Criticism of Islam makes author a target
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Peter Goodspeed, National Post
Published: Thursday, March 01, 2007
canada.com
Sitting on a couch in a private club in Toronto decorated with a half-dozen large erotic photographs of a couple enthusiastically engaged, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Dutch parliamentarian, defends her depiction of Islam as "backward" and a "faith rooted in oppression."
"I was brought up in Islam and I was sensitive to the differences of our societies," she says in a soft, whispering voice. "I had the same awe as other immigrants from Islamic countries when I came here and I would say, 'Oh my God, the women are uncovered and naked.'
"If I saw this in 1992," she says, gesturing at the photographs, "I would have just been appalled. But now I think, 'Well, people can look at this and can see it as a form of art.' "
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of the book Infidel, takes a break after speaking at Toronto's Spoke Club yesterday. The Somali-born former Dutch parliamentarian says the Koran spreads a culture that is "brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women and harsh in war."
Peter J. Thompson, National Post
The difference, she says, is that she has discovered that in Western society, people can debate the difference between pornography and art -- without bodyguards.
In her case, however, a bodyguard sat nearby at the foot of the stairs leading to the room where the 38-year-old spent yesterday promoting her autobiography Infidel.
Ms. Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines three years ago when a Muslim fanatic shot and killed her colleague, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, on an Amsterdam street before pinning a five-page letter to his chest with a knife.
The letter was addressed to Ms. Hirsi Ali and called for a jihad against the West and, more graphically and specifically, for her murder. Once a devout Muslim who voluntarily wore the hijab as a teenager, Ms. Hirsi Ali now describes herself as an atheist, saying, "I do not believe in God, in Allah, in angels and the hereafter."
But she regularly goes beyond debating the value of religion to attack the very tenets of her former faith. A political conservative filled with feminist rage, she claims violent anti-Semitism and misogyny lie at the heart of Islam.
She was a victim of female genital mutilation at the age of five and was forced into an arranged marriage with a distant cousin who lived in Toronto when she was 22.
Ms. Hirsi Ali says Muslim women are too frequently treated as private property and compelled to be devout and dutiful or risk degradation or death.
The Koran, she says, spreads a culture that is "brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women and harsh in war."
And she lambastes Western liberalism for what she calls an uncritical multiculturalism that tolerates the intolerant.
"When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments and I see that it simply isn't so," she says. "People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist."
On occasion, Ms. Hirsi Ali has called the Prophet Muhammad a tyrant and a pervert.
Time magazine has named her one of the most influential thinkers of our time.
She is a study in contrasts: an advocate of freedom who fled to Europe to escape her arranged marriage, she now lives her life in locked rooms and bullet-proof cars with bodyguards protecting her 24 hours a day.
"It isn't something that affects only me," she says. "I have become a permanent target, but we are all targets. I?m not the only target."
The immigrant from Africa became a politician in the Netherlands and surged into the limelight in 2003, when Europe was swept by a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.
That same sentiment almost cost Ms. Hirsi Ali her Dutch citizenship, when in the publicity surrounding Mr. Van Gogh's murder, it was revealed she had lied about her name and age on her application for political asylum and had concocted a story about running away from Somalia's civil war, when in fact she had already had refugee status in Kenya for 10 years.
In her book, Ms. Hirsi Ali insists it was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that drove her to abandon her Islamic roots.
"The little shutter at the back of my mind, where I pushed all my dissonant thoughts, snapped open after the 9/11 attacks, and it refused to close again," she says.
"I found myself thinking that the Koran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans ? And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war."
Now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Ms. Hirsi Ali spends her time researching and writing about the relationship between the West and Islam and studying women's rights in Islam.
NATIONALPOST.COM
For more background on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh, visit our homepage.
© National Post 2007 |
