Activist lives loud

BASYA LAYE

Author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is used to ruffling feathers. From a young age, Hirsi Ali, who was born into a devout Muslim family in Somalia, asked tough questions of her religion and environment. She grew up in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, experienced genital mutilation at the hands of female relatives and escaped from an arranged marriage at a young age, subsequently fleeing to Europe to seek asylum in Holland, where she eventually became an outspoken member of parliament – and a woman targeted for assassination.

Hirsi Ali spoke about her new book, Nomad, on a conference call hosted by the Israel Project, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. The conversation was moderated by Barbara Ledeen, TIP senior advisor on Iran.

In her introduction, Ledeen said it was in Holland that Hirsi Ali first began to focus her attention on “furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society and on defending the rights of Muslim women.” It was also in Holland that Hirsi Ali met friend and filmmaker Theo van Gogh, working closely with him on Submission, a film that was critical of the treatment of women in Islamic society. Hirsi Ali was forced into hiding by fundamentalists after van Gogh was murdered and she started receiving death threats. Today, Hirsi Ali is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and founder of the AHA Foundation, which works to “help protect and defend the rights of women in the West again militant Islam.”

About why she wrote a follow up to Infidel, Hirsi Ali said she wanted to answer the questions that readers of Infidel had, the first being how things were between her and her family. She said she uses her own family “to illustrate the differences between the two cultures: the one that I grew up in that was Somali, that was tribal and that was Islamic, and the culture I found in the Netherlands that was Western, secular and individualistic.

“The second question I address in Nomad is … do you think that radical Islam is also present in the United States? Because at the time, in 2006-2007, it seemed as if Americans thought of their Muslim immigrants and their Muslim citizens as better off than the Muslims in Europe, which is the case. And because of their economic integration and educational integration, Americans … felt that they were immune to radical Islam and to homegrown terrorism.”

Hirsi Ali is concerned about the strength of extremists, in America and Europe. “Unfortunately, I’ve been proven right,” she said, mentioning the Times Square bomber and the mass shooting perpetrated by U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, that killed 13 and injured 30 at the Fort Hood military base.

In Nomad, Hirsi Ali also addresses the differences she sees between secular, Western society and what she calls the “tribal Islamic” one. She concentrates on three themes she believes are universal: values and attitudes toward sexuality, money and aggression and violence. She describes regulations around sexuality in the Islamic world, “whether they’re religious or tribal,” with women in a subordinate position, and “where sexuality is mystified … and taboo.”

Poverty is another problem, she said. “There’s a large Muslim underclass. Whether they come from Pakistan and Bangladesh, or whether they come from Afghanistan or Somalia, there are a growing number of families, communities in Europe, particularly, that seem to get stuck in that welfare situation. And I thought examining the attitudes toward money, sharing – everything is more communal, as is opposed to, you know, the Western way of being selfish and saving your own money and all of that [and] examining these different attitudes toward money might give us a clue as to why some of them remain in poverty situations or in these welfare states.”

Hirsi Ali noted attitudes towards aggression when she worked with the Dutch Somali community as a translator. “Most people [in Dutch prisons] were of color – most of them from Turkey or from Morocco, and later joined by Somalis, Afghanis, Iraqis; these are the new asylum-seekers. Now, not all of them … are violent criminals, but there was an element of violence, an element toward aggression…. Little girls are brought up to be submissive, boys are brought up to be aggressive,” she said.

Responding to a question about whether the threat of Muslim extremism on U.S. soil has been overstated, Hirsi Ali said, “Radical Islam comes in two flavors. And one flavor is the violent flavor – the al-Qaida type, the suicide bomber – and the other is the Muslim Brotherhood type. And both groups have the same objective, but they disagree on the means to get them to that same objective, that objective being either the introduction of Shariah law or the dream of a caliphate, of an Islamic empire.” She explained, the Muslim Brotherhood type of group goes with “their da’wa, or their propaganda, toward, mainly, other Muslims. The Brotherhood’s main objective today is not so much to convert Americans to Islam or Europeans to Islam, but to capture the hearts and minds of all the Muslim immigrants. And once they have a large enough majority, they may or may not resort to violence.”

Hirsi Ali believes that U.S. and European governments are capable of targeting violent extremists. However, she said, “I haven’t seen any strategy to deal with the other side, and the reason being because they are peaceful and also because they are very good with their PR ... they’re very good in playing ‘white guilt,’ conflating a set of beliefs – and that’s what Islam is – with racism. Any form of criticism toward Islam is labeled Islamaphobia.”

The way to deal with it, she said, is to divide Islam into two dimensions: religion and faith. She said, “[T]he way we define religion in a country like the U.S. – the prayer, the fasting, the charity, the visiting of Mecca and all other kinds of birth and death rituals – that would be treated as religion and should be protected by the First Amendment…. The political-social dimension of Islam, that is, Shariah-type Islam, should just have the same status as any other political ideology. And, if we give it that status, then we will be able to compete by composing counter-propaganda against the utopia that they use to attract Muslim immigrants, and then compete for the hearts and minds of other Muslims.... But the two Muslim countries that we’re involved in today are Iraq and Afghanistan … what we have in place in those two countries is the counterinsurgency strategy, which is a military strategy. I think that should be supplemented with a counter-propaganda strategy so that the population can be told – can be educated over and over again on what it means to live under Shariah law.”

One caller asked about how she might explain “why formerly outspoken women’s-rights groups ... have been almost silent regarding the cause of Muslim women.”

Hirsi Ali responded: “The feminist movement was essentially a white movement, and the aggressor, the oppressor, was the white man. By the time most feminists actually realized their objective … there was a mission drift where they had moved from fighting for women’s rights to fighting for the rights of Palestinians and types of other cultural groups that they felt whose rights were violated, and moved away from the focus of women only.

“Besides, in the 1960s and 1970s, when this shift takes place, it’s also the rise of multiculturalism and moral relativism, where you’re not allowed to compare cultures and religions and values, because if you do so, that makes you into a racist, an ethnocentrist, an imperialist, etc. Unfortunately, that created a situation where the white man would be criticized for every single misstep he makes – and that gets corrected – but all men of color could get away with oppressing women simply by claiming that their culture be respected or their religion be respected, by claiming the minority status.... Now, how can feminists come out of that trap and focus again on their mission and take on the real oppression of, you know, the honor killings, female genital mutilation, the abortions of Chinese girls…. They could take these things on if they left the moral relativism path and also if they could persuade themselves that … there’s a difference between a set of beliefs and a faith, and a culture is an abstract term. And a culture pertains to groups. Feminists, but also liberals, started out by protecting the rights of individuals ... and, I think, not only the feminists but, in general, the liberal West, has to go back to that focus of human rights, where it begins with individual human rights, regardless of your faith, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.”

Hirsi Ali said she believes that the many women in the Muslim world understand that Western women have greater freedoms. “Do they want them?” she asked. “I think they do.... [But] I think that right now, most Muslim women find themselves in a position where the price of freedom is too high. You can see that in all the incidents ... in places like Pakistan and Iran, and even in Saudi Arabia. Some of the women who choose to be the architects of their own destiny are faced with violence, they’re faced with death threats, they’re faced with rejection by their own families, they’re faced with challenges that I think European and American women have never seen, not even in past centuries.”

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