Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi

Just finished listening to Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi. Here are some highlights…

Growing up in Somalia in the 1970s was tough due to political turmoil and a war with Ethiopia. Hirsi’s father was jailed as an anti-Communist, so she was reared mostly by her mother and grandmother. While her mother was away trying to earn a black market living for the family, the grandmother brought in a traditional Islamic circumciser to cut off/out Hirsi’s genitals and those of her sister. This is a truly horrifying part of the book. A newspaper account of female genital mutilation, written by a comfortable western journalist, soon to return in an air-conditioned Land Cruiser to the Hilton, doesn’t have the impact of a personal account. The girls were aged 6 and 4, held down by female relatives, sliced into with scissors, then sewed up and left with their legs tied together for a week so that they would form enough scar tissue to serve as a chastity belt. There are the inevitable infections.

Eventually Hirsi’s father escapes from prison and over the border to Ethiopia. The mother refuses to live among Christians in Ethiopia and hence the family agrees to reunite in Mecca. Saudi Arabia proves to be incredibly hot, even by Somali standards, and much more violent. Every day in the main square there are beheadings, hands being cut off, women being stoned. In the evening, the sounds of women being beaten by their husbands drift over into the Hirsi house. The Saudis refer to the Somalis as “slaves” (black slavery was common in the Arabian Peninsula until the 1930s) and curse unseen Jews every time anything goes wrong, e.g., a the failure of a window air conditioner.

The family returns to Africa , but the violence does not abate. Hirsi’s family engages a traditional Koran instructor, who forces children to memorize the Koran in Arabic, even if they don’t understand any Arabic. Hirsi resists this form of instruction and the instructor bangs her head against the wall so hard that she nearly dies from a fractured skull and brain trauma (fortunately this happened at a time when Nairobi had an excellent hospital; an Italian surgeon saved her life). Somalia breaks down into civil war, with violence among clans and races. Racism is much more extreme and more violent than in the U.S., despite the fact that all Somalis have dark skin. Somalis recognize a variety of distinct races based on general appearance and a hierarchy of worth among those races. The superior races look down upon the inferior as unworthy and, to a large extent, subhuman.

Women were subject to arbitrary violence if they lost the protection of male relatives. A woman on her own in a refugee camp would be raped, often suffering fatal injuries. A woman who became pregnant out of wedlock would be shunned by fellow Muslims, grabbed on the street by passersby, denounced as a harlot, and often killed by her father or brothers.

Hirsi is fortunate to get a job with the United Nations. They were taking Western donor money and putting it into rural telephone service. Unfortunately, as soon as the copper wire was laid down, Somalis would rip it up and sell the wire. The government did not function any more efficiently, according to Hirsi. Civil servants had contempt for anything “white” or “Christian” and their primary concern was how to transfer government money into their own pockets.

Hirsi’s father marries her to a cousin whom she has met only once and disliked. She is supposed to meet this cousin in Canada, where he lives, and travels to Germany to await a Canadian visa. Once there, she runs away to Holland and declares herself an asylum-seeker. She lies about her name, so that her family will have more difficulty finding her, and lies about her story, since being married to an oaf does not meet Holland’s legal requirements for asylum.

Hirsi eventually gets Dutch citizenship, enrolls as a college student, and finds ample work as a Somali/Dutch translator. Her translation work puts her in contact with a lot of immigrants and she eventually begins to notice a trend: Muslim men are involved in a tremendous amount of violence and crime, much of it directed against their wives. September 11, 2001 finds Hirsi working with some well-meaning Dutch labor party researchers. Their immediate reaction is to tell her that “Islam is a religion of peace and we know that Muslims don’t support this.” The TV station segues into coverage of local Muslim communities around Holland and the rest of Europe celebrating the success of the World Trade Center attack. Hirsi responds to her colleagues that she has memorized the Koran and, in fact, the “peace” in Islam is reserved for Muslims and Muslim communities. Infidels are supposed to be killed, according to Hirsi’s reading of the Koran.

Contrasting the peace, order, education, and prosperity of Christian Holland with the violence, disorder, ignorance, illiteracy, and poverty of all of the Muslim countries she has known, Hirsi begins to question the value of Islam for women and the truth of Islam. She becomes an atheist, but knowing that atheism is a capital offense under Islamic law, tries to keep her loss of faith to herself.

She probably should have kept a bit more to herself; after a few TV appearances and public lectures, Hirsi has accumulated so many threats to her life that she requires bodyguards. Things really heat up during the Muslim riots in Nigeria over whether the Miss World contest was un-Islamic and a newspaper editorial that suggested that Mohammed might have chosen a wife from among the beauties. Hirsi publicly discusses the controversy and agrees with the editorial, citing texts about the prophet’s life that report his finding certain women attractive. It is not clear what the relevance to the discussion is, but Hirsi cites the prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl (Aisha), which was consummated when the wife turned 9 years old. Mohammed was 54 years old at the time and the image of him having sex with a 9-year-old was not a piece of Islamic scholarship that local Muslims wanted brought before the Dutch public. The death threats intensified and Hirsi ended up with one of the most expensive security details in all of Holland.

In Holland, a country of 16 million, politics are much more like those of a U.S. state than comparable to the U.S. national politics. With just a few lucky connections, Hirsi ends up being asked to stand for parliament under the banner of the Liberal party (she says that we would regard these guys as socialists, but in Holland they are what passes for the party of business). While the threats to her life are building, she runs in the election and wins a seat. She concentrates on changing conditions for Muslim women living in Holland, attempting to dismantle state-funded Islamic schools for a start. Hirsi strove for the education of women and the right of women to leave the house and work. Her contention is that Muslim boys grow up seeing their mother being beaten constantly and that makes them more likely to resort to criminal violence as adults. Her legislative agenda included trying to keep girls from getting “excised” on kitchen tables in Holland, and helping immigrants integrate more with conventional Dutch society. Hirsi insisted that the government track the number of Muslim girls who are killed by their brothers and fathers to protect the family’s honor (it turned out to be a number that shocked the Dutch public).

Hirsi is eventually forced out of her house by lawsuits from neighbors, who argue successfully that her presence is a threat to their security and property values. She gives up her seat in Parliament and relocates to a think-tank in the United States.

The End.

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Although Hirsi makes headlines for her conflicts with folks in Europe, for me the most interesting part of the book was about her early life in Somalia and neighboring countries. It would not be easy to walk a mile in her childhood and teenage shoes.