Pilgrim’s Progress

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Infidel 

National Review, April 30, 2007

If you have not heard of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you haven’t been paying attention, you haven’t been reading your National Review, and you are probably unaware just how near Europe may be to serious sectarian disorder.

You’ve also missed out on the remarkable story of how an obscure refugee from Somalia rose to become a leading figure in the fight against the oppression of Muslim women, and a prominent member of the Dutch parliament, only to be forced by fear for her safety to cross the Atlantic into what looks a lot like exile in America. Now, thanks to the publication of Infidel, Hirsi Ali’s beautifully written autobiography, you have the chance to catch up on this epic tale. It’s a compelling enough read on its own terms, but it’s valuable also for the revealing, and deeply troubling, light it sheds on our era of unprecedented migration, extraordinary social change, and profound cultural disruption.

Even from her earliest days Ayaan Hirsi Ali was swept up in these transformations. Indeed she is the product of them. Her father, Hirsi Magan, a son of a Somali warrior, succeeded in making his way from the Northern Desert to the Upper West Side, and a degree at Columbia University. A (relatively) enlightened man and a patriot, he then went home to help build a modern nation out of a ragtag mess of feuding clans. It was on his return to Mogadishu in the mid-1960s that he married the woman who was to become Hirsi Ali’s mother. Less happily, he fell foul of Somalia’s dictator, a Soviet-sponsored thug with a very different idea of what progress should mean. For Magan that meant jail, exile, and, ultimately, refuge in the harsh pieties of mosque and clan, pieties that were to devastate his relationship with the daughter who so hero-worshiped him.

When Magan vanished into jail, so did any notions of modernity he had brought into his family. When the future disappears, the past has a nasty habit of rushing right back in. Little Ayaan was left in the hands of a mother lost to increasing religious obsession, patriarchal custom, and growing psychological difficulty. Making matters still worse was the dominant presence of a grandmother immersed in the superstitions and bleak Hobbesian certainties of the sandy wilderness in which she had been raised. At one point, the young Ayaan is taken out into that same primordial desert. Not for the first, or the last, time, she finds herself caught between ancestral ways and her own tenuous connection with a more advanced way of life: “My grandmother’s world wasn’t our world. Her lectures only frightened me even more. Lions? Hyenas? I had never seen such creatures. We were city children, which to her nomad values made us more inept than lowly farmers or the ignoble blacksmith clans.”

But the lectures weren’t the worst of it: “My father was in jail and my mother was away for long periods, but Grandma would ensure that the old traditions would be respected in the old ways.”

And so they were. Hirsi Ali then describes the ritual mutilation of her genitals (“female circumcision,” some euphemists like to call it), a description so unflinching, so searing, so disgusting, that it’s almost impossible to read. Ayaan was five at the time. The procedure ends with her brutalized, covered in blood, legs tied tightly together — it makes for a better scar, you know — as powerless in the face of barbarism as was her friend, doomed, unruly Theo van Gogh, when, decades later and a continent and a civilization away, another barbarian with another knife came calling for him too.

Eventually, Ayaan’s upbringing evolved into what could be seen as a jet-age version of her family’s nomadic traditions, including stints in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. But if this did represent some sort of connection with the past, it was a connection that was fraying. She found herself repeatedly confronted by two competing visions of the world, one familiar, ancient, and oppressive, the other, still glimpsed only in outline, fresh, glittering, and brimming with opportunity.

But then, as so often, Ayaan Hirsi Ali did what few might have expected. While at a Muslim school in Kenya, she fell into the embrace of the fundamentalist Islam that lay at the heart of so much that was wrong with her life. Going much further than most of her contemporaries, she even chose to don that miserable, all-enveloping black robe: “All those girls with their little white headscarves were children, hypocrites. I was a star of God. When I spread out my hands I felt like I could fly.”

But there was more to this enthusiasm than a severe case of false consciousness. Look closely, and that amazing, extraordinarily resilient ego of hers can be seen peeping out from under the darkness: “[The] huge black cloak . . . had a thrill to it, a sensuous feeling. It made me feel powerful: Underneath this screen lay a previously unsuspected, but potentially lethal, femininity. I was unique: Very few people walked about like that in those days in Nairobi. Weirdly, it made me feel like an individual. It sent out a message of superiority: I was the one true Muslim.”

Submission? Not exactly.

It’s impossible not to detect in these passages, in my view the most significant in the book, the key to the woman she finally became. There is that proud sense of self, there is the brutal honesty, and there is the obvious, compulsive pleasure she takes in absolutist belief and the feeling of moral superiority that comes with it. To grasp this is to understand why, once Ayaan Hirsi Ali arrived in the West (the story of how she managed this feat is well and movingly told in Infidel), she chose not the easy life that could, at last, have been hers, but instead embarked upon the crusade for which she is now famous, the crusade that cost Theo van Gogh his life and which has now driven her out of Holland.

But there should be no doubt that hers is a crusade that has the potential to be almost as unsettling for many of those (particularly on the U.S. right) who are now so pleased to support her as for those she opposes. While she may proclaim herself a defender of the Enlightenment, it’s important to realize that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Enlightenment is not the Anglo-American version — questioning, skeptical, agnostic, reasonable — but something far fiercer with more than a whiff of revolutionary France about it. The religious fervor of her Nairobi days has not evaporated; it has merely been transferred into the fixed, and no less irrational, certainty that there is no God. As for “moderate” Islam, there is, she insists, really no such thing. She’s sure about that, as she’s sure about everything.

Naturally, she thinks that we in the West are feeble, complacent, too “culturally sensitive,” lulled by our secularism into forgetting the dangers of a religion of wrath. It’s difficult to disagree. After 9/11, she told herself that she had “to wake these people up.” That’s you and me she’s talking about, and waking us up is what she has been trying to do ever since. Her message may sometimes be too harsh, too black-and-white, but if it’s making someone, anyone, pay attention to a problem that is not just going away, it will do some good.

And if you think that makes Ayaan Hirsi Ali sound like an ancient prophet, you’re right. The irony, I suspect, would be lost on her.