Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The brutal murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh in 2004 shocked the world. Shot and mutilated by a Muslim fanatic as he cycled to work, it was a stark reminder of the dangers of challenging an extreme Islamic worldview. It also changed the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, van Gogh's collaborator on the film that had offended his murderer. Born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, she had escaped an arranged marriage and made a new life as a Dutch parliamentarian, championing the reform of Islam and its attitude to women's rights. She now has twenty-four-hour police protection, but refuses to let that inhibit her willingness to speak out. THE INFIDEL is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's astonishing story. Recounting the extraordinary transition from a third-world upbringing to her current status as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, it is a truly remarkable autobiography that is as gripping as it is inspiring.

Infidel

The author’s view of Islam felt overwhelmingly negative, with more bitterness than reflection. While she raised important points about mutilation and women’s rights in restrictive societies, her focus on blaming the religion rather than the tribalistic traditions driving these issues felt one-sided. This bias overshadowed what could have been a more nuanced discussion, making the book feel more resentful than insightful.

Liana

The author’s view of Islam felt overwhelmingly negative, with more bitterness than reflection. While she raised important points about mutilation and women’s rights in restrictive societies, her focus on blaming the religion rather than the tribalistic traditions driving these issues felt one-sided. This bias overshadowed what could have been a more nuanced discussion, making the book feel more resentful than insightful.



Gavin

I told him, "I'm not coming to the [wedding he arranged for her], and all he said was, "You're not required." Legally, this was true.


   I went to Sister Aziza and said, “The [Christian] girls will not become Muslims. Their parents have taught them other religions. It isn't their fault, and I don't think it's fair that they'll burn in Hell." Sister Aziza told me I was wrong. Through me, Allah had given them a choice. If these girls rejected the true religion, then it was right that they should burn.


Vivid and horrific. She is sewn shut as a child. Her Sunday school teacher beats her into the hospital. She is forced into marriage. She flees civil war and her family. She becomes an apostate. She makes an edgy film. The latter three are held to be crimes, the last worthy of death. But somehow the book is not a misery memoir.


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She is hard to agree with and impossible to ignore; some people solve this tension with absurd insults. Her work against sexism is thought to be negated (and then some) by her succour to racism.

What are the arguments against her views?

* "Her critique only applies to Somalia." (e.g.) 
Sadly not.

* "Her critique was only valid in the 70s." 
Sadly not.

* "Her critique only applies to Wahhabism." 
No; she grew up under non-Saudi Islamic socialism.

* "Her writing is self-serving: she built a political career on denigrating Islam." 
Ah yes: cunning of her to be born into oppression, get chopped up and repeatedly forced into marriage; what an impressive long con. More seriously: it doesn't strike me as a good deal to accept a high probability of murder for the rest of your life, in exchange for a political seat and an academic post. Why is so hard to believe that someone willing to risk her life might mean it?

* "She has no scholarly credentials to speak authoritatively about Islam". 
Doesn't apply to Infidel, since it is a first-person account of several different Muslim regimes. More than this: she grew up in four different Islamic societies, speaks half a dozen languages, and has spent 17 years studying it, at Harvard and places like that. This is not to say she's correct, it's just obviously untrue that she has no scholarly credentials.

* "She is an inauthentic ethnic voice." / "Her portrayals are neo-Orientalist." / "Her portrayals are an enactment of the colonial civilizing mission discourse." 
This is only an objection if you think she's lying (or cherry-picking), and if you take correspondence to old ideas of bad people as proof of falsehood or unsayableness. Who's more authentic? 

* "Their accounts confirm dangerous stereotypes and reinforce the old-new dichotomy of the 'civilized us' versus the 'barbaric them'. In addition, they increase the pressure on Muslim and Arabs in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere." (source) 
I wouldn't have used "confirm" there, if I was making his point.

* "Her policy prescriptions are extreme and counterproductive." 
This was true through the noughties (she called it 'fascism', called it war), but apparently she's mellowed. (Generally people aren't given a second chance on these matters.)

* "Hirsi Ali feels she cannot be a feminist and a Muslim... [but] numerous women who espouse feminist, intellectual, Muslim and African identity [exist]." (e.g. here) 
Completely true. 

* "(Only) white men like her" / "Her fans are awful.". 
This is very twisted ad hominem (because the critic realises that they can't attack a Somali woman who has survived decades of abuse).

Here's one of mine: To understand Ayn Rand - the cartoonish egotism, the false social theory, the needless extremity - you need to remember what she went through: the equally cartoonish, false and extreme Stalinism. (This point would outrage Rand, since it makes a victim of her, and makes her vaunted individualism just a mechanical inversion.) Maybe you could argue Hirsi Ali is like this. Even if you do, it doesn't reduce our obligation to actually argue with Rand or Hirsi Ali at all, though.

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Here's the crux of the whole thing, her discussing religion with her dad:

  
"There is no coercion in Islam," my father said. "No human being has the right to punish another for not observing his religious duties. Only Allah can do that."

It was like Quran school, but more intelligent. We even talked about martyrdom. My father said that committing suicide for Holy War was acceptable only in the time of the Prophet—and then only because the unbelievers had attacked the Prophet first. Today there could not be a Holy War, he said, because only the Prophet Muhammad could call for a Holy War.

This was my father's Islam: a mostly nonviolent religion that was his own interpretation of the Prophet's words. It relied on one's own sense of right and wrong, at least to some degree. It was more intelligent than the Islam I had learned from the ma'alim, and it was also far more humane. Still, this version of Islam also left me with unanswered questions and a sense of injustice: Why was it that only women needed to ask permission from their husband to leave the house, and not the other way round?

My father's Islam was also clearly an interpretation of what the Prophet said. As such, it was not legitimate. You may not interpret the will of Allah and the words of the Quran: it says so, right there in the book. There is a read-only lock. It is forbidden to pick and choose: you may only obey. The Prophet said, "I have left you with clear guidance; no one deviates from it after me, except that he shall he destroyed." A fundamentalist would tell my father, "The sentence 'Only the Prophet can call a Holy War' is not in the Quran. You're putting it in there. That is blasphemy."



: Did you notice it? She yields the entire ground to the fundamentalists. She's a literalist! She notes, correctly, that the Quran forbids interpretation, forbids reformation, and gives up. Never mind that almost all religious people live extremely flexibly with the demands of their religion, "failing" at this and adapting that. Never mind that, contrary to the Word, there's loads of Islams, that some majority-Muslim countries have been electing women for ages, that some Muslim governments have been trying to stop FGM for a while now. We're messy, nevertheless, thank god. 

(It looks like her more recent books focus on exactly this point, though.)

Amazing account of one woman's trek from Islam to non Islam and the effects in her life.

Melody Izard

Ayaan shares her early years (which includes genital excision). She embraces Islam then rips off her head scarf and decides she's an atheist. Devout Muslims are not happy and she now lives with frequent death threats. Intresting, disturbing - but it gets a little tedious once you get to Holland.

Jennifer Gregory

I hope, someday, to be half the woman she is.

Mahasin S Ameen

I thought Hirisi Ali's book was thoughtful and well written, but it starts to get a little preachy towards the end. I've read reviews that said that her views on Islam are biased, and I think they are, but I think that's completely understandable. I'd like to say that Hirsi Ali's experiences with being a Muslim female were related to her being from Somalia, but I've seen and experienced the same repression of the education of women.

Infidel

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