees to the Netherlands to begin anew. Hirsi Ali tells her story of life as a young Muslim in various settings in a tragic and traumatic way. She describes in brave detail her own genital mutilation that was known as female circumcision, the strict obedience by which she was expected to live–life as a slave to Allah, she calls it–and her unrelenting desire to ask forbidden questions surrounding her own life. Indeed Hirsi Ali violated a great deal of customs, rituals and norms of her faith as a Muslim by refusing to obey her father when he demanded her arranged marriage. In doing so, she had already begun to question the absolute obedience required by Shia law based on the Quran itself.
It was in more bold movements that she began to examine what she alleged as the validity of the Islamic faith itself and particularly women who would subject themselves to such abuse and inequity. Despite much consternation, Hirsi Ali eventually rejected Islam and transformed into an atheist while studying in the Netherlands. She became a member of Parliament for her juxtapositioned views on Islam and refugees within the country–how they should be required to integrate themselves into Dutch culture, work Ductch jobs, if they expected to live in this new country of theirs. She demanded that these Muslim refugees send their children to public secular schools instead of Quran schools only so that they could integrate into the world around them, because for the most part during the 1990′s they preferred to stay a secluded community inside of the Netherlands. In fact, Hirsi Ali’s main contention was with the Dutch government itself and that it provided a welfare state that allowed for the establishment of isolation through financial and Parliamentary support.
As one might imagine, many Muslims were outraged that Hirsi Ali would speak out against the faith of such a multitude of people worldwide and her irreverence for the Prophet Mohammed. They considered her actions a result of “internal suicide,” that she was not only abandoning her former faith but turning against it in a hypocritical manner to rid herself of childhood trauma. She and Theo van Gogh directed a short film depicting four outcast Mulsim women who had been raped and beaten and then disowned by their families for allowing such atrocities to occur. Not long after, van Gogh was murdered in London with a letter stabbed into his chest directed to Hirsi Ali indicating a war with the West was brewing. Through a storm of threats on her life and months in hiding, and in combination with the revocation of her citizenship (because she had lied on her refugee application), she resigned from Parliament and moved to Washington D.C. to serve as a steam-engine mind in a conservative think tank.
Say what you want about Hirsi Ali and her repudiation of her former faith–whether it be Islam, Christianity, or any other religion–but she risked her life to seek out answers to questions that burned her at the very core. With an almost false sense of security in the Netherlands, she acted recklessly at times and could have easily been murdered herself. On the other hand, many a great leader, great thinker has sacrificed much to gain much, including personal security. In Ali’s mind, it was worth the risk of her own life to better the survival of other women’s lives who might be in similar predicaments as she had been. Perhaps I don’t agree with all she has said–and it’s mostly because I don’t fully understand the world of Islam due to my lack of context–but I admire her courage, open-mindedness and world perspective for sharing her life through her book and leading the way for perhaps millions of women who are victims of inequality.
