REVIEW:  INFIDEL

 

[INFIDEL; by Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Free Press, NY; 2007; ISBN 978-0-7432-8968-9]

Compare two statements. The first concerns a girl of about 5 years age:

“I was next. Grandma swung her hand from side to side and said, ‘Once this long kintir is removed you and your sister will be pure.’ From Grandma’s words and gestures I gathered that this hideous kintir, my clitoris, would one day grow so long that it would swing sideways between my legs.

[…]

“Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribably, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests...

[…]

“I must have fallen asleep, for it wasn’t until much later that day that I realized my legs had been tied together, to prevent me from moving to facilitate the formation of a scar. It was dark and my bladder was bursting, but it hurt too much to pee…

[…]

“[My sister]…was never the same afterward…She had horrible nightmares, and during the day began stomping off to be alone. My once cheerful, playful little sister changed. Sometimes she just stared vacantly at nothing for hours. We all started wetting our beds after the circumcision.”

The second concerns a woman of 39 years age.

“Why am I not in Kenya, squatting at a charcoal brazier making angellos? Why have I been instead a representative in the Dutch Parliament, making law? I have been lucky, and not many women are lucky in the places I come from. In some sense, I owe them something…I need to seek out the other women held captive in the compound of irrationality and superstition and persuade them to take their lives into their own hands.”

......

 

Astonishingly, these are the same person: Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Infidel is the story of this 39 year old woman’s journey from the Stone Age in Somalia to becoming a leading light in the West.

 

Figuratively, Infidel could be said to open with the sentiment expressed by Benjamin Franklin, “Of what use is a newborn baby?” and close by answering the question. This autobiography, which answers Franklin’s question, unlike any book I have read in years.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story would indeed make a phenomenal movie. Infidel is the story of the development of a human as a being of self-made soul, and a heroic soul at that. It presents drama, struggle, war, error, civil disintegration and chaos, danger, misdirection, many very bad people, and the ever-present uncertainty of outcome. It ends in triumph.

Part I: My Childhood

I am purposely severely condensing the review of this portion of the book, one which most reviewers stress, in order to dwell on the major events which transformed the little girl to woman.

Ayaan Hirsi Magan’s story begins when she is a very young child, the middle child of three, in the intensely tribalized and Islamized Somalia. Life was dirt-poor groveling to sustain existence. Life was shot through with superstitions, terrors, and prohibitions which no room for joy. Adults regarded life and their world as malevolent and duty filled, beholden to clans and tribes, and beholden most of all to religion (Islam). Children were not spanked; they were often beaten by family adults, and sometimes religious figures. On top of that, Somalia faced war with Ethiopia and progressive social disintegration under a warlord. Somalia was hell on earth, but it was not the only hell on earth.

A major formative experience for Ayaan came at age 8 when she lived briefly in Saudi Arabia, including Mecca.

“Everything in Saudi Arabia was about sin. You weren’t naughty; you were sinful. You weren’t clean; you were pure. The word haram, forbidden, was something we heard every day. Taking a bus with men was haram. Boys and girls playing together was haram. When we played with the other girls in the courtyard of the Quran school, if our white headscarves shook loose, that was haram too, even if there were no boys around.

[…]

“Saudi Arabia meant intense heat and filth and cruelty. People had their heads cut off in public squares. Adults spoke of it. It was a normal, routine thing: after the Friday noon prayer you could go home for lunch, or you could go and watch the executions. Hands were cut off. Men were flogged. Women were stoned. In the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia was booming, but though the price of oil was tugging the country’s economy into the modern world, its society seemed fixed in the Middle Ages.”

At age 10, she and the family moved to Nairobi, Kenya. Ayaan continued to learn other languages, including English, and discovered something magnificent in her schooling: books.

“We read 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps. Later, we read English translations of Russian novels, with their strange patronymics and snow vistas. We imagined the British moors in Wuthering Heights and the fight for racial equality in South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country. An entire world of Western ideas began to take shape.”

“All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas—races were equal, women were equal to men—and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me.”

Every book was valuable: “Even our plain old biology and science textbooks seem to follow a powerful narrative: you went out with knowledge and sought to advance humanity.”

Her inquisitive and receptive mind had received its wake-up call. Her books fed her mind. From “literature” to “trash,” she read voraciously and experienced one excitement after another, including sexual ones. “... [B]uried in all of these books was a message: women had a choice. Heroines fell in love, they fought off family obstacles and questions of wealth and status, and they married the man they chose.”

The more she experienced anything Islamic, including sundry female marital rites, rituals, and customs, the more Islam seemed alien and abnormal. In Kenya, she began noticing the new march of militant Islam, fueled and financed by Saudi Arabia. The Muslim Brotherhood had become the tip of the militant Islam spear. It was more Wahhabi than Wahhab. At the age of 17, she tried to buy into fundamentalist Islamic propaganda proselytized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and she succeeded, for a while.

