Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The story of a great fighter

By Patricia Lanca

[A review of Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Free Press, New York, 2007]

Ayaan is the daughter of Hirsi, begotten by Magan who was begotten by Isse who was begottten by Guleid who was begotten by Ali, and so the list goes on. She could recite eight centuries of ancestors in the male line. We are reminded of the Book of Genesis and the endless genealogies of the patriarchs. If she made mistakes her implacable grandmother beat her into avoiding them next time. As Ayaan tells the story of her childhood in Mogadishu in Somalia and later in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia and in Kenya, we are transported to the lands of the Bible where the tribe and the clan are ever present and individual lives count not at all. There may be trucks and cars, telephones and radios, but it is a world very distant from ours.

It is a world in which women are totally subservient to men; where their virginity is guaranteed by the knife used for genital mutilation in childhood; a world where they are forced into marriage with men chosen by their fathers; where a word or look exchanged with a man who is neither father nor brother can be punished by death. A world where it is the victim of rape who is blamed and not the perpetrator. A world where from early youth women must cover their faces and the rest of their bodies lest the sight of bare skin provoke the (apparently) unbridled appetites of the men. A world where the dogmas of Islam are learned by rote from the Koran in Arabic, a language they often don’t understand. A world where one of the doctrines taught is that husbands have the right to beat their wives for disobedience.

Such is the world in which Ayaan grew up. She tells it all, with almost compulsive frankness, leaving out nothing. She tells of the horrors but also of the kindnesses. She recalls the tyranny of the family and the clan, but also their solidarity and generosity in difficult times. She speaks of tenderness within the family, a tenderness which exists in spite of the claustrophobia and the cruelty.

Most of her affection is for the father she adores and who, in comparison with the generalized obscurantism of Somalia, is a modern and enlightened man who wants his daughter to be educated. He did not agree with genital mutilation of girls but her grandmother, in his absence, forced her mother to comply with tradition. Ayaan and her sister were both subjected to excision, with excruciating consequences for her sister. Her father was a political activist persecuted by the regime of Siad Barré in which Ayaan grew up. He was often absent from home, a fugitive or in prison. She learned her first lessons in militancy from him and a rough introduction to politics.  Nevertheless her father’s modernity was a relative matter and it was his insistence on a forced marriage that motivated Ayaan’s eventual flight from Africa.

The repressive policies of African communism in Somalia followed by more than one civil war, her flight with her brother, sister and mother to Saudi Arabia and later to Ethiopia and Kenya, gave her the opportunity to learn about other peoples and other customs and, most tellingly, to compare the life of Moslems with those of Christian Africans. Because Ayaan, had been full of curiosity from early childhood, everything that happened to her gave her cause for reflection.

She observed everything, noted everything and puzzled over all the contradictions. She observed the dreadful animosity and hatred between the different groups and clans of her own people, and their scorn for Ethiopians and Kenyans. Because they weren’t Muslims? Only partly. There was also contempt and hatred for Arabs, especially in Mecca where Ayaan and her family lived for a time, a contempt constantly on the lips of her mother, intensely aware of her own high status among the Somalis.

The author has the gift of telling the details of everyday life with the same objectivity she dedicates to bigger events like flight as a refugee from one African country to another, or changing from one school and one language to another. She talks frankly of her conversion to the militant Islamism of the Moslem Brotherhood and her short passage through fundamentalism: She covered her face and her body and devoted herself to Koranic studies, anxious for a spiritual life and an ethical guidance that would be certain and coherent. Ayaan’s thirst recalls those existential crises experienced by   some adolescent Christian girls who are attracted to the religious life.

So vividly does she tell of her struggle with faith and tradition that the reader almost forgets his own culture and begins to identify with the young Moslem girl. This identification the author provokes is the great merit of her book. When she flees from forced marriage and at last arrives in Holland, we share Ayaan’s reactions as she confronts the new world of freedom. We share her amazement at the order and civility of people, the kindness of strangers, the punctuality and cleanliness of public transport, the fact that everything works, almost unbelievable after the anarchy, disorder and arbitrariness of the life she knew in Africa. Ayaan’s journey is quite simply the voyage from the closed society of tribal life to the open society of liberal democracy and the industrialized world. Most immigrants to the West share this opportunity but the majority have neither Ayaan’s intelligence and curiosity, nor her courage. And so they end up refusing it while some of them try to destroy it.

She has bad times in Holland as well as victories, from refugee status to citizen and then member of the Dutch parliament. She works at all sorts of jobs from factory worker or cleaner to interpreter and social worker in the refugee camps. She has ample opportunity to observe other refugees from her homeland, especially the women and sees that the great majority remain in the ghetto, enclosed in the shell created by their religion. And she concludes that it is the policy of multiculturalism imposed by the European Left that reinforces the most retrograde aspects of Islam. She works and studies, studies and works. She gets to know and live among Dutch people as one of them. She exchanges the chador for blue jeans and learns to ride a bicycle.

Ayaan manages with enormous effort to overcome all the obstacles and is at last admitted to study Political Science at Leyden, Holland’s most prestigious university. She has made up her mind to learn what it is that makes this new world tick.  She wants to know how Europeans succeeded in emerging from obscurantism. She wants to study the Enlightenment and its philosophers. She wants to know what liberalism is about.

Above all Ayan wants to speak out for Moslem women. She is determined to denounce their sufferings. But as she tries to pursue what she feels to be her vocation, Ayaan becomes a marked woman. Theo Van Gogh, the producer of a film about the subjection of Moslem women, whose script she wrote, is murdered and she herself is threatened with death. In free democratic Holland she is driven underground and finally forced out of the country. The book ends with Ayaan’s arrival in the United States, a country she had been taught to hate as an imperialist oppressor when she lived in Africa.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography is a case study in the sociology and psychology of a whole generation of young Moslems confronted with the contradiction between two worlds: the world of freedom and the world of servitude. The author is a true heroine of our times.  Her story should be read by all adolescents perplexed by the modern world and by all adults confused by the commonplaces of multiculturalism.

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Patricia Lanca writes from Portugal about social and political issues. A former member of the Portuguese parliament, her website is "portolanibooks.vol1.googlepages.com/home"