The Unravelling of Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Q-News July 2006, Issue 367

The end came quickly for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Once it looked like allegations that she had lied to enter The Netherlands and fabricated her past were proven true, the same political friends who made her the darling of the Dutch right, speedily retreated from her side. Ali became the thing that she had looked down on in contempt: just another dishonest immigrant. You could almost hear the sniggering amongst Holland’s embattled Muslim minority. She’s now ditching Europe and taking her secular crusade to the United States. Mohamed N. Husain reports.

Last year, Time hailed Ayaan Hirsi Ali one of the world’s “100 most influential people.” The Economist described her as a “cultural ideologue of the new right”. Her first book, The Caged Virgin will hit bookshops with much fanfare this month and she is scheduled to tour Britain before she heads off to Washington DC to take up her post at the American Enterprise Institute. Until recently she was the darling of Europe’s secular political establishment - a brown face made welcome because of her shrill denunciations of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and Europe’s “backward Muslims”. It seemed like the happy days would never end.

Ali arrived in Holland in 1992, falsely claiming to be on the run from an arranged marriage. Having absconded from her well-to-do Somali family (settled in Kenya), she took a job as a cleaner in The Netherlands. Like thousands of other women, she put herself through university and tried to better her economic condition. Unlike many of her generation, however, she accepted all that was taught on her political science course without retaining, or developing, the critical intellect expected of the erudite Muslim intellectual she would soon claim to be.

Instead, she described her time at the University of Leiden as “paradise”, admitting to getting drunk regularly, losing her Muslim friends and identity. With a colonised mind, a loss of faith and exposure to excessive secular liberalism, she travelled throughout Europe and China. What she thought she had escaped continued to haunt her.

Now a speaker of several languages, Hirsi Ali worked as a translator in a refugee centre in Rotterdam. She was horrified to learn that immigrant females in Holland, away from Morocco and Turkey, continued to be subjected to one of the most horrid of African and Arab cultural practices, clitoredectomy, or female genital mutilation (FGM). Cases of male domestic violence, rape, and forced marriages were epidemic. That experience, coupled with her unquestioned liberal education and Somali clannish upbringing, moulded her confrontational worldview. Hirsi Ali was rightly alarmed by male brutality: her diagnosis, however, was flawed. She was courageous to speak out against misogynistic practices; her convictions ended up demonising the very people she set out to protect.

A late arrival to Europe (aged 22), she was awestruck by “freedom and lost her equanimity.” She moved quickly up the social ladder: from cleaner, to translator to researcher for the social-democratic Labour party. In close contact with the political class in Holland, severed from her Muslim family and faith community, she further developed her ideas about culture, migration, perceived lack of Muslim integration and the role of “ideological Islam” in public life. Hirsi Ali, by her own admission is not well-versed in the Islamic scriptures - she is a critic without the basic tools necessary for criticism. Upon hearing, for example, that Tony Blair had read the Koran ‘cover to cover’, she mocked him. It was the kind of ignorant, knee jerk edict that she became so good at giving. She recently declared that a report by a Dutch think tank, The Scientific Council for Government Policy, that concluded that their was little conflict between Islam and Dutch values and human rights, undermined free speech. Her utterances, time and again, have confirmed her deep ignorance of Muslim scholarship. This lack of education did not serve her well: she has repeatedly confused Islam with political Islamism, religion with culture. Nevertheless, in a post 9/11 world eager for easily digestible theories and easy answers, much of the Western media continued to promote her as a leading ‘critic of Islam’. Hirsi Ali has proven to be a savvy operator.

Habitual Opportunist

Hirsi Ali ran away from Germany to The Netherlands in 1992 and claimed that she had escaped from an arranged marriage in war-torn Somalia. As Professor Jytte Klausen of Brandeis University who knows Ali and has followed her career closely, recently told The Toronto Star, this was a fib: “She wasn’t forced into a marriage. She had an amicable relationship with her husband, as well as with the rest of her family. It was not true that she had to hide from her family for years.” Her estranged husband hadn’t spoken up because, “Because Hirsi Ali has asked him not to. They parted company amicably.”

There is more to this fabrication than meets the eye: yes, she lied to secure Dutch citizenship but she also demonstrated an acute awareness of Western social and political sensitivities. She played on Dutch liberal vulnerabilities to secure herself a home in Europe, an education and initially joined the Labour party, not the rightwing, crypto-racist VVD party to further her career.

The Dutch Labour party advocated multiculturalism, tolerance, and dialogue. Hirsi Ali was interested in the opposite: assimilation, a marginalisation of faith, zero-tolerance for Muslims who spoke from the religious convictions. She successfully used women’s rights as a vehicle to amplify her views, raising her profile within the Labour party. She seized the post-9/11 climate to attack her fellow Muslims and eventually discarded her faith, declaring, “I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.” Her views on a host of issues were at odds with the Labour party and when her political opponents, the rightwing VVD offered her the lure of a parliamentary seat, she abandoned Labour.

