Book Review

A Call to liberty, not betrayal

Infidel: my life

For those of us who are brought up with Islam, if we face up to the terrible reality we are in, we can change our destiny." This is the message of Infidel - the autobiographical story of the notorious Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who travelled across borders of culture and countries, from the restrictions of religion and politics in Muslim Somalia to being a Member of Parliament in the Netherlands, and ultimately to the constrictions of living under constant police protection.

Hirsi Ali's father was a fierce opponent of the Somali regime so the family emigrated to Saudi Arabia, and later to Kenya. In Infidel, she is affectionate and even-handed about her upbringing. Admiringly portraying her mother Asha's courage and independence, she also describes how Asha became embittered and deranged, beating and oppressing her children. Yet, with her characteristic stern, pure impartiality towards all her protagonists, including herself, Hirsi Ali insists on how ineluctably her mother had been broken by loneliness, exhaustion and the "submission" enjoined by her religion. Her father is also clearly and compassionately portrayed - his idealism, intelligence and love ultimately conflicting with his religious beliefs.

These beliefs she herself passionately shared, but what she has always been above all seeking is both truth and freedom, the virtues of the Enlightenment. She "was not content to accept the rules of our religion at face value, but ... felt compelled to try to understand them", to penetrate to their "underlying intention".

She was enthusiastic but always questioning, For a time, in Kenya, her enthusiasm drove her to frequent the meetings of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose mission was to purify Islam and return it to its fundamentals. She admired their efforts to purge the adherence to clan, which is not intrinsically Islamic, and leads to corruption, partisanship and disregard of human rights, and continually questioned the tenets that seemed to conflict with Allah's proclaimed justice and mercy. Why, despite going into such detail about women's veiling, did they not denounce female genital mutilation, also not intrinsically Islamic yet practised in many Muslim countries? If men and women were supposed to be equal, why did women have to obey their husbands, and not vice versa? Why should women be permanently sexually available to their husbands, except during menstruation, "even on the saddle of a camel"?

Escaping an arranged marriage, Hirsi Ali sought asylum in the Netherlands. At first she clung to the tradition of veiling herself, but came to realise that she was actually more invisible walking down the street in Western garb. Men might appraise, but on the whole they ignored her. She discovered the exhilarating liberation of riding a bicycle and swimming, of living in student houses while studying at university, of reading and debating Spinoza, Voltaire, Darwin, of being a Member of the Dutch Parliament, of collaborating in a film to expose the abuses of Islamic women in the Netherlands. It all sounds like a fairy story (and, admittedly, she may, as accused, be a little punch-drunk in her praise of the West), but the book ends with a tumble to earth - the murder of Theo van Gogh (the film's director), death threats against Hirsi Ali, the threatened removal of her Dutch citizenship.

Ironically, thanks to her ecstatic embrace of freedom, and her attempt to achieve it for Muslim women, her own has been brutally curtailed. But why do Western liberals, even women, appear to second the death-threateners in vilifying her?

When Hirsi Ali disputes the wearing of the veil, Muslims and liberals alike are eager to protest it is a matter of modesty, a matter of choice for Muslim women to make in the same way that Western women can decide what amount of, if any, make-up they might want to wear.

Hirsi Ali shows up the disingenuousness of this argument, and how the veil is a synecdoche for an attitude that views woman as sexual prey if they do not conceal their skin and hair. And even if, as hardline feminists and Muslims seem jointly to insist, "All men are rapists", then shouldn't the onus be on them to learn self-control, rather than on women to hide from them?

Hirsi Ali has been accused of being racist, attacking her culture out of "self-hatred", betraying her religion. "Tell me," she writes, "is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless?" Or, she might add, were Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, William Wilberforce and Mary Wollstonecraft  self-hating traitors to their culture when they spoke out for religious toleration, the rights of women and minorities, the abolition of slavery? Were they not rather reforming and liberating their own culture?

 Many middle-aged Catholics may be reminded of our own pre-Vatican II youth, and of the struggles we individually, and the Church as a whole, went through in order to reconcile what was essential to Catholicism with modern, humanist Enlightenment values.

But in Christianity, there is a spirit as well as a letter. Theocracy is an undesirable form of government; the Sermon on the Mount is the original and radically humane text to which we must always return. What Infidel asks is: can there be a moderate Islam? Can there be a way of clearing aside the rules to get at some core of compassion and love? I cannot possibly answer that. It does seem odd, though, that when someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, steeped in the Islamic tradition, seeks to do so she should be called a traitor rather than a brave liberator, which is what, as this book indisputably shows, she is.

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