What was the attraction? “It felt good to belong…this self-evident feeling of not having to justify your existence or explain anything…[T]here was a feeling of oneness and union, a huge sense of community from everyone involved in a small space doing just one thing, and doing it voluntarily…“Religion gave me a sense of peace only from its assurance of a life after death.”

Her dear father had “arranged” for her to be married—a situation she adamantly opposed. Her proposed husband was profoundly dull and uninteresting to her. She had already endured one arranged marriage, but her absent husband allowed her father to destroy all official documents and proof of that marriage, so that he could foist her off on this Somali man from Canada. Her father and the husband concocted the plan to send her from Africa to Germany to await the arrival of the arranged husband from Canada.

She, on the other hand, had a very different future in mind for herself once she got to Germany.

PART II: My Freedom

Had she been selfless, as all religions and the secular left preach that one should be, she would have died anonymously in Africa. She is a hero-worshipper. Above all, she worships the mind of Man at its best. Man qua man is her standard.

Her arrival in Europe exposed her to human accomplishments that simply dazzled her, from simple buildings to cleanliness and order, to punctuality, to colors, and so on. Her mental and personal development took another quantum leap right away.

She had to escape from this banal man and this arranged marriage.

“I didn’t know how I would escape or what freedom might mean. But I knew what course my life would take if I went to Canada. I would have a life like my mother’s, Jawahir's (a female friend), and like the life of this woman with whom I was staying in Bonn. I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent—always—on someone treating me well.

[...]

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my 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.”

In Holland, she renamed herself “Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” born November 13, 1967.

In Holland, she began developing her own sense and experience of self. She began having fun, and she learned that she could make herself happy. Furthermore, when she did these things, all of which were quite unIslamic, the world did not fall apart as the preachers of Islam had told her all of her life. She had always been told that women were super-powerful and able to drive men into psychotic rutting frenzies with exposure. Wearing jeans, riding a bicycle, going with her head uncovered, well, no one noticed.

Dark clouds gathered briefly in her life. Her family and the husband, along with tribal elders, had tracked Ayaan to Holland, and they demanded a hearing about her refusing to go with her husband. “I was ready to confront my family. I had discovered an inner strength. I had tested my self-reliance, and I felt I could manage. I had become resilient, and I had discovered the rule of law.”  At this tribal “trial,” she knew this was her own trial, her “…right to rule my own life.”. She became divorced and free: “The soul cannot be coerced.”

She now entered the final stages of her confrontation with Islam. She knew that she had to resolve this in order to become the full, proper adult she wanted to be. “Every Islamic value I had been taught instructed me to put myself last. Life on earth is a test, and if you manage to put yourself last in this life, you are serving Allah; your place will be first in the Hereafter. The more deeply you submit your will, the more virtuous that makes you…”

Considering her collectivist, tribal upbringing, she reached the following ideas on her own, ideas, which were totally at variance with anything Somalian, particularly the émigrés: “Being on welfare shamed me…I was able: I had arms and legs...I didn’t want to keep taking and never give”; “I decided I must work…” She was reacting to the fact that she had been put on the dole by Holland immigration officials since her arrival.  Most Somalis loved such a state.

Here is one of those oddities that seemed to interfere with her life off and on since early girlhood. Because of her incomplete success learning Dutch, she was considered by agency authorities to be unable to handle theory (concepts). Ayaan wanted to study political science at the university level. She was discouraged because agency bureaucrats thought she lacked the intellect! Now this woman has become such an epistemological and moral triumph to the extent that no one in his right mind will ever raise such questions again.

The Somalis she encountered in Holland sounded like Jesse Jackson. They complained and blamed everything on the Dutch. They took no responsibilities for themselves. They were universal failures who closed off all avenues of improvement for themselves that involved taking responsibility for themselves. Then they blamed everyone else, particularly their patrons. Ayaan says, “Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn’t make it easier.”

As she read more and more of the ideas of the world, she examined Islam ever more closely. One of the final struggle elements she had to resolve concerned morality and religion. “…I didn’t for one instant imagine that a moral framework for humanity could exist that wasn’t religious. There was always a God. Not having one was immoral. If you didn’t accept God, then you couldn’t have a morality. This is why the words infidel and apostate are so hideous to a Muslim; they are synonymous with immorality in the deepest way.” She still needed more time, more learning, and more thought.

Having cleared the bureaucratic hurdles, she enrolled in the university at Leiden and found the Enlightenment. “And here, this commitment to freedom took hold of me, too.” Comparing the thrill of “forbidden fruit” when doing things unIslamic, she writes “Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.” At Leiden, she discovered that “… [T]he facts themselves are a beautiful idea. They were about method and reason. There was no place for emotions and irrationality.” As her mind developed, she also discovered that “Holland’s multiculturalism…wasn’t working.” She did not rest until she found out why: Then she discovered real individualism and its unique power.