To date, she has exploited and betrayed her family, clan, religion, adopted home, and political party to crusade against what seems like a personal vendetta against the only factor shared by those she opposes: a belief in or respect for Islam.

Secular Extremist Voice

Millions of Muslim women and men are just as concerned as Hirsi Ali, if not more, about the misogynistic practices that pervade many eastern cultures. Forced marriages, domestic violence, child abuse, rape, and female subjugation cut across religions, nations, and cultures. Lebanese Christians and Druze living in Australia have a hideous reputation for these crimes. I have met Christian Armenian women in Lebanon and Syria who were subject to the worst forms of domestic violence. What is more, Amnesty International has repeatedly confirmed that in African countries with large Christian populations such as Eritrea and Ethiopia FGM rates are above 90%. As a cultural practice, it also affects Egypt, Somalia and other predominantly Muslim countries. In contrast, in populous Muslim nations such as Indonesia or Bangladesh, clitoredectomy is unheard of.

Therefore, to blame Islam for male tyranny is wrong. If Hirsi Ali has learnt anything about cultural relativism, then it should be to see the emergence of Islam in its seventh century Arabian context. The Prophet Mohammed uplifted women from being sexual objects to full human beings, on par with men. I concede that many Muslims are at fault, but to blame a religion that liberated women is intellectually untenable. As with so much else in Hirsi Ali’s life, she has exploited her own personal tragedy and tarred a billion Muslims with the same broad brush.

Mainstream secularists who argue that religion is a private matter, and desire a neutral, or shared, public place to deter conflict, command following among the Muslim masses. The failure of Islamists in free elections in several Muslim countries underscores this fact. However, extremist secularism seeks to eradicate religion and impose a hollow atheism on society. Hirsi Ali is an avowed advocate of the latter, publicly arguing that “religions should be mocked for fun and entertainment”.

An Excellent Neo-Con Adventure

With a proven track record for outgrowing her surroundings and recently offending large sections of the Dutch people by stating that they were appeasing Muslims as they once appeased Hitler, she is said to consider Europe not free enough for her vitriol. Having deceived many along the way her rise to infamy, and ridden many a whirlwind to the fringes of secular extremism, she has now set her eyes on exploiting US concerns about Islam and the Muslim world.

The United States continues to feel and behave like a vulnerable country. Its political leaders have repeatedly stated that they seek to win Muslim hearts and minds. Laudable aims, no doubt. However, in recent years, several leading Muslims, including Yusuf Islam, Tariq Ramadan, and the late Dr Zaki Badawi were all sent back from the US. In comparison, Hirsi Ali has been given a hero’s welcome.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the neo-conservative temple where the like of former Bush speechwriter David Frum and Lynne Cheney, cheerlead the war on Iraq, has employed Ali, with the tacit of support of several leading members of the government. The AEI has backed other infamous character like Ahmad Chalabi - who was a favoured Bush Iraqi on the eve of the invasion and who is still feted regularly by the AEI. By befriending Hirsi Ali the AEI is again repeating the same mistake.

Sheltering a self-confessed fraudster and then awarding her a fellowship is not the most productive way forward for building bridges between Muslim nations and the United States. In view of Ali’s propensity to lie, deceive, and exploit to achieve her own ends and by rearranging her fickle allegiances, US opinion formers would be well advised not to take Hirsi Ali too seriously. She arrives in the US with a clear intent of what she wants. Her mission statement is clearly laid out in the pages of her book: to subvert Islam by fomenting as much dissent in Muslim ranks as possible. This process, she refers to as “reform”. She goes on: “In order to do this we will need the help of the liberal West, whose interest are greatly served by a reform of Islam.”

At a time when most responsible, peace-seeking people of all faiths and no faith strive for better understanding and reconciliation, Hirsi Ali and others advocate provocation of Muslims in the name of ‘reform’, ‘entertainment’, and pseudo-intellectual ‘urgency and necessity’. Ali cunningly claims her argument is only with ‘radical Islamism’: it is not. Her vilification of the Prophet and the Quran is an attack on all Muslims.

The US has first-rate Islam specialists at home. If it is Islam that US leaders wish to understand, then they must turn to their own sons and daughters- like Hamza Yusuf Hanson, Ingrid Mattson, Zaid Shakir and others. Hirsi Ali does not seek mutual understanding. If a ‘clash’ is what we want to avoid, then Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, undoubtedly, part of the problem.

With contributions from Fareena Alam.