Another Interesting Read: Infidel

I finished reading Infidel while down with the flu the last few days. The author is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, well-known and controversial in Europe for her advocacy on behalf of Islamic women immigrants.

You may recall the murder a couple of years ago of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an outraged Muslim in the Netherlands that touched off a furor. He was targeted because he and Ali produced a film called "Submission", which criticized the oppression of women by a rigid interpretation of the Quran. She was forced into months of hiding under the protection of the Dutch government because of threats against her as well. Today she still lives under the protection of armed guards in Washington, DC where she works for the American Enterprise Institute.

Ali is a native of Somalia, but also lived in Kenya and Saudi Arabia before seeking asylum in the Netherlands from an arranged marriage. She became a Dutch citizen, a graduate of the University of Leiden, and was elected to Parliament.

This is the fascinating story of her intellectual journey from a traditional Muslim childhood to an "infidel" who rejects Islam in favor of Western values. She grew up in a strict Muslim family where she was subjected to female circumcision (which she says is part of tribal culture rather than a tenet of Islam), survived brutal beatings, lived her adolescence as a devout follower of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and experienced civil war and turmoil in several unstable countries in Africa.

After gaining asylum in the Netherlands, Ali supported herself as a translator for the government immigration agencies. Her experiences convinced her that the Dutch policy of multiculturalism was producing policies that perpetuated cruelty on women and girls. Ali writes that she heard repeated stories of the excision of little girls on kitchen tables in the Netherlands and well as the systematic beating and abuse of immigrant women. She believes that the immigrant culture is being preserved in the Netherlands at the expense of their women and children and of their integration into Dutch society which values tolerance and personal liberty.

As she says, " The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of alternative ways of life."

For her criticism of Islam, Ali has been rejected by her family and clan; suffered political attacks in the Netherlands (including an attempt to void her Dutch citizenship); and lives with daily death threats. Her views are controversial with some, but she is a champion of free speech and the right to dissent at considerable personal cost.

After finishing the book I reflected that for all of her rejection of Islam and her professed atheism, Ali still seems God-haunted. As my neighbor, The Old Marine, says, "every person has a God-shaped hole in the heart that only God can fill." In one passage in the book a Dutch Protestant friend talks to Ali about her own faith, but Ali cannot accept what she has been brought up to believe is an "idolatrous" religion. I pray that someday she will be able to let God fill that hole in her heart again.