A Review of Infidel

[Koora-Tuunshe]

Impressive review

 

Mahamud M. Yahye, PhD

 

I have read the Dutch/Somali politician, Ayaan’s Hirsi Ali’s, controversial book: Infidel. (It was sent to me, with gratitude from my part, by an American lady, Ms. Jeanne D., who had worked in Somalia as a member of the U.S. voluntary organization, the Peace Corps, in the 1960s, and who still retains a great deal of admiration, respect and empathy for that country and its unlucky people). As the book indicates, Ayaan was born in Somalia (around 1969; the fateful but sad year in which Gen. Siad Barre had seized power through a military coup d’etat), was raised as a Muslim and she spent the/ early years of her life in East Africa (i.e., Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya) and Saudi Arabia. In 1992, Ayaan moved to Holland as a refugee, escaping an arranged marriage to a distant relative whom she had never met, as she claims. After earning a university degree in political science, she joined the Dutch Labor Party through which she eventually became a member of parliament – a post she later had to vacate after it was demonstrated that she had lied in her application for political asylum in the Netherlands and her subsequent acquisition of Dutch citizenship. Again, she had to move to USA a few years ago, because little Holland could not, apparently, secure her personal safety. There she joined one of the most conservative American think-tanks.

 

Having made this brief introduction, let me stress two important points. Firstly, Ayaan’s book, though not that great, has gained popularity in the West (I gather it was a bestseller in America) because of her vehement attacks on Islam and everything Islamic. In the current post-9/11 atmosphere, anyone who criticizes Islam, fairly or unfairly, is assured a sizable audience as well as an enormous publicity. Secondly, in terms of language and style the book is well written, although I totally disagree with the thrust of apostate Ayaan’s argument concerning her denunciation and abandonment of her ancestral religion. If Ayaan - and not a ghost writer - had authored this now infamous book, she is a talented linguist. I understand she is also very fluent in both Somali and Dutch languages. This is not surprising, because her father, Mr. Hirsi Magan Isse, a devout Muslim and a former member of the now defunct Somali Academy for Literature – and whom I know personally - is arguably the best contemporary writer in Somali language. I still remember very vividly when the opposition against Siad Barre’s dictatorial regime would air by air from abroad (around 1979) Hirsi Magan’s fictional story, Laaska Daawada [The Pond of Medicine] in which he heavily criticized that tyrannical regime and enticed its overthrow through popular uprising. When his story was aired early evening, whole segments of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, would come to a complete standstill as everybody wanted to hear it. As such, with just a fictional story, Hirsi Magan was able to damage seriously the body of Siad Barre regime’s propaganda of the preceding 10 years. This shows that the pen can sometimes be mightier than the sword. (I understand Hirsi now lives as a political refugee in Britain where he spends most of his time explaining the noble Qur’an to members of the Somali community in their own language).

 

Infidel, a totally biased book against the noble religion of Islam, is moderately long (353 pages). It comprises two main sections, 17 chapters and an epilogue.(1) The first half of the book mainly deals with the author’s upbringing and makes good reading, particularly for a Somali like me who is familiar with the national context which renegade Ayaan is talking about. That part could also be interesting for a foreigner to whom it would introduce the unique features and complexities of the Somali culture and its peculiar but harsh traditional aspects. I was particularly touched and saddened by the unnecessary cruelty that is meted out to Somali girls from early childhood, starting with the barbaric, un-Islamic practice known as female genital mutilation (FGM), especially its severer version called genital infibulations, to which Ayaan was reported to have been subjected at the tender age of five, plus a countless number of 6quotidian household chores from which their male siblings are normally exempted. When I read her harrowing stories of cruelty, regular beatings, and maltreatment, I thanked almighty God that I was not born a girl in a traditional Somali setting. On the other hand, in this detailed account of her life, Ayaan talks so frankly and, at times, with so much elaboration on her intimate life that I was so shocked – or rather very much disgusted. This is so, because no normal girl from a decent Somali family, like Ayaan’s, would in her right mind attack her noble Islamic religion so fiercely or talk about what happened in her bedroom on her wedding night. But apparently, she is not a normal person; she is notoriously eccentric.

