She has the high cheekbones and long, lean body of a fashion model. She has the eyes of a seeker of truths. She has the background of an Islamic terrorist.
Her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and she wrote the book, Infidel. She is so intelligent, brave, and beautiful, I wonder that I cannot look up to the heavens and see a trail of stardust igniting the darkness behind her as she streaks like a comet across the sky.
Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. She was brought up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Infidel is about what it is like to be raised Muslim and to have absolutely no option of exercising her intellect, her emotions, or her free will because she is, was, and will always be female.
At age 22, she fled an arranged marriage to Europe and settled in Holland. To her horror, she discovered that all of the oppressions to which Islamic women were subjected had emigrated, with Muslim families, to the West. It was then that she made her decision: “The most important thing I could do with my life was expose the reality of those women’s lives to people in power and make sure that existing laws demanding equality between the sexes were applied. Mine was a combat of action, not ideas. I should stand for Parliament.”
Doing so, Hirsi Ali wanted to achieve three things. First, to make Holland “stop tolerating the oppression of Muslim women in its midst.” Second, to “spark a debate among Muslims about reforming aspects of Islam so that people could begin to question, and criticize, their own beliefs.” And third, to educate Muslim women about “how bad, and how unacceptable, their suffering was.”
In January 2002 at age thirty-three, Aayan Hirsi Ali became a member of Holland’s Parliament. A week later, a local radio program, announced: “Hirsi Ali Calls Prophet Muhammad a Pervert.”
In an interview she had given three weeks earlier, she described the fifty-four-year-old Prophet’s Allah-approved marriage to a six-year-old child, consummated when the girl was only nine. Then, showing more raw nerve and common decency than any politician I can think of, Hirsi Ali added, “By our Western standards, Muhammad is a perverse man, and a tyrant.”
Within minutes of that broadcast, her life was threatened, her career as a Parliamentarian was almost over, and members of her own party were demanding that she “apologize for causing such commotion,” insisting that they would help to “protect her from herself.” Infuriated, she responded, “If the Prophet Muhammad went to bed with a nine-year-old, then according to Dutch law he is a pedophile. If you look at how the Prophet Muhammad ruled, he was a lone ruler, an autocrat, and that is tyranny. As for being protected from myself, that is condescending, and inexcusable.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali knew more than anyone should ever know about the inexcusable. Her grandmother taught her fear. “A woman alone is like a piece of sheep fat in the sun... Before you know it, the ants and insects are crawling all over it, until there is nothing left but a smear of grease.” That same grandmother, when she was five years old, decided that she had be purified by “having her genitals cuts out.” She was spread-eagled on the floor and held down for a blacksmith/circumciser “... 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.”
Welcome to the glories of being Muslim and a five-year-old female in Somalia.
