Infidel

Infidel is the incredible autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who burst on the scene of European politics in 2004 following the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh with whom she had just made a short movie, Submission, which was highly critical of the treatment of women in Islam. Ayaan spent the first 7 years of her life living in Somali. Meanwhile, her father, who was a political figure in the Somali opposition, was often away from home. When the country deteriorated and it was no longer safe to stay there, the family moved first to Ethiopia, then to Saudi Arabia, and finally to Kenya where she lived for 10 years until she had the chance to flee to Europe at the age of 22in 1992. She had been exposed to all forms of Islam. She was repeatedly physically abused and underwent genital mutilation, consistent with her Somali customs.

Originally a devote Muslim, as was her mother, Ayaan gradually found herself growing away from the faith, especially after she was fully exposed to Western thought. The transitions that she successfully made from one country to the next, the languages that she learned in the process, the relationships that she developed were remarkable. The courage that she showed at each step is nearly unbelievable to anyone raised in the Est. She made a journey which that is unlike any that I’ve ever read, from Islamic fundamentalism to disavowal of Islamic thought and finally atheism. She went from Somalia to Holland where she became a member of Parliament, only to have Dutch citizenship revoked as the result of her controversial views. In the forward, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “One reason why she herself is so hated, and why her life is considered forfeit, is that she is exactly what the title of this book proudly proclaims her to be: an apostate. She has exerted her right to abandon the religion in which she was brought up.”

In 1992, Ayaan was actually being sent to Canada for a marriage that had been arranged by her father, and when she landed in Germany on the way there, she chose to escape. That led her to Holland which had a particularly liberal immigration policy at the time. She saw the date that she got on a train to Holland as her real birthday: “the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn’t have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.”

Infidel helped me understand why the West is so hated by Islam and why there are so few people that are capable of making the same transitions described by Ayaan. It helps understand the difficulty faced in Europe today of dealing with the massive migration of Muslims into their societies. She wrote, “The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hypocrisy, and double standards…. The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.” This book is a dramatic story of courage.