 

Because of being accused of belonging to a dissident group, Ayaan’s father was imprisoned in Mogadishu as a political detainee for several years. After his daring escape from prison, he and the rest of the family had to flee to Saudi Arabia around 1978. However, the Saudi authorities later withdrew his status as a political refugee, most probably due to a heavy pressure from Siad Barre’s repressive government, and the family had to move first to Ethiopia (after the establishment of the opposition group called the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, or SSDF) then to Kenya. The family then briefly returned to Somalia after SSDF collapsed due mainly to the poor quality of its top leadership, according to Ayaan’s assertion. But the family had, once again, to flee to Kenya, as refugees, after the downfall of Siad Barre’s tyrannical regime and the onslaught of the country’s terrible civil war in early 1991. In this connection, one quick remark that I would like to make is that, although the above-mentioned foreign countries had welcomed Ayaan and her family and offered them a peaceful abode, as refugees, she criticizes and bad mouths all of them directly or indirectly. For instance, she reports that when one day she told her mother that [in a biology class] at her school in Nairobi, Kenya, they were taught that human beings had descended from apes, her mum responded very quickly: “That’s the end of your school fees. Kenyans may have come from apes, yes. But not Muslims.” In another place she writes, referring to her stay in Saudi Arabia, “Islamic law in Saudi Arabia treated half its citizens like animals, with no rights or recourse, disposing of women without regard.” Talking about Ethiopia and its people, she says “Ethiopians were kufr [infidels]; the very sound of the word was scornful. They drank alcohol and they didn’t wash properly. They were despicable.” (2)

 

These are egregious insults that can only come from a supercilious person with a childish attitude, too. I also disliked her use of the divisive Somali tribal names and, particularly, her exaggerated praise of her immediate sub-sub-clan (Osman Mahamud) and sub-clan (********* or ********** and not Macherten as she wrongly spelled it) together with her insulting, belittling and disparaging attitude towards other Somali clans. Another thing that annoyed me was that in her use of several Somali words/names, the author does not follow the spelling standard of the Somali language or its Anglicized version. For instance, when referring to the flowing, very colorful and very light dress worn by Somali ladies and known as “diric” (or diri’) she renders it as “diriah”. Besides, referring to the simple name of Mahamud, she has spelled it in about four different ways.

 

In the second half of the book, the author talks in suffocating details about her trials and tribulations as a political refugee when she moved from Kenya to the Netherlands in 1992. In her case, the situation was rendered more complicated because she had lied about her identity/name in order to gain easy access to the status of a political refugee in Holland. (But it is an open secret that if all Somalis had to tell the whole truth in their refugee applications, very few of them would have been accepted as political refugees in Western Europe and North America). On the other hand, I must admit that, though Ayaan’s travails in Holland were at times interesting, I found it difficult to continue reading that part of the book – it was just boringly too detailed. Page after page, she talks about scores of very mundane issues regarding her pending legal case, security arrangements and her daily political activities. I also kept wondering how she remembered all these minute details of her daily grinding in the Netherlands unless she was keeping an elaborate, timely diary. But I doubt that, because my fellow countrymen and women are not famous for being so organized and disciplined to engage in this kind of a learned, modern day undertaking. She could have made up some of these stories herself, I guess.

 

She deals in minute details with her great troubles in Holland and the strict security arrangements she had to undergo especially after airing the infamous film, titled “Submission”. This highly biased and insulting film on which Ayaan had collaborated with a Dutch filmmaker by the name of Theo van Gogh showed, I understand, women with verses of the holy Qur’an painted on their naked bodies. Van Gogh made many Muslims in Holland extremely angry and was eventually stabbed to death by a Moroccan man. The killer was said to have left a letter threatening Ayaan to the same fate on van Gogh’s corpse. Consequently, the Dutch authorities had to devise an elaborate security system and assign 24-hour bodyguards for her protection. When you read about these strict daily security plans, you wonder what Ayaan has gained from her blasphemy unless she was foolhardy to the extent of madness. (Some other reviewers of her books also opined that her apostasy and her severe, irrational attack and current hatred of Islam could be attributed to the miserable life she had endured in her childhood). Incidentally, when she lived in Kenya, she was – based on her own admission – a radical Muslim, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and she used to wear a full-blown veil (hijab).

 

The author devotes only one chapter towards the end of her book, shamelessly titled “Leaving God” to the idea why she had to break with the noble Islamic religion and justifies it in a very superficial way. She does not give any valid points in this regard, except her repetition without solid evidence, that Islam everywhere subjugates women and violates their basic rights. She also says that, after 9/11, she discovered that Islam was a violent religion. As a man who lived in both the Arab/Muslim world and the West, Ayaan’s naïve and superficial argument did not convince me and I became more attached to my divine Islamic religion. As some female writers like Asra Nomani have shown, Islam has given some fundamental rights to women, such as participation in inheritance, keeping their identity/names (and not adopting their husbands’ family names after marriage, as Western/Christians do), initiation of divorce, engagement in business – as the Prophet’s first wife Khadija did [may Allah be pleased with her] - and participation in community leadership, before Western women could obtain such basic human rights. Besides, the heinous acts of a small clique of misguided Muslim extremists/deviants cannot wipe out the Islamic religion’s real nature of peace and tolerance.

 

Ayaan Hirsi could have followed the example of this Muslim American lady of Indian origin, called Ms. Asra Q. Nomani, who in her book Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s struggle for the Soul of Islam, tried to engage in a civilized debate when it comes to arguing for the rights of Muslim women.(3) Ms. Nomani and other leading Muslim American women have been striving for engaging in what they call in Arabic: “jihad li tajdid al-ruh al-Islami (or a struggle for the renewal of the soul of Islam). Their movement eschews bigoted, sexist and intolerant practices that betray Islam, the prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) and all the good people who call themselves Muslims.(4) More specifically, with regard to the running of one of their mosques in West Virginia, USA, this movement had, for instance, struggled to allow women – contrary to the old practices of that community – to walk through the front door (and not the rear one only) of their mosque, to pray in the main hall, to fill positions of leadership, and to guide community activities in their area. In this regard, the mission of this enlightened Islamic movement could be summarized in the following few words: “to fight to liberate Muslim communities from cultural norms that contradict the Islamic principles of tolerance, inclusion and equality.” In her more objective, rational and well-argued book, Asra Nomani even draws up as appendixes for her book two interesting bills of rights, namely, (a) An Islamic bill of rights for women in mosques; and (b) An Islamic bill of rights for women in the bedroom.

 

This is the more intelligent approach that Ayaan Hirsi could have followed if she really wanted to take Islam to its “reformation period”, as she disingenuously claims, instead of using a broad-brush technique and, thus, attacking the fundamental tenets of Islam and announcing her break with this noble religion that has served humanity very well for over 14 centuries. Ayaan’s misguided approach is like throwing the baby with the bath tub, as the proverbial saying goes.

 

Mahamud M. Yahye, PhD

e-mail:

mm2yahya@yahoo.com

 

(1) See Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel.(New York: Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2007)

 

(2) Note here that there is no Ali in her real name. It should have read: Ayaan Hirsi Magan

 

Op. cit., pp. 64, 60, and 56

 

(3) Nomani, Asra Q. Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam.

(New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2005), 306 pages

 

(4) Nomani, op. cit., pp. 281 and 283

[Fabregas]

waxaa maxa laga review garayanya? Don't waste your money on people who will use to it to publish further material to demonise the Prophet, salalahu calayhi wasalam!

[Koora-Tuunshe]

^He particularly underlines how ancient cultural beliefs contradict with Islamic values, yet many non-Muslims confuse such deep-rooted norms as though they're endorsed in Islam. For instance, FGM, honor killing, etc.

 

However, I don't know why Ayan goes into intricate detail of the mistreatment of women in Somalia. Somali women have always been treated as equal with men (In front of Allah) and they travel independently, even in the past.

 

Look at this quote by the historian and anthropologist Andrzejewski (1978)

 

It must be observed at this point that the lot of Somali women, even before this time, was probably somewhat better in many other male-dominated societies, and their difficulties arose more from abuse of the system than from cruelties inherent in it.

For instance, women did not have to be veiled, except by tradition among members of a small number of families in some of the towns, and

everywhere they had considerable freedom of movement,

as can be seen from the women in the novel are traveling independently from Aden to Somalia .

Somali men usually feel great reverence and affection for their mothers, and consequently many women of ability and character had a strong influence on family matters and even, by manipulating their menfolk, on public affairs. Marriages were normally arranged by the families concerned, but often enough after the young people had already met and initiated the process, and the custom did not necessarily present any problems.