Those who have not heard of the traditions and practices of different ethnic people the narrative by the author Hirsi Ali will seems strange and may be unbelievable. But not so to those studied a little of these literatures. As a Somali Muslim girl Ms Ali is brave, steadfast, rational and truthful. She starts from her birth as a girl in a society based on clan honour & superiority in
Ms Ali chronicled almost al aspects of the social system specifically with reference to the condition of women in that society. They were not better than chattel slaves with no rights except obeying their parents and elders without question. Most considered the children to be brought up as devout and disciplined towards Allah the only god. The girls should not be allowed to have an independent mind of their own. The boys had some little leeway but completely restricted by the revealed texts. How faith makes man inhuman towards other humans and especially to women. Fathers, mothers and everyone else inflict unrestricted cruelty on small children in the name of devotion to Allah and discipline. The cruellest is that of cutting and stitching the vagina of a girl child. Ms Ali’s description of the operation in primitive surroundings at home is a picture of horror. Girls are kept away from education and knowledge. Their minds are filled with all kind of super natural creature’s beliefs and mumbo jumbo.
Ms Ali has succeeded to convey her travails and tribulations of growing up as an obedient servant of Islam. She was the target for anything gone wrong in the daily family life and got punished at times too severely. Her mother allowed her to attend school because of her father insisting on it. There was the compulsory class to learn Koran. No knowledge was imparted but rots and repeat verses of the Koran by heart. The teacher was not only a bigot but also a tyrant. One of them almost caused her death by banging her head on to the wall. In all this travails Ms Ali blames herself. She starts to learn only when she was in Kenyan school. Her non-Muslim friends used to give her books for reading and she came to know a different world outside. Still there were the effects of koranic teachings about non-believers going to hell hereafter.
Her father though active in the political movement to reform the govt. was a staunch believer in leading an Islamic way of life. He married several times as allowed in his faith but failed to keep track of earlier wives and children. His behaviour seems too strange for a non Muslim to comprehend. Still, Ms Ali and her family members do not see any default. They all take it as the legitimate male right. The first questions asked by Ms Ali were about equality between boys and girls for which her elders had no answer except that is ordained by Koran. In the community girls are treated as non-persons. They could not and should not show their faces outside of their homes. They are punished for any perceived disobedience of clannish rules including violent death. Ali goes thru all kinds of faces in her childhood days. She had contacts with fundamental groups such as Muslim Brotherhood which was advocating establishment of pure Islamic rule in countries inhabited by Muslims. They also wished to convert the rest of the world to Islam in times to come.
Ms Ali was married to one from whom she wanted to escape and did escape in her onward journey to
One aspect of the story needs some more research and observation. The fact that there are so many refugees from
Her autobiography is very simple in language and easy reading. Her objective will be served if more and more girls in similar situations that mean all Muslim women come out to change their status to be human. Let Ms Ali’s shoulders be strong.
Not too long back I was thinking that Islamic violence is the response to the colonisation, oppression, economic deprivation and given social circumstances but not for reasons of religion. This thought seems to be result of long years of ideological conditioning. However, now a days I have started questioning myself whether there will be some deeper reasons for the outburst of systematic violence and terror. It is not the teeming millions of poor who resorted to terror but well educated, skilled and qualified who are prominent in the scene. This points to a different perspective i.e. that of religious convictions. The acts of terrorists have sanction from the texts as could be concluded from the exhortations coming out of the perpetrators. They are quoting chapter and verse from sacred book Koran in support. Ms Ali confirms them all as true. The recent out burst of anger and the accompanying violence against depiction of their prophet in all corners of the world are evidence enough to establish the malevolent nature of faith.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: abandoned to fanatics
The outspoken former Dutch legislator deserves the protection her country promised before she ran for parliament.
By Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie
October 9, 2007
As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.
