Book Review: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayann Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and raised as a Muslim, moving from one bad situation to another as a child and young adult in African and Saudi Arabia. Her experiences, from female circumcision to beatings by men, chronicle in great detail the lack of options and rights a female has in the Muslim world.

As she gets older, she begins to question a prophet (Mohammad) and set of rules (Quran) that require total slave submission to the master (Allah) and keep a society in an environment of war, starvation, and brutality.

The final straw is an arranged marriage (per Muslim tradition) by her father to a man she doesn't know nor cares for, who lives in Canada. On route to her new life as a wife, she seeks refuge in Germany, eventually making way to the Netherlands, where she works as a translator for Dutch officials interviewing other refugees from Africa.

She eventually gets Dutch citizenship, and assimilates into Dutch culture, noting that Europe and the West are much more organized, clean, fair, and democratic than Muslim countries, and not the decadent sex-obsessed clan of infidels that she was taught as a young child.

Her concern for Muslim women being abused and killed for actions they did not perform (for example, girls killed by fathers for getting raped and embarrassing the family) leads to her involvement in Dutch politics as an advocate for these women, but it comes at a price.

Because she is so vocally critical of the Muslim faith, she receives death threats and must be protected by the Dutch government (as a member of Parliament). She writes a movie with noted Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh that is critical of Muslim practices, and one day Van Gogh is stabbed on the street in broad daylight, and a death notice to Ali left stabbed in his chest.

Ali is moved across the country in secrecy and eventually to the US for several weeks, while questions of her past result in her Dutch citizenship being revoked. Eventually, her time in office ends, and thus her government protection ends, and even her neighbors sue her for all of the inconvenience the security has caused on their lives.

She now lives in the US, and continues her fight against injustice against Muslim women. She is now a self-proclaimed atheist, and she said she has learned to live with the death threats. One of the themes that I found interesting is Ali's stance that the West is better and should not tolerate Mulism inequalities, Muslim-only schools, etc., because it encourages the abuse.

"People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture of out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. That is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people?" she wrote (p.348).

"Life is better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state. To accept subordination and abuse because Allah willed it- that , for me, would be self-hatred."

Ali says that hundreds of millions of women across the world live in forced marriages, and 6000 small girls are excised every day. "My central, motivating concern is that women in Islam are oppressed. That oppression of women causes Muslim women and Muslim men, too, to lag behind the West. It creates a culture that generates more backwardness with every generation. It would be better for everyone- for Muslims, above all, if this situation would change," she wrote.

A first step would be to read Ali's book to better understand the Muslim belief system, from someone who lived it. The next step would be to consider the politically incorrect stance that to tolerance of abuse is no better than the abuser. While it is counter to everything we are told in the US (embrace differences, freedom of religion), if a belief is wrong and harmful, we typically don't allow it (child pornography, KKK, age discrimination, etc.). So why the acceptance of Muslims?

Maybe the future requires us to acknowledge that the Muslim faith, at least as it is practiced by hundreds of millions of people around the world, is not in the best interests of anyone. Of course, no one wants to live with death threats for saying so either.