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AYAAN HIRSI ALI
Nomad: From Islam to America (2011)
Free Press
978-14391-7182-0
The best way to get me to read something is to ban it or
seek to silence its author. Brandeis University’s (cowardly) decision to rescind
an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali for her criticism of Islam led me to downloaded
Nomad, her memoir sequel to Infidel (2007).
Ali has major issues with Islam, as would any civilized
woman who endured circumcision and genital mutilation as a child, was entombed
in a chador, and affianced to an
older man she never met. As a
Somali refuge growing up in Kenya and Ethiopia, Ali received just enough education
to question and developed just enough courage to flee. Her journey to the West
took her first to The Netherlands, where she got a thorough education, got
elected to Parliament, wrote a movie script, and endured the horror of seeing
director friend Theo van Gogh murdered by Islamists, and herself made the
target of a fatwa. That threat,
plus encounters with a Dutch-style political vendetta, led Ali to relocate to
the United States, where she employs bodyguards to protect her from the legions
of Muslim males who would love to collect their spiritual rewards for killing
her. She doesn’t like having bodyguards, but states, “…it’s better than being
dead. It’s also better than wearing a headscarf or a veil, which to me
represents the mental and physical restrictions that so many Muslim women have
to suffer.” (277)
Ali doesn't wish to play nice. “Islam is imbued with
violence, and it encourages violence,” says she. (202) It’s also a religion marred
by anti-Semitism, and intolerance, rejects Enlightenment values, and “is based on a
book, the Quran, that denies women basic human rights….” (133) Ali lets the
words of the Quran, the teachings of Muhammad, and the practices of the devout
to make her case that Islam is, at its core, misogynist. She describes a
worldview that sounds as if was sifted from the sands of antiquity. “According
to the Quaran,” she writes, a “husband is permitted to beat [women] and decide
whether they may word or leave the house; he may marry other women without
seeking their approval, and if he chooses to divorce them, they have no right
to resist or to keep custody of their children.” (133) Even more horrifying, if
he decides his wife or daughter has disgraced the family name, he can murder
her and walk free.
Muslim men immigrating to the West will not walk free if
they murder, but she insists that only the blind assert that such “honor
killings” don’t happen on Western soil.
Ali sees a veritable clash of civilizations between Islam and the
non-Islamic world. She cautions Westerners not to be lulled into thinking that
their values convert Muslims living among them–most Muslim immigrants, she
asserts, come to the West either to escape refuge camps or for economic
opportunity, but they have no respect for Western values and no loyalty to the
lands that adopt them. This is true of her own family; despite her success, family
members curse her as a whore over the telephone in one breath, and demand she send
them money the next.
Ali now works for the American Enterprise Institute, a
conservative think-tank. If you wonder why she’d go such a route, it’s because
she reserves some of her harshest criticism for mushy-headed supporters of
multiculturalism and for American feminists (the latter of whom she sees as
cowardly). “American liberals appear to be more uncomfortable with my
condemning of the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives,”
she charges. Instead, they “look down at their shoes when faced with questions
about cultural differences.” (106) She wonders why liberals valorize the civil
rights movement, but spout clichés about “affirming the values of tribal
lifestyles” in the name of multiculturalism. Ali calls the “multiculturalist
belief that … culture should somehow be preserved, even when its products move
to Western societies ... a recipe for social failure.” (213) She is positively
contemptuous of American feminists, whose cultural relativism she sees as
anathema to the gender equity values they purport to hold.
Don’t preserve Islam, she implores, defeat and dismantle it.
This, in her mind, is a matter or urgency. She sees radical Islam as ascendant and
cites studies that show 50% of American Muslims identify more strongly with
their religion than with the United Sates, and that one of four under the age
of 30 justifies suicide bombing against Americans to defend Islam. It’s time, she argues, to stop excusing
Islamic barbarity. She acknowledges there are many decent individual Muslims,
but they only become so be repudiating the core teachings of Islam.
Ali’s message is unsettling and raises the hackles of those
who endorse ecumenicalism and cultural diversity. Needless to say Muslims view Ali–who
now identifies as an atheist–as a heretic. Some of Ali’s ‘solutions,’ such as
more education, seem hopelessly hackneyed, and a few are just weird–such as
imploring the Catholic Church to evangelize Muslim lands. For one who has been
a politician, Ali also sometimes seems politically naïve. (Why, she asks, does
the West retain ties to nations that harbor anti-Western ideologues? Ummm… oil?)
There’s plenty to criticize, including Ali’s flat prose. But we ought to pay
very close attention to what she says. I couldn’t help but draw analogies
between Ali’s take on the current state of Islam and Europe in the 1920s, when
fascism seemed more annoying than threatening.
No Wikipedia peeking—Where
are the Maldives and what do you know about them? You’ll find them in the
Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka, about halfway between the Horn of Africa
and Sumatra—a string of 28 small islands upon which fewer than 400,000 people
live. It’s also a nation under Shar’ia law with a horrifying human rights
record. In all, an unlikely place to find a musician who counts among his
heroes The Beatles and Pink Floyd, and tackles women’s rights, environmental
stewardship, and government corruption. Ahmed Nasheed is so out of sync with
the powers that be that he gets no national airplay and has to peddle his music
in tourist shops and abroad. 
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