Hirsi Ali first fled to the
After attending the
The rest of her story is well known. In 2004, Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film "Submission," which examined the link between Islamic law and the suffering of millions of women under Islam. The reaction from the Muslim community was nothing short of psychopathic, and it confirmed the necessity of Hirsi Ali's work and the reasonableness of her fears. Van Gogh, having declined bodyguards of his own, was gunned down and nearly decapitated on an
Hirsi Ali was immediately forced into hiding and moved from safe house to safe house, sometimes more than once a day, for months. Eventually, her security concerns drove her from the
Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, "Infidel," has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in the New York Times, "Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him."
The Dutch Parliament will be debating Hirsi Ali's case this week. As it stands, the government's decision to protect her only within the borders of the
There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for parliament and to become the world's most visible and imperilled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the
The Dutch government should recognize a scandal in the making and rediscover its obligation to provide Hirsi Ali with the protection she was promised.
There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.
Sam Harris is the author of "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." Salman Rushdie is a novelist whose works include "Midnight's Children," which won the Booker Prize, and "The Satanic Verses."
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Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie have jointly published an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times in support of Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
April 3, 2005
Daughter of the Enlightenment
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Last spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali took her ''Dutch mother'' -- the woman who taught her the language and cared for her after she arrived in the
The story is, like much in Hirsi Ali's life, an inseparable mix of the terrifying and the tender. Sipping tea and nibbling from a bowl of chocolate-covered raisins in a house in the Dutch countryside in February, she made every attempt to soft-pedal it. ''Nothing nonverbal about him was violent -- and it wasn't a real knife,'' she told me. ''Just for bread and butter.'' Now as then, her armed guards were along. It had been dark for several hours and they'd positioned their bullet-proof vehicles as inconspicuously as possible along the street. She was doing her best to ignore them.
Hirsi Ali is self-effacing and slight. Relaxing on a sofa, she had folded herself into so small a shape that she seemed to disappear behind the throw pillow that she hugged to her knees. Every few minutes she pulled a thick, black woollen shawl around her shoulders and clutched it close under her chin against the cold. Because her voice is soft, she can seem meek. She is not. Hirsi Ali has a calm and syllogistic way of dropping verbal bombs all over the place, using words European politicians never do: Decadent. Corrupt. Cowardly. Wrong.
Dutch voters have an increasing appetite for such talk. Sept. 11 raised worries all over
Hirsi Ali was born into
Hirsi Ali was an obedient, serious girl. Her religious observance drifted between the devout and the fanatical. But this did not stop her growing realization that there was less scope for women than for men in her world, or her sense that Islam was to blame for it. A crisis came in 1992, when her father contracted her in marriage to a Somali-Canadian cousin she did not know. After a wedding ceremony in
She also worked as a translator for immigration and social-service agencies. She interviewed Muslim women married off to reprobate cousins because they had lost their honour (virginity) and no one outside the family would have them. She interviewed battered wives and women infected with the AIDS virus who were under the impression that Muslims could not contract it. She came to marvel -- and despair -- at the tenacity of traditional Islam's grip on women who, now living in the West, seemingly had little reason to fear it.
In 1995, she entered the
On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, Hirsi Ali was in her second week of work as a researcher at the think tank of the centre-left Labour Party, a job she'd sought after a short corporate stint peddling drugs to doctors for GlaxoSmithKline. Although she now describes herself as an atheist (''I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter''), she had not at that point wholly lost her faith. The water-cooler talk that week was converging on agreement that it was simplistic to blame the attacks on Islam. Hirsi Ali begged to differ. She had been haunted by the letter left by the hijacker Mohamed Atta, in which he reminded his accomplices to pray for martyrdom. ''If I were a male under the same circumstances,'' she says, ''I could have been there. It was exactly what I used to believe.''
Soon she had the chance to talk this way in public. Television interviewers were clamouring for immigrant analysts. She took the floor at a conference in an
The important thing, she insisted, was that people be able to talk about Islam openly, in an atmosphere free of intimidation. In her 2004 book, ''The Cage of Virgins,'' she wrote, ''When a 'Life of Brian' comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of Theo van Gogh, it will be a huge step forward.''
