The hard terrain one woman walks through
Farida Shaikh feels she has a resounding read before her
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a controversial political figure, a freedom fighter, and a champion of free speech. In this profoundly moving memoire she tells of her traditional Muslim childhood and her intellectual awakening.. She became an atheist, and her criticism of Islam enraged the Muslims and leftists. She survived civil war, female circumcision, brutal beatings, and escaped forced marriage. She sought asylum in the Netherlands, and while fighting for the rights of Muslim women and reform in the religion, she became an enemy of reactionary Islamists and was under constant threat. Hirsi Ali comes of a family of nomadic desert herders in Somalia, where one's ancestry and clan determine social status. She and her siblings grew up following the tribal dictates. When she was five, in accordance with custom, she was mutilated by men of the tribe, her clitoris was cut off so that she would remain 'pure' for her husband. Her father Hirsi Magan Isse, was a powerful man in Somalia, rebel leader against the dictator Siad Barré. It was this involvement that led to Hirsi Ali's family into fleeing Somalia and moving to Saudi Arabia and later to Kenya. Growing up out of her native country, Ayaan Hirsi Ali noticed the cruelty and violence against women and their inferior position in society. The writer's adolescent years were spent in Kenya where, on one occasion, a Quran tutor beat her so severely for disobedience that he fractured her skull. Here in school she was influenced by English and Western authors. She was shocked to learn that her Kenyan boyfriend was an atheist. At age twenty three, Hirsi Ali's father announced that he had given her away in marriage to a man she had never met. She protested, and decided to escape by travelling to Europe under the pretense of meeting her husband there; and while in the Netherlands she was granted asylum. The facilities available to all citizens there impressed her. She studied political science and later worked as a translator to support herself. She was granted citizenship and eventually worked her way up to a position at the American think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Ali's doubts about the rigid, restrictive dogmas of faith steadily loosened, and the defining moment came after 9/11, when she analyzed the interpretations of Osama bin Laden on his faith. She reached the conclusion that she could no longer in good conscience remain a member of a religious community whose views she could not share. When she began giving speeches and interviews questioning various aspects of the faith she had turned her back on, she achieved quick notoriety. She joined the Netherlands' opposition Liberal Party as a candidate for office, and was elected to Parliament in 2003. While in office, she successfully implemented reforms such as requiring the Dutch police to count honour killings as a separate category of murder. It was also at this time that she collaborated with Theo van Gogh as scriptwriter of his film Submission that outraged Muslim viewers. Theo was murdered and she went into hiding under the protection of Dutch security services. Ali also became the centre of a scandal as the rumour spread that she had made a false application for asylum. Escaping an arranged marriage was not considered to be a proper justification for refugee status at the time, although Hirsi Ali had been freely admitting to this on the national media for years. Ultimately, she stepped down from Parliament, but when the Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, tried to strip her of her citizenship, such confusion arose that Verdonk was forced to resign and her party's coalition government collapsed. In the end, Hirsi Ali retained her Dutch citizenship. She still receives threats on a regular basis, but she has continued to be vocal in her views of religion. Infidel is thus an autobiographical book, a translation of the Dutch book Mijn Vrijheid (My Freedom), released in English by a female ghost writer who for security reasons remains anonymous. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's painstakingly assembled account reads like a very sharp reaction to a code of life that she has lived and later chose to break away from. However, her experiences and realizations cover too narrow a ground and fall short of a wider comparison for readers to appreciate her dramatic response. Even so, the book is indeed a resounding read!
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