Book Review: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Simon and Schuster, 2007; Paperback, 2008)
Book Review: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Simon and Schuster, 2007; Paperback, 2008)
Reviewed by Deborah W. Alexander, Calgary member CW4WAfghan
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Most of you will recall the alarming murder of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004, in the streets of Amsterdam. He had produced a stark film entitled Submission about the violence and oppression to which some Muslim women are victims, using the script of Ayaan Ali, who had sought him out for the project. A butcher knife, plunged deep in his chest, held a letter to Ayaan Ali, saying that she would be next. This book is Ayaan Ali's story. Born in Mogadishu of a strong-willed and courageous mother, who had herself escaped the oppressive East African desert life to which she was born, and to a highly educated Somalian father who developed literacy programs throughout the region around Mogadishu, Ayaan Ali started life in Mogadishu in 1969. She was born in the midst of a communist coup which overthrew the Somalian government and her whole growing up was in the midst of turmoil and intrigue, as her father fought with the rebels to restore the previous order and was lengthily imprisoned. At age 4 1/2 she was loaded into a truck with her siblings at night and taken out of harm's way, to a grass hut in the countryside some eighty kilometres from Mogadishu.
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Ayaan Ali's story is one of immense courage, persistence, determination, and intelligence. Her father, because of his work in the resistance to the Communist regime of Siad Barre in Somalia, moved the family from country to country within Africa as Ayaan Ali was growing up. At age 6 she was moved from Mogadishu, Somalia to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. There she began her formal schooling in a Quran school, a Madrassa. Everything was 'haran' which means 'forbidden'. Boys and girls playing together was 'haran'; headscarves falling off heads in play was 'haran'. Then they were moved on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where at night Ayaan Ali would hear women in the neighbourhood screaming, beaten by their husbands. As Blacks in this Arab country, Somalians were treated as barely human. Life is Saudi Arabia was very difficult, with required worship five times a day and no freedom for the women and girls to go out from their house without male accompaniment. Ayaan's father much of the time was not there, so that Ayaan Ali, her mother, and her sister were very isolated.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> After four years in Riyadh, the family was moved to Ethiopia, but they were there for only a year before they moved again, this time to Nairobi, Kenya. By now Ayaan Ali was 11, and her father enrolled the children in an English language school. On the playground children spoke Swahili, so once again Ayaan and her sister learned new languages, both Swahili and English. Between the ages of 11 and 14, at the English school, Ayaan Ali read lots of English and American literature. These books had a profound effect on her. She said later, "As much as I wanted to be a devout Muslim, I always found it uncomfortable to be opposed to the West. For me, Britain and America were the countries in my books where there was decency and individual choice." By age 14, Ayaan's father had left the family more or less permanently, and Asha, Ayaan's mother, who was a much more doctrinaire Muslim than the father, put the girls in Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi. There were girls from many countries there and, while there was intensive study of the Quran, there was also a broader study of literature which became very important to Ayaan Ali.
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Throughout her teenage years Ayaan Ali worked very hard to understand the Quran and become a devout Muslim. She took daily classes in the Quran and at age 17 bought her own copy and read it line by line. Much of it disturbed her: Women should obey their husbands no matter what they demanded. Women were worth half a man. Infidels should be killed. She also read the early prophets of jihadism (Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb) who were writing about the need for islamic revolution in Egypt in the 1920's. She read "Muslims need to stage a catastrophic revolution to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth."
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While Ayaan Ali was troubled by some of the teachings of the Quran, it was probably her first-hand experience with Islam that, in the end, turned her away from it. When she renounced the Muslim religion, she lost all connection to her past as she was disowned by her clan, her parents, her roots. Her experience of physical brutality and of unremitting male dominance were extraordinary in the eyes of a Western reader. She was repeatedly beaten by her Maternal Grandmother as a 4 year old when she was not able to repeat the names of her clan ancestors in perfect order for ten generations! She was beaten by her mother with wire and sticks for the slightest disobedience in the home. She was blindfolded and thrown against the wall by her itinerant Quran teacher when she refused to keep mumbling verses she did not understand! This resulted in a fractured skull and put her in hospital for some time. Through all this Ayaan Ali kept moving on with her education. She and her sister, despite the mother's prohibitions, enrolled in a good secretarial school on the outskirts of Nairobi. Graduating in 1989, at age 20, they decided to go to work. Her mother locked her and her sister in a closet, forbidding them as good Muslim girls to sully themselves in the workplace. Eventually they were sent back to Somalia, "a good Muslim country" in the mother's eyes. From there Ayaan Ali went to Nairobi where she was forced to marry by her father. She escaped after the marriage to Holland, applied for refugee status claiming fear of persecution were she to return home, and she was granted "the lifetime right to live in Holland". She studied there from 1992 to 2000, and just before her 30th birthday received her Master's Degree in Political Science from the University of Leiden. What a journey!
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> As you read this review, she is purportedly somewhere in the United States. She wrote films, published articles, and gave public speeches from 200 to 2003. In 2003 she became a member of the Dutch Parliament. The burning issue in her life, in her writing, and in her politics was the suppression of Muslim women. In Holland she had been very close to the Somali Muslim community, for several years serving as a translator for the Dutch Immigration Service as they processed refugee Somali women and children. She came to feel very strongly that the Dutch system of multiculturalism was preventing immigrants from growing into the mainstream community. She felt it kept them from adopting the rights and practices of a liberal Western democracy. Instead, with the generous provision of Muslim schools, health clinics, and community centres, Muslim women were being ghetoized and consequently remained subject to intolerable male domination and physical cruelty. It was this that made her go to Theo Van Gogh and have him make the movie Submission. It was this that got Van Gogh killed and put Ayaan Ali in extreme danger.
It is, of course, very important not to generalize from this book about the experience of a Somali Muslim woman to Muslim women in general. However, Ayaan Ali has given us a window into the culture of very conservative Muslims. It is a picture of what it is like to be a woman in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, and in parts of many Muslim countries, particularly in rural areas, where extreme Muslim conservative practices and beliefs still prevail. The beauty of this book is that it is the story of a highly intelligent woman's own experience with Islam. This book describes the experience of a woman who always wanted to be a good Muslim, a believer, as she was growing up, but who could not accept the misogyny she found not only in her lengthy studies of the Quran but throughout her daily life. In another country, at a different time, her experience as a Muslim woman might have been very different. But this is what she faced and decided she must do. When she left Holland, for her safety, she once more was giving up everything and everybody she knew and cared about. It is hard, indeed, not to be in awe of her honesty and bravery. This book is a 'must read' for anyone wanting to better understand the many faces of Islam.
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