Hirsi Ali's name will be forever linked to van Gogh's. But the two had known each other for less than a year when, on Nov. 2, 2004, the director was shot and stabbed to death on his morning bike ride to work. Muhammad Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch-born Islamist of Moroccan immigrant parents, has been charged with the murder. That spring, van Gogh, a celebrated provocateur and public nuisance, had attended a political forum where he defended Hirsi Ali whenever her name came up. The Lebanese-Belgian Arab-nationalist firebrand Dyab Abou Jahjah was there, bodyguards in tow, and when van Gogh was invited to lead a discussion, Abou Jahjah refused to participate. Van Gogh asked what Abou Jahjah, whom he called ''the pimp of the prophet,'' was afraid of, since he had not only Allah but also a gang of bodyguards by his side. Two Dutch politicians rose to repudiate van Gogh. He left in a huff and called Hirsi Ali on her cell phone.
She was in a
''Submission Part 1'' the 11-minute film that Hirsi Ali conceived and wrote and that van Gogh directed, was shown on television soon thereafter. It presented four fictional episodes. All involved violence against women and the Koranic verses that had been, or could be, used to justify it. These verses were written on the skin of the actresses' semi naked bodies.
Hirsi Ali says she felt guilt over van Gogh's death -- guilt that van Gogh's mother publicly insisted was misplaced -- but she continues to reject any suggestion that the film they made was sensationalist, or gratuitous in its use of see-through clothing. ''Maybe Americans think, 'This is a naked body,' '' she says. ''But this body is why half the nation in
After stabbing van Gogh, the killer left impaled on the corpse a five-page letter addressed to Hirsi Ali. As the
When Hirsi Ali was 16, an Iranian-trained Shiite fundamentalist arrived to teach at the previously Anglophile Muslim Girls' Secondary School in
Sister Aziza called this inner jihad. ''We all wanted to be martyrs,'' Hirsi Ali says, ''or I did, because we saw what the Iraqi army was doing to the Iranians. Only it was always 'We the Muslims,' '' meaning
Hirsi Ali's African upbringing came up frequently on the three-hour ''Summer Guests'' TV program last August when she showed ''Submission'' for the first time. The program invites Dutch celebrities to select and comment on favourite video clips as a way of revealing something about their personal lives. Hirsi Ali's included ''The Gods Must Be Crazy'' and a news clip about
The
Until recently, the
The system withered in the 1960's, but many Dutch clung to the hope that its virtues could be revived for an age of immigration. In the early 1990's, Frits Bolkestein, then the leader of the country's pro-free-market party, the VVD, warned in articles and speeches that they could not. He argued that certain identities, unlike the old Catholic and Protestant ones, would, if maintained, undermine the individual rights that are at the heart of the Dutch constitution. He cited the practice of bigamy, for instance. Where clashes occurred, Bolkestein insisted, Dutch norms must prevail. For this observation, he was condemned as a rightist and a racist. Today, most Dutch accept the validity of Bolkestein's critique, even if they can't agree on what to do about it.
In 2002, Bolkestein's VVD persuaded Hirsi Ali to leave her Labour policy group to take a place on the VVD's parliamentary list for the next election. Some on the left greeted her departure with relief -- Labour usually competes with two other left parties for Muslim votes, and activists had threatened to withdraw support for Labour when Hirsi Ali began speaking out. Still, it is a natural question whether the VVD -- traditionally a businessmen's party -- is the right place for a Third World feminist. It is not a question that troubles Hirsi Ali much. She says, ''It gives me, intellectually and ideologically, an easier position to say, 'Listen, we are the party for the individuals, and Muslim women who are individuals.' ''
The predicament of individual Muslim women has become a public concern in the
Until the arrival of Hirsi Ali, Dutch feminists tended to duck when there appeared to be a conflict between the rights of women and the culture of immigrants. One exception is the Egyptian-born essayist Nahed Selim, an ally of Hirsi Ali on many issues. Another is Cisca Dresselhuys, editor of the large-circulation feminist magazine Opzij, who drew fire when she announced that she would not hire women who wore head scarves. Dresselhuys wants Hirsi Ali to leave Dutch politics and take up a post where she could pursue her political passions internationally. For Dresselhuys, Hirsi Ali is ''more an activist than a politician.'' This is a common view in the
But she prefers to describe her legislative achievements in broad terms. ''I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant,'' she says, ''while under their noses women are living like slaves.'' In this task, she sees a role for both activism and politicking, and she is particularly proud that almost all of her parliamentary motions have passed. ''I may polarize on television and on the op-ed pages, but in Parliament, I always get my majority,'' she says.
