Freedom fighter

[Controlled Chaos]

Freedom fighter

Under threat of death, bodyguards always near, Dutch politician and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali keeps on fearlessly criticizing Islam.

By Carlin Romano

Inquirer Book Critic

 

(Rob Keeris/Associated Press)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Book preface | The Caged Virgin, An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam

 

 

Sitting regally at a small table in 19, the tony cafe atop Park Hyatt at the Bellevue, Ayaan Hirsi Ali smiles as if the world were a peaceful place, and all people brothers and sisters.

 

Slim, black, beautiful and stylish, she lifts her espresso cup to her lips slowly, with a princess' sense of self. Waitresses flit about. Wealthy sorts chat across their overpriced breakfasts. Hirsi Ali, 36 looking like 26, turns heads.

 

To the business guys eyeing her from other tables, her looks compute as "model," or maybe "TV anchor."

 

Hey, is that Iman? Naomi Campbell?

 

Well, they're easier guesses than the second coming of Spinoza. Hirsi Ali may be the boldest rationalist rebel the Netherlands has seen since that 17th-century philosopher got himself excommunicated for rejecting (among other things) the Amsterdam Jewish community's belief in immortality of the soul.

 

Yes, those two muscled guys a few tables away, who keep drilling in on Hirsi Ali's eyes, are Dutch, but they aren't trying to make eye contact. They're trying to keep her alive.

 

"Here I have two men and one car," Europe's most stinging critic of Islam says with a sigh. She's in Philadelphia this month for a conference in honor of scholar Bernard Lewis, and to promote her first book, The Caged Virgin (The Free Press, $19.95). "At home it's six men and two cars."

 

Hirsi Ali, who is single and has (she says) no romantic life given the dangers that swirl around her, has been named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2005, a Glamour magazine Hero of the Month, and European of the Year by Reader's Digest. Over the last few years, she's been awarded the Danish Freedom Prize, the Swedish Democracy Prize, the Government of Madrid's Tolerance Award, and many other human rights honors.

 

How did life come to this for a Somalian turned Dutch citizen whose blunt criticism of Muslim treatment of women makes death threats an everyday downer? It's a story increasingly blared around the world on the front pages of newspapers.

 

Born in Mogadishu, Hirsi Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, where she suffered the genital mutilation she now fiercely battles, and attended a Muslim English-language school in Nairobi.

 

In her youth, she believed in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islam, even backing the Iranian's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. But when she turned 22, her father arranged for her marriage to a distant cousin in Canada. In Germany on her way to meet the man in 1992, Hirsi Ali hopped a train to the Netherlands and escaped.

 

Accepted as a refugee, she studied political theory at the University of Leiden while rising from menial jobs to translation and social work with immigrants. She received Dutch citizenship in 1997. Her study of philosophy turned her into an atheist, and Sept. 11 further stirred her to question Islamic beliefs. Invited by the Labor Party in 2003 to run for a seat in the Dutch Parliament, she won it. But it was murder that made her famous.

 

In 2004, she joined Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a descendant of the painter, to write and narrate a short TV film titled Submission: Part One. It showed four women in see-through garments, Koranic verses written on their bodies, discussing abuse by Muslim men.

 

In November 2004, a radical Dutch jihadist of Moroccan descent stabbed van Gogh to death in Amsterdam. A note attached to the knife left in his chest threatened the same punishment to Hirsi Ali. Dutch security quickly ushered her into hiding - she's been guarded 24/7 ever since.

 

Last month, after her visit to Philadelphia, life back home took an even stranger turn. A TV documentary revived old allegations that she had lied about her name, age and refugee status in applying for asylum.

 

Hirsi Ali had long ago admitted changing her name and, on the advice of social workers, claiming she had come straight from Somalia. But she has steadfastly denied lying about the arranged marriage, or her fear that her family would try to kill her.

 

Nonetheless, Rita Verdonk, the Dutch immigration minister, and the figure in her own political party whom Hirsi Ali has vaunted as Holland's strongest leader against appeasement of radical Islam, declared that she would revoke Hirsi Ali's citizenship.

 

"She's a very strong woman," Hirsi Ali said of Verdonk, a former prison warden, before the conflict flared. "She's not going to move for anyone. But she's not well-versed... . She has not had an intellectual upbringing.... "

 

Hirsi Ali believes the Dutch now split into "appeasers" who don't want to upset Muslim communities, and a growing number of "confrontationalists" like herself.

 

Hirsi Ali concedes she had already leaned toward leaving Holland for many reasons: the death threats and security; eviction from her most recent apartment in the Hague after neighbors won a court judgment that Hirsi Ali's dangerous proximity violated their human rights; and the chance to come to the United States as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. So she resigned from Parliament.

 

"It is difficult to work as a parliamentarian if you have nowhere to live," she told a news conference.

 

A furor followed Verdonk's action and the prime minister restored Hirsi Ali's citizenship. But her resignation stands. According to her publicist, she's accepted the American Enterprise Institute's offer.

 

Asked to summarize the pros and cons of how the Dutch see her, Hirsi Ali replies, "Two words are used. One is she's so brave, and the other is she's so clear." As for critics, they "say that I'm traumatized, that I've had an unhappy childhood. They say that I'm a radical. That I'm a liar and that I invented my childhood... . Another cliche is that she wants to be in the limelight. Another is that because she has these people around her, the cars and the security, she lives outside reality.

 

"As I make an inventory, as I list the cliches," she says, "I really see how silly they are."

 

Not everyone thinks they're silly. Mohammed Sidi, chairman of the Trust for Islam and Citizenship in Holland, called Submission "pure provocation." The Netherlands branch of the Arab-European League has said "she wants to offend millions of Muslims in the Netherlands." The country's Contact Group for Muslims and Government called Submission "a distortion of the facts."

 

Her critics contend that Hirsi Ali takes the worst aspects of Islam, such as instances of racism and abuse of women, and projects them onto all Muslims. To Hirsi Ali's credit, she includes their criticisms in her book and seeks to answer them.

 

But you need talk only briefly with Hirsi Ali, or read The Caged Virgin - a crisp, very clear indictment of Islamic misogyny mixed with autobiographical scenes and reflections about her own liberation - to understand that the lady pulls no punches.

 

This is not Rodney King and "Can't we all just get along?" Not "We respect Islam and, hey, everyone has a few bad apples."

 

Hirsi Ali aims at Islam's heart. She insists that the beliefs and life of Islam's prophet, Muhammad, must be confronted, analyzed, and, in many respects, rejected.

 

"If 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion abide by, follow his rules," Hirsi Ali observes, "and say we want to be like him, then I think it's urgent, it's necessary."

 

She concedes that Muhammad urged Muslims to do some good things, "such as his advice to be charitable toward the poor and orphans." But, Hirsi Ali insists, on the whole he's not admirable.

 

"He borrowed a little bit from Judaism," she says, "he borrowed a little bit from Christianity, and he invented some things, especially the fierceness with which he dealt with his enemies, the killing, the way he violated special tribal rules."

 

Long before radical Islamists threatened violence in return for any criticism of Muhammad (thus violating the Islamic principle that Muhammad was a man with flaws and should not be idolized), Islamic scholars accepted that Muhammad was a warrior of his time, contending that he shouldn't be judged by modern standards.

 

Even Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, leans to that interpretation, though Hirsi Ali sees his graciousness as prudence: "I think Bernard wants to leave the Arabs some dignity... . He wants to give them an opening, which is really noble... . "

 

Her own view, however, is that "following this man [Muhammad] can lead to only one thing, fascism... ."

 

Hirsi Ali says she decided to confront Muhammad's history after Nigerian Muslims rioted over the planned 2002 Miss World contest there. A British-educated Nigerian journalist poured fuel on the fire by writing that Muhammad himself would have married one of the contestants. The rioting killed 200 people.

 

"So I said," Hirsi Ali confides, " 'You know what, darling Europeans? I'm going to tell you about Muhammad!' "

 

True to her gloves-off approach, Hirsi Ali talked about how Muhammad, who had nine wives, fell in love with his wife Aisha when she was 6 and married her when she was 9. Hirsi Ali outraged Dutch Muslims by accusing Muhammad of pedophilia.

 

Hirsi Ali says some took the issue seriously. She emphasizes its relevance because "there are more and more men taking minors as wives, and saying that Muhammad is their example."

 

Hirsi Ali says the debate gave her hope - she received one letter from a Muslim that read, "I don't know what you started in me, but I am thinking... . "

 

In the same way, Hirsi Ali explains, she'd like to challenge the beliefs of Black Muslims in America. She finds it as unfathomable that African Americans would convert to Islam as that Jews would convert to Nazism.

 

"I want to tell them about Darfur," she asserts firmly. "The people in Darfur are being exterminated just because they are black. So [islam] is also a racist doctrine... . People don't know what's going on in Saudi Arabia. All these palaces are full of black slaves! So the black community here converting to Islam is like converting voluntarily to slavery.

 

"I think if they hear it from a black person," she says hopefully, "it will help."

 

These days, Hirsi Ali reports, she's working on a book about Enlightenment values - Voltaire remains a great hero. She plans to have it translated into Arabic, Urdu, and other key languages and distributed around the world in video and audio.

 

"I'm going to resurrect Muhammad, and he's going to have conversations with [british philosopher Karl] Popper and me and [economic theorist Friedrich] Hayek."

 

Hirsi Ali smiles. "I hope I live long enough to complete it," she says.

 

ONLINE EXTRA

 

Read an excerpt from "The Caged Virgin"

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Kinda fun to watch the conservative religious zealots (not you, CC, but the arch-conservative zealots like Cox & Forkum, WND, et al.) rally around the cause of an avowed atheist. I'm really surprised that many of these supporters like the American Enterprise Institute would rally for her because she's a) quite feminist and B) quite pro gay rights.

 

I don't want to paint the bichromatic political rainbow here, but it is somewhat shocking that many US religious fundamentalists would support her, given her platform on a variety of other issues that intersect with her criticism of fundamentalist Islam (i.e. their stance on homosexuality)

 

All that said, I do agree with a lot of what she says about fundamentalism of any religion being one big major league pain in the ass. Never underestimate the power of religious fundamentalist morons.