Medieval Christianity made the uncomfortable discovery that all absolutist belief systems have since had to make: it is impossible to be just a little bit heretical, or to permit just a little heresy. The rack and the stake and the thumbscrew are ultimately unavailing against this fact. Once admit any doubt, and the whole edifice is in danger of collapse. An excellent instance of such questioning occurs in the first third of this book, when Ayaan is sitting through yet another dull rant about the need to cover up all the distinctive features of the female, lest women commit the unpardonable sin of arousing male desire. She gets up to ask “What about the men? Shouldn’t they cover? Don’t women also have desire for male bodies? Couldn’t they be tempted by the sight of men’s skin?” Of course, this inescapable question is considered ridiculous, and, anyway, the Prophet didn’t allow any latitude for it to be asked, so that must be the end of the matter. Ayaan tells us that she used to hear on all sides that work would come to a standstill if men could see female flesh: trucks would crash and all would be chaos. It was only when she got to Holland that she appreciated that coexistence on terms of gender equality and casual dress was possible. (The irony here, I must add, is slightly at her expense. I have seen grown men look really quite foolish when she comes into the room.)
Ever since the assault on civil society that was launched on September 11, 2001, much of the “Western” world has been on a frenzied quest for interlocutors with the Islamic world. How are we to “understand” Muslim demands and emotions? What have we done to merit such hatred? How can we come to terms with a society that appears to take religious preachments literally? In the pages of Infidel, the answers to these questions are fairly easily discoverable. The cause of backwardness and misery in the Muslim world is not Western oppression but Islam itself: a faith that promulgates contempt for Enlightenment and secular values. It teaches hatred to children, promises a grotesque version of an afterlife, elevates the cult of “martyrdom,” flirts with the mad idea of forced conversion of the non-Islamic world, and deprives societies of the talents and energies of 50 percent of their members: the female half. One need look no further to explain the stultification of Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, and Somalia. The corollary holds with some exactitude: those Muslim societies that are relatively open and prosperous—one might instance Indonesia, Turkey, and Tunisia—are precisely the ones that keep religion in bounds. And the line between a failed state and a “rogue” one thus becomes increasingly difficult to draw, because when Islamist societies fail (as they will, if they try to govern on the principles of shari’a) they are prevented by their own faith from making any self-critical inquiry. It cannot be because of Quranic fanaticism that our children’s teeth rot, that disease and illiteracy are rampant, that nothing much (except the police system) seems to work. No: it is because of a conspiracy of Jews and Crusaders that we suffer! And thus the latent violence of the failed state is mobilized for export, and hysterical, impoverished crowds applaud the self-destructive actions of the ignorant, barbaric children they have raised.
A number of brave ex-Muslims have been warning us for many years that Islamist demands are not to be interpreted as some kind of “civil rights” claim. Even within the frontiers of Europe and North America, there are now “honor” killings, the mutilation of female genitalia, the imposition of veilings and beatings on wives and daughters and sisters, and calls for censorship and repression backed up by serious threats of violence. Several European capital cities, from London to Madrid, have shared the fate of New York and Washington in becoming the scene of random bombings. Nor have the cities of more “secular” Muslim countries, including the three I just mentioned, Indonesia, Turkey, and Tunisia, been exempt. Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Monica Ali, and many others have tried to tell us what is under way, and what lies in our future. Infidel is one of the latest, and surely one of the most luminous, of these manifestos. You cannot read it and be content with the insipid and masochistic suggestions of “dialogue” that flow every day into our media from the pens of people like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito. You cannot read it and allow President Bush the least credit for intoning the weird idea that “Islam is a religion of peace.”
Nor can you read it and expect to be confirmed in the rightness of your “own” religion as against the “other” one. Ayaan does not just speak out against female circumcision. She doesn’t think that boy babies should have their genitals hacked in the name of god either. (For this, she has been compared to Hitler!) Christian groups trying to recruit her have been gently but firmly turned away. Her self-education has led her to adopt the skeptical, humanist tradition that was so much aided by the hospitality of Holland, a country that sheltered Spinoza and Pierre Bayle and other freethinkers who sought refuge from clerical tyranny, and which for a while lived up to this humanist tradition by giving her asylum as well.
The end of this book tells the story of the disappointment that followed, a disappointment we should all feel. An element in Dutch public life, and indeed Dutch public opinion, has decided that it prefers a quiet life to the adoption and protection of this outspoken young lady. Having promised one of its more talented parliamentarians indefinite security against the sadists and fanatics who butchered Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street, and who told Ayaan that she was next on the list, the government of the Netherlands abruptly announced in October 2007 that it would no longer guarantee her safety if she chose to continue living in America. (Having effectively forced her to leave for America after evicting her from her home and subjecting her to a trumped-up charge of falsifying her asylum papers, those who came up with this formula can be congratulated on the ingenuity of their sanctimoniousness.) The essential cowardice and hypocrisy of the maneuver is easily summarized: the cost of the protection is said to be too great, but it nevertheless can be borne, yet only if she continues to live in Holland, which has already said that it doesn’t want her. Mr. Pecksniff himself could hardly have formulated it better.