Hirsi Ali claims a direct line of intellectual inheritance from the Dutch Enlightenment, and says she is merely laying claim as a Dutch person to freedoms won for her fellow citizens starting in the 17th century. ''Most of the philosophers then were allochtonen,'' she says, making ironic use of the term the Dutch bureaucracy uses for immigrants and their children. ''In the
Andreas Kinneging, professor of legal philosophy at Leiden, and leader of a conservative intellectual revival in the Netherlands, has a mixed view of these matters. Kinneging, who knows Hirsi Ali from her time at the university, shares some of her worries: that the Dutch model of cozy consensus-building among the ''pillars'' of society is dangerously out of date, for instance. But he is equally put off by the antitraditional agenda of the radical Enlightenment. ''Many of the things that happened in the last 40 years,'' he says, advance ''ultraliberal values that I think are wrong. In some areas -- decency, respect, loyalty, care for one's wife -- Islam could actually have a positive influence on our culture. Ayaan comes from a backward country. For her this 60's liberal culture is only sunshine. She doesn't see the dark side of it.'' Yet Kinneging also says he admires Hirsi Ali as ''a politician in the grand style. For 95 percent of the Dutch public, politics has always been a matter of get along and go along. They haven't a clue how to deal with her.''
Hirsi Ali describes Bolkestein, the VVD statesman, as her mentor. The affection is reciprocal. He finds her tactics both understandable and necessary. ''The lesson I have learned in this country is Geen rel, geen debat,'' he says. No ruckus, no debate. Such thinking also appeals to the Friends of Ayaan, as they are sometimes invidiously called in the press -- an ideologically varied circle that ranges from far right to far left and includes many of the leading thinkers in the country.
Hirsi Ali has also made enemies across the political spectrum. Hans Dijkstal, the former VVD leader, is a sharp dissenter from the welcome his party has given Hirsi Ali. Sitting in his office near the Parliament, he told me that ''more and more Muslims are wearing head scarves as a symbol of dignity, as a symbol of resistance'' to Hirsi Ali and the right-wing politician Geert Wilders. Geert Mak, a best-selling Dutch historian and memoirist, goes even further. In a recent pamphlet about the fallout from the van Gogh murder, Mak complained that ''an aura of martyrdom'' had arisen around Hirsi Ali, and he suggested that her security detail had become ''a sort of status symbol.'' He claimed to see similarities between the techniques of ''Submission Part 1'' and those of ''The Eternal Jew,'' a 1940 film made by Joseph Goebbels's propaganda ministry.
Hirsi Ali is not easy to place in the spectrum of Dutch politics. The country's top political pollster, Maurice de Hond, found that Hirsi Ali's own party's voters ranked her behind only the Labour leader Wouter Bos as the worst politician in the country. Meanwhile, readers of the left-leaning daily Volkskrant voted her ''Person of the Year'' for 2004. The centre-left newsmagazine Vrij Nederland ran a feature in which prominent intellectuals urged her to return to Labour. De Hond says he thinks most of Hirsi Ali's votes come from women, and few from Muslims. ''She is the only Dutch politician who is completely outside our left-right continuum,'' de Hond says.