Finally, she came face to face with the realization that she must leave religion. The events of 11 September 2001 forced her break with Islam and all religion. The Dutch were as stupidly asleep to the realities of Islam as were all the other Western countries, including America. She felt the mission to “wake these people up.”

Horrified by the words of bin Laden, she reviewed the koran and ahadith only to confirm all of his statements. Time and space do not allow the proper exposition here of her description of her realization, but these are to be found in Chapter 14, “Leaving God.”

She could practice mental compartmentalization no longer. Her mind demanded the evidence of her senses be integrated with all she had learned by unrelenting logic.

In May 2002, she began reading The Atheist Manifesto “Before I’d read four pages, I already knew my answer. I had left God behind years ago. I was an atheist.” She added, “I looked in the mirror and said out loud, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ I said it slowly, enunciating it carefully, in Somali. And I felt relief.” At age 25, I had a similar experience in all respects.

What then? If no God, what was there for her? “I was on a psychological mission to accept living without a God, which means accepting that I gave my life its own meaning.” Few people can recognize the need for this, and even fewer can have the courage to try to recognize it. This woman did it all for herself, and that attests to the tremendous intellect and character she has.

The next step was as inevitable as it was essential. All humans must feel themselves to be moral beings. They must feel right, about themselves and their lives. This is a critical requirement of human nature, or, as Ayaan herself states “…I needed to believe I was still moral.”

“Humans themselves are the source of good and evil, I thought. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn’t be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion, which are to be a better and more generous person, without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey inhuman rules. I would no longer lie, to myself or others. I had had enough of lying. I was no longer afraid of the Hereafter.”

One must infer a sense of her morality since she does not explain her morality explicitly. She does tell us that she consulted books of my thinkers.

From here, her development moved quickly. She became a member of the Dutch Parliament, and she began speaking the truth publicly about Islam. Earlier, she had been against America in favor of “social democracy.” She quickly outgrew this. “Social democracy is grounded in the rights of groups of people, not individuals.” (emphasis mine)

She found quickly that Islam and Muslims hate the truth, especially in public. She also knew the same applied to Westerners, including the Dutch. Death threats followed. Theo Van Gogh was murdered, and she lived under constant threat of death.

At last, she had matured into that rarest of things, a normal adult. Unlike those who proclaim themselves and others as normal adults, psychologically and philosophically she towered over almost everyone in the West and certainly over everyone in the rest of the world.

She concludes Infidel with a number of outstanding statements including these:

“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.”

and

“What would you do with a responsibility like that (after being named by Time magazine into the category of ‘Leaders and Revolutionaries’? Perhaps I could start by telling people that values matter. The values of my parents’ world generate and preserve poverty and tyranny, for example, in their oppression of women. A clear look at this would be tremendously beneficial. In simple terms, for those of us who were brought up with Islam, if we face up to the terrible reality we are in, we can change our destiny.”

Some reviewers of Infidel have tried to make sophistic remarks about the book and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. One claimed that she saw Europe through child-like, rose-colored glasses. That reviewer completely ignored context, of an African girl exposed only to the Third World, suddenly encountering the First World with awe. What else? Another reviewer seemed to think that she over-stressed conditions she had left—conditions which make Berlin in May 1945 look nice. Go figure. Worst was the Newsweek reviewer with a Muslima name who castigated Ayaan for rejecting Islam and telling Islam as it is—ostensively because she was alleged to be subjective, bitter, unfair, and driving away the Muslim females she wants to reach. This reviewer also thought that there are plenty of normal, well-adjusted Muslim women. Talk about self-serving denial! None of this reviewer’s claims are true.

Infidel is not just an autobiography. It is that—but much, much more. It is an epistemological autobiography with a triumphant ending, and stands as a monument to real human nature.  While this review stresses the epistemological side of her development, it must be said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali comes across as a warm, vibrantly alive woman in every sense of the term "woman."

Think back to the origins of Ayaan Hirsi Ali—a dirt-poor, black female in a male-dominated, tribal, third-world Islamic culture. Statistically, she fits all those profiles that the “feely-touchies” use to justify adult failures, miscreants, and other ne’er-do-wells because of a “poor childhood.”

However, poor adults come from poor choices made by each when growing up and on in adulthood. Brigitte Gabriel could have become just another anonymous Lebanese peasant. Ayn Rand could have been ground into oblivion under the heel of the Communists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali could have become just another squandered African that no one ever would have been aware of. None of these women surrendered to failure. All chose to retain their selves and their grounding in reality. All took reason as an absolute and applied theirs to the fullest extent of each. All are heroic.

 

As for Ben Franklin’s question, their lives answer the question, “Of what use is a newborn baby?”