Alas, this parochialism and provinciality is not solely a Dutch affair. Across the intellectual spectrum of the West, voices are raised to say that the problem is not the exorbitant demands made by Muslim bullies (which have recently included death threats against Danish cartoonists, announcements by Islamic taxi drivers that they will not carry “unclean” guide dogs for blind people, and a successful claim by a Muslim policeman in London that he should be exempt from guarding the embassy of Israel). No, the problem is that of people like Ayaan, who upset and “offend” the “faith community” of Islam. Let us be absolutely clear and state that this objection on their part is not to what she says, but to her very existence. To that extent, then, we ought to recognize that it is in the final analysis an objection to our existence, too.
It is very often said that we should not judge religion by the actions of its fringe extremists. This fair-seeming advice has led to the promotion of a new school of Muslim “moderates,” most notably Tariq Ramadan, who have come to expect (and to receive) considerable deference from Western intellectuals. However, let us take just one aspect of Ayaan’s case and see how well the “moderate” interpretation holds up. One reason why she herself is so hated, and why her life is considered forfeit, is that she is exactly what the title of this book proudly proclaims her to be: an apostate. She has exerted her right to abandon the religion in which she was brought up. But an immediate problem here presents itself. The Muslim hadith, which have canonical status along with the Quran, state plainly that the punishment for apostasy is death. In textual matters, embarrassed religious revisionists sometimes take refuge in metaphor or in variant readings of scriptural scholarship, but even that evasive tactic isn’t available in this case. The injunction says what it says, no more and no less. The “fundamentalists,” in other words, have the religious law on their side. I once had the chance to ask Tariq Ramadan what he thought of this, and he replied that in his view the killing of apostates was “unimplementable.” Unimplementable?
That may well—given the fast-growing number of ex-Muslims—be so. But the morally lazy term does not seem to carry anything much by way of, say, condemnation. (In another debate, this time with Nicolas Sarkozy before he became the president of France, Tariq Ramadan was induced to say that he thought the stoning of women for adultery should be subject to “a moratorium.” In other words, Muslims might consider stopping it for a while.) So apparently Islam could suffer something worse than being judged by its extremists. It could, after all, be judged by its moderates.
Implied in all this dreary “dialogue,” with its implication that Islam will reform itself very slowly, if at all, is the idea that in the meantime we must expect to adapt ourselves to its preachings and policies. There is another viewpoint that must be stated without equivocation: if Muslims want to immigrate to open and developed societies in order to better themselves, then it is they who must expect to do the adapting. We no longer allow Jews to run separate Orthodox courts in their communities, or permit Mormons to practice polygamy or racial discrimination or child marriage. That is the price of “inclusion,” and a very reasonable one. The demand for special consideration for Islamists—even to the extent of press censorship, where they can claim “offense,” and school segregation by sex, where they can invoke tradition—is the demand not to extend our multicultural and polyethnic culture, but rather the demand to negate it. Are we to admit to membership of the societal mosaic those who scream with hatred against immodest women, Jews, homosexuals, and Hindus (and this is not to exhaust the list)? If so, then we are knowingly admitting enemies on the same footing as friends. Relativism has no right to make such an exorbitant demand.
Enormous credit, then, should go to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who worked these great questions out for herself in a crucible of personal experience. She is much wiser than many thousands of apologetic academics and pundits, and she is also, I want to say, much more tolerant and much more humane. It is impossible to imagine her disliking someone on the mere grounds of origin or faith, just as it is impossible to imagine her being reconciled to any dogma that forms its calcified opinion on that basis. To invoke Immanuel Kant’s principle of universality, we might be able to say with a high degree of confidence that the world would be a better place if her ethos was to be the determining one. Can we say the same for those who play the dull game of temporizing, compromising, affectless moral equivalence? We are unlikely to arrive at a time when examples of individual moral courage and intellectual honesty are not the clue to a larger scheme of liberty. As long as we continue to value these qualities, Infidel will count as a rebuke to all those who claim to see no difference between secular civilization and clerical barbarism, and as an inspiration to all those who view this confrontation without apology as the defining struggle of our time.
* * *
Christopher Hitchens
Introduction
One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to go to work at his film production company in Amsterdam. He took out his old black bicycle and headed down a main road. Waiting in a doorway was a Moroccan man with a handgun and two butcher knives.
As Theo cycled down the Linnaeusstraat, Muhammad Bouyeri approached. He pulled out his gun and shot Theo several times. Theo fell off his bike and lurched across the road, then collapsed. Bouyeri followed. Theo begged, “Can’t we talk about this?” but Bouyeri shot him four more times. Then he took out one of his butcher knives and sawed into Theo’s throat. With the other knife, he stabbed a five-page letter onto Theo’s chest.
The letter was addressed to me.
Two months before, Theo and I had made a short film together. We called it Submission, Part 1. I intended one day to make Part 2. (Theo warned me that he would work on Part 2 only if I accepted some humor in it!) Part 1 was about defiance—about Muslim women who shift from total submission to God to a dialogue with their deity. They pray, but instead of casting down their eyes, these women look up, at Allah, with the words of the Quran tattooed on their skin. They tell Him honestly that if submission to Him brings them so much misery, and He remains silent, they may stop submitting.
There is the woman who is flogged for committing adultery; another who is given in marriage to a man she loathes; another who is beaten by her husband on a regular basis; and another who is shunned by her father when he learns that his brother raped her. Each abuse is justified by the perpetrators in the name of God, citing the Quran verses now written on the bodies of the women. These women stand for hundreds of thousands of Muslim women around the world.
* * *
Theo and I knew it was a dangerous film to make. But Theo was a valiant man—he was a warrior, however unlikely that might seem. He was also very Dutch, and no nation in the world is more deeply attached to freedom of expression than the Dutch. The suggestion that he remove his name from the film’s credits for security reasons made Theo angry. He told me once, “If I can’t put my name on my own film, in Holland, then Holland isn’t Holland any more, and I am not me.”
People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.
This is the story of my life. It is a subjective record of my own personal memories, as close to accurate as I can make them; my relationship with the rest of my family has been so fractured that I cannot now refresh these recollections by asking them for help. It is the story of what I have experienced, what I’ve seen, and why I think the way I do. I’ve come to see that it is useful, and maybe even important, to tell this story. I want to make a few things clear, set a certain number of records straight, and also tell people about another kind of world and what it’s really like.
I was born in Somalia. I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was twenty-two, and became a member of Parliament in Holland. I made a movie with Theo, and now I live with bodyguards and armored cars. In April 2006 a Dutch court ordered that I leave my safe-home that I was renting from the State. The judge concluded that my neighbors had a right to argue that they felt unsafe because of my presence in the building. I had already decided to move to the United States before the debate surrounding my Dutch citizenship erupted.
This book is dedicated to my family, and also to the millions and millions of Muslim women who have had to submit.
PART I
My Childhood
CHAPTER 1
Bloodlines
“Who are you?”
“I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan.”
I am sitting with my grandmother on a grass mat under the talal tree. Behind us is our house, and the branches of the talal tree are all that shields us from the sun blazing down on the white sand. “Go on,” my grandmother says, glaring at me.
“And Magan was the son of Isse.”
“And then?”
“Isse was the son of Guleid, was the son of Ali. Was the son of Wai’ays. Was the son of Muhammad. Ali. Umar.” I hesitate for a moment. “Osman. Mahamud.” I catch my breath, proud of myself.
“Bah?” asks my grandmother. “Which consort?”
“Bah Ya’qub, Garab-Sare.” I name the most powerful of Osman Mahamud’s wives: daughter of Ya’qub, she of the highest shoulder.
My grandmother nods, grudgingly. I have done well, for a five-year-old. I have managed to count my forefathers back for three hundred years—the part that is crucially important. Osman Mahamud is the name of my father’s subclan, and thus my own. It is where I belong, who I am.
Later, as I grow up, my grandmother will coax and even beat me to learn my father’s ancestry eight hundred years back, to the beginning of the great clan of the Darod. I am a Darod, a Harti, a Macherten, an Osman Mahamud. I am of the consort called the Higher Shoulder. I am a Magan.
“Get it right,” my grandmother warns, shaking a switch at me. “The names will make you strong. They are
your bloodline. If you honor them they will keep you alive. If you dishonor them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone. Do it again.”
* * *
Somali children must memorize their lineage: this is more important than almost anything. Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, “Who are you?” They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.
If you share a grandfather, perhaps even an eighth great-grandfather, with a Somali, the two of you are bound together as cousins. You are members of the great family that forms a clan. You offer each other food and hospitality. Although a child belongs to the clan of his father, it may be useful to remember the details of your mother’s bloodline, too, in case you travel and need a stranger’s help.
So, though the sweat pearled down our backs on those long afternoons, my big brother, Mahad, and I learned to chant, in unison, the names of both our lineages. Later, my grandmother began teaching my little sister, Haweya, to do the same, but she never got as far with her. Haweya was quick and bright, but she sat still even less often than Mahad and I.
The truth is that this ancestral knowledge seemed pointless to us modern children, brought up in concrete houses, with hard roofs, behind fixed, fenced walls. Mostly we pranced off, dodging the sharp smacks my grandmother aimed at our legs with the switches that she broke off our tree. We would rather climb the tree and play in its branches.
Above all, we loved listening to my grandmother’s stories while my mother cooked over a charcoal brazier and we lay, on a mat, under our tree. These stories never came when we begged for them. They arrived by surprise. My grandmother would be weaving a mat, muttering to herself, and suddenly we would realize that the muttering had turned into a fairy tale.