Infidel

Advertisements
Advertisements

9 min read

FacebookTwitterLinkedInPrintFriendlyShare

In her life and work, Ayaan Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable
woman of our times.

To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary,
she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted
against her in her twin struggles to force the Western world
to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of
women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it.

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she
battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah
elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were
wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the
UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the
children, in which little boys would be playing with little
girls.

The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together
was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult
to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little
boys and girls.

On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at
the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was
raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and
write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

To save the world for Allah, they decided to
butcher little girls.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires
across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in
Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its
source and discovered the school had been built as a
deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had
filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath
the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and
the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to
butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last
month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights
activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously
calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing
the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian
imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

Late last year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel In
describing her own life, what she actually explains are the
two competing human impulses -- conformity and individualism.
In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on
the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural
collapse.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father
who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist
dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family,
Hirsi Ali's childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along
the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the
Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran.

Hirsi Ali's rebellion against Islam was personal, not
political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she
found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam
just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a
five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock
when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a
knife mutilate her genitals.

Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness
of the "true Islam." Why, she wondered were she and her
mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment
without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in
Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the
company of boys was sinful.

Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of
polygamy? Why could she not choose her own husband? Why was
she told by one and all that her normal human impulses to
seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were
sinful and evil?

As she puts it, "I could never comprehend the downright
unfairness of the rules, especially for women. How could a
just God -- a God so just that almost every page of the Koran
praises his fairness -- desire that women be treated so
unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman's
testimony is worth half of a man's, I would think, Why? If
God is merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be
hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did
unbelievers have to go to Hell?"

In her words, "The spark of will inside me grew even as I
studied and practiced to submit." Ali credits Harlequin
romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from
submission. These books, with their passionate loves were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and
desires she was told to repress were natural and could even
be beautiful and right.

Her impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform.
As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Muslim and
even joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of
submission she began wearing a full-body burka.

But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will
had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the
terror she saw as a Muslim girl, believing they must be
distorting the Koran. "Surely," she writes, "Allah could not
have said that men should beat their wives when they were
disobedient? Surely a woman's statement in court should be
worth the same as a man's?"

Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she
found that everything the preachers had said was written in
the book.

At 21, Hirsi Ali emancipated herself. Fleeing from an
arranged marriage to a Somali immigrant in Canada, she
sought and received asylum in Holland. There, she embraced
Dutch society and freedoms and quickly flourished in a true
rag-to-riches immigrant tale. She learned Dutch fluently and
began supporting herself as a translator. In just four years
she had bridged the cultural divide between Africa and
Europe and began studying political science with the creme
de la creme of Dutch society at the University of Leiden.

A mere decade after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch
citizen, she was a pubic figure, an outspoken social critic
of Islam in Europe. In January 2003, she was elected to
Parliament as a member of the conservative Liberal Party.

In Holland, she found herself confronted by a kinder,
gentler type of cultural tyranny -- the moral relativism of
political correctness dictated by the Left.

In Holland, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder,
gentler type of cultural tyranny -- the moral relativism of
political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the
Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so
in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority
not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist
tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim minority.

Hirsi Ali's labors brought her to Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the
two produced the film Submission, Part One. The short film
shows a young Muslim woman wearing a translucent burka.
Passages of the Koran permitting the abuse of women are
written on her. The woman prays in submission to Allah
all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At
the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and
calls into question the reasonableness of her submission.

The film's provocative message placed both Hirsi Ali and Van
Gogh's lives in imminent danger. And on November 21, 2004
Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Muslim on the streets of
Amsterdam. The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's
chest in which he threatened to murder Hirsi Ali "in the
name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful."

While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under
armed guard in army installations, her message proved too
much of a challenge for the Dutch establishment which
vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality
on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the
country and the parliament. Although the public outcry that
ensued forced the government to restore her citizenship, the
message was clear.

Hirsi Alo moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute she continues to warn the West
of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural
disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just
last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call
for her murder for the crime of apostasy.

In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central
challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the
Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it
propagates in the name of divinity.

She holds a mirror up to the Free World and demands that we
defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism
and cultural decline.

So too, she demands our compassion for the women of Islam.
She says we must see the suffering beneath the veil and work
to alleviate it. Whether it means that we must mass produce
and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance
novels throughout the Islamic world; challenge veiled women
to explain why they ascribe to a faith that gives men the
divine right to beat and rape women; or simply hold Muslim
communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which
our civilization is based, the West must help these women
free themselves from oppression.

Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold
voices like Hirsi Ali's. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali
has lived under threat of death for her views.

We must understand that only when she, and people like her
can walk on the streets unafraid will we have properly
defended our freedom.

Click here to comment on this article
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
EXPLORE
LEARN
MORE
Explore
Learn
Resources
Next Steps
About
Donate
Menu
Languages
Menu
Social
.