Disrupting political classifications is explicitly what Hirsi Ali means to do. In her view, consensus-seeking politicians of all parties work hard to keep off the table the issues most Dutch people care about. Sometimes she refers to these people -- from Dijkstal to the Christian Democrat justice minister Piet Hein Donner to Job Cohen, the Labour mayor of
The present Dutch crisis looks very different if you believe a tribal principle is at work. It can look apocalyptic, in fact. In late February, sitting in an empty conference room in
ast fall, entering the Dutch Parliament wasn't much different than entering one of the museums nearby. Now it is like entering a military base. You go in through a side entrance, which has been equipped with bullet-proof glass, behind which the main hall is piled up with office furniture, crime-scene tape and two-by-fours. The building is being turned upside down over the threats to Hirsi Ali.
Those threats continue. In the days after the van Gogh murder, the Dutch police were met by a grenade attack when they raided the apartment of Jason Walters, a half-American member of a suspected terrorist cell called the Hofstad Group, with which van Gogh's accused killer was linked. There, they found a death list that had Hirsi Ali's name on it. Dutch investigators later announced they had found a plan drafted by Walters's brother Jermaine to kill Hirsi Ali at midnight on New Year's Eve. De Volkskrant interviewed several women associated with the Hofstad Group, one of whom bragged of the group's patience and said they hoped a woman would commit the murder, so that it would have greater impact. In November, a woman came to the Legislature, claiming to be a big fan of Hirsi Ali's, with a gift for her, a book. She waited for Hirsi Ali to come outside the security perimeter. Hirsi Ali was delayed in a meeting. After a long wait, the girl left, and left the book. It was a call to jihad that had been written under a pseudonym by van Gogh's accused killer.
Hirsi Ali now receives death threats in Internet chat rooms and in rap songs. Last month, she spent time in court, the target of a civil suit filed by an Islamic group from the provinces. Its lawyer complained that ''blasphemous and offensive'' language in her book ''The Cage of Virgins'' was causing ''psychic damage'' to his clients. He sought a court order that any future movies she made be submitted to a three-person panel before they could be shown. The suit was rejected. ''It's a strategy,'' Hirsi Ali says. ''Some threaten me and make real preparations to kill me, and others try to pester me.''
In mid-February, Hirsi Ali shocked the country by revealing the location at which she was being kept in hiding -- a naval base in
Hirsi Ali has been dealt a full house of the royal virtues: courage, intelligence, compassion. She has needed them. Hers is a big, heroic life that moves her fellow citizens but now gets lived mostly in locked rooms and bullet-proof cars. She leads that life partly above other Dutch people, as a national symbol -- and partly below them, as a prisoner. She is a democracy campaigner for whom the role of an ordinary democratic citizen is off-limits, an egalitarian for whom equal treatment is turning out to be an elusive and maybe impossible thing.
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing writer for the magazine.
The Price of Freedom IF THE DUTCH GOVERNMENT ABANDONS AYAAN HIRSI
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 8, 2007, at 11:28 AM ET
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
If any country has enjoyed a long reputation for peaceful and democratic consensus combined with civic fortitude, that country is the
In the last few years, two episodes have hideously sullied this image. The first smirching was the conduct of the Dutch contingent in
Those of us who protested at this slaughter of Europe's Muslims are also obliged to register outrage, I think, at the Dutch state's latest betrayal. On Oct. 1, having leaked its intention in advance to the press, the Christian-Democrat administration of Jan Peter Balkenende announced that it would no longer guarantee the protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
To give a brief back story, it will be remembered that Hirsi Ali, a refugee from genital mutilation, forced marriage, and civil war in her native
The Dutch parliament debates this question later this week, and I hope that its embassies hear from people who don't regard this as an "internal affair" of the
Suppose the narrow and parochial view prevails in
For a while, her security in
A last resort would be to set up a trust or fund by voluntary subscription and continue to pay for her security that way. Perhaps some of the readers of this column would consider kicking in or know someone who was about to make an unwise campaign contribution that could be diverted to a better end? If so, do please watch this space and be prepared to write to your congressional representatives, or to the Dutch ambassador, in the meantime. We keep hearing that not enough sacrifices are demanded of us, and many people wonder what they can do to forward the struggle against barbarism and intimidation. So, now's your chance.
Hitchens has also criticized
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fairand the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
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