Infidel

Published: 03/03/2007

Infidel: My Life
Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Simon & Schuster
2007
ISBN-13:978-0-7432-9503-1


How does one comment objectively on anything Ayaan Hirsin Ali writes, says or does? She has to be held aloft you feel, coddled and paraded in defiance of her obscurantist foes who want to cut her into pieces. A bloody threat was penned on a note stabbed into the corpse of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, murdered in 2004, by a Islamicist fanatic. Ali had collaborated with Van Gogh to make ‘Submission’, a controversial ( some say unforgivably obscene) film featuring fictional Muslim women with tattooed verses of the Koran on their skins, verses Ali believes justify the violation of women. By the time this is published she could be dead. Any criticism