No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Allah is not Great: How Islam Poisons Everything

Time for another book report, and today I'm reviewing Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. I still intend to read and review Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion as I promised last time, but someone has checked out my local public library's copy so I'll wait until it comes back. What, did you think I was going to buy it? [Update: here's the link]

Anyway, Infidel is a fascinating and at times harrowing book, but also an inspiring one. A girl grows up in poverty in Mogadishu, just one generation removed from a nomadic lifestyle that's thousands of years old. She's steeped in a violently misogynistic religion, and at age five she undergoes the astonishingly cruel, painful and barbaric custom that is female genital mutilation. The reason for this custom is pure ignorance: people believe that if a girl's clitoris is not cut out, it will keep growing larger and larger. A girl who has not been butchered this way is a kinterleey, unclean, evil, a prostitute, deserving of being beaten and bullied by everyone else including schoolteachers and other adults. Remember, we're talking about five-year-old girls.

As the girl grows older, she is continually lectured that she is nothing, worthless, inherently sinful and evil, by sole virtue of her gender. She is the property of her father and brother until the inevitable arranged marriage to a stranger, then she is her husband's property, to be beaten and raped at will. Her husband will be perfectly free to take another wife, even disappear without a word and abandon her with her children (as Ayaan's father did to her mother). But if a girl steps out of line by the slightest amount, in her words, dress, behavior, by any romantic interest in a non-Muslim or even a Muslim of the wrong clan, then she has shamed her male "owners", and they can avenge their "honor" only by brutally murdering her.

Thanks to her irresponsible and usually absent father, Ayaan has a chaotic childhood, being dragged around from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia to Kenya, back to Somalia, and then back again to Kenya. The one bright spot is the school in Nairobi which opens her eyes to Western ideas of individual freedom. Even trashy Barbara Cartland bodice-rippers inspire her with the idea of women making their own choices in love and in life.

Then Ayaan is snapped back to reality with the news that marriage has been arranged for her, with a Somali man living in Canada. She dreads the prospect of her dreams being quashed, the pain of the "Night of Defloration" when her stranger husband will break open the scar tissue (left from the genital mutilation) with his penis and proudly display the bloody sheets, and the lifetime of servitude and debasement that lies ahead of her and that has already broken the spirit of her older female friends.

Ayaan is given a ticket to Canada via Germany. While in Germany, on the spur of the moment she takes a train to the Netherlands and applies for asylum as a refugee. Fearing that her would-be husband and his vengeful clan will be after her, she gives her name as Ayaan Hirsi Ali instead of Ayaan Hirsi Magan, using her grandfather's name instead of her father's. This is legal under Somali law, but has tragic consequences later.

Ayaan quickly makes a new life for herself in the Netherlands. She becomes fluent in Dutch, gets a degree in political science from the country's most prestigious university, and impresses everyone she meets with her hard work and quiet determination. She also works as a Somali translator for the Dutch welfare agencies, and every day encounters heartbreaking stories of women beaten, abused, and raped, and young girls butchered in rent-free refugee apartments. She becomes determined to stop the suffering of Muslim women in the Netherlands, which is being ignored because of political correctness and feeble-minded multiculturalism.

After just a few years in the country, Ayaan becomes not only a Dutch citizen but a Member of Parliament, and collaborates with filmmaker Theo van Gogh (great-grandnephew of Vincent) on a ten-minute film which, to Western eyes, sounds incredibly innocuous. It shows women praying to Allah, but breaking taboo by lifting their eyes from the ground and asking why they must submit without question.

The result: pandemonium. Holland's explosively-growing Muslim community reacts with outrage, and Van Gogh is brutally murdered. Ayaan must go into hiding, cut off from her friends, surrounded by government-supplied bodyguards at all times and never able to stay in the same place more than a few nights in a row. At length the Dutch government, perhaps tired of the expense of protecting her, brings up the issue of her changing her name when applying for asylum, and threatens to revoke her Dutch citizenship. This would make her ineligible to serve in Parliament, and thus ineligible for bodyguards. Fortunately, Ayaan gets an opportunity to move to the US where she is now working at a conservative think-tank.

It's not surprising that conservative Christians would exploit this story for their own purposes. As Ayaan points out, Muslims are coming to Europe in huge numbers and simply not integrating; they have their own (tax-supported) Quranic schools, they watch only Muslim TV via satellite dishes or cassettes sold door-to-door in Muslim neighborhoods, they generally cocoon themselves from the host country and deride it as full of filthy unbeliever pigs, even while taking advantage of every generosity extended to them. (A Somali woman tells Ayaan how to milk the system: "If you call a Dutchman a racist, he'll give you anything you want.") Lack of integration (the Quran forbids friendship with infidels) leads to higher crime, poverty, abuse of women and children, lower educational achievements, and failure to learn the values of the host country: freedom, openness, respect for one's neighbors, and the rule of law instead of barbaric "honor killings."

But can Christians look in a mirror and claim to be without sin? Here in the US we are seeing the rise of an increasingly powerful parallel Christianist society, with children home-schooled to prevent exposure to the teaching of evolution or sex education, then sent to Pat Robertson University or its ilk, from which they emerge with no real qualifications except as Bush administration flunkies. Something very similar is going on with ultra-orthodox Hassidic communities in Israel and parts of the US. Read this story of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem who regard government-run city buses as their personal domain, and savagely attack even Jewish women who invade "their" holy space. Ask yourself whether only Islam is the problem, or whether it's a sickness of fundamentalist and fanatical religion generally.

But a more important and more positive message to learn from this book is that even someone as disadvantaged as Ayaan can break free from the prison of backwardness and superstition she was born into. Even though she knew almost nothing of Western culture while living in Africa, it still exerted a powerful pull on her and many of her friends.

Think of how much good we in the West could achieve if we could reach out to the Muslim world instead of spending billions a day to destroy Iraq and create whole new generations of Osama bin Ladens and centuries of hatred and revenge. The US has spent a pittance on Arabic-language broadcasting in the Middle East, and true to form has fucked up by appointing cronies who don't speak Arabic and have no broadcast experience, and have inadvertently allowed pro-al-Qaeda material to be aired. The BBC also spends a pittance, relatively speaking, but has a highly-respected World Service which is a lifeline of free speech and factual information for people in despotic regimes all over the world.

Islam, like any religion, means different things to different people. But for far too many people, it degrades women and inculcates mindless fanaticism and violence. It's not that Christianity is any better than Islam; read this fine collection of quotes from the American Taliban and it's obvious that if given free rein, Christofascists in the US would cause just as much oppression and suffering. Life in Western society offers more freedom and more opportunities only because Christianity has been reined in and stripped of its once absolute power. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment came at a huge cost in holy wars and inquisitions. The Muslim world has yet to experience similar movements, even as the US backslides into religious insanity and triumphalism.

Anyway, as a fellow infidel who has had to make his own journey from a suffocatingly religious upbringing to the light of reason (though mine was vastly easier), I highly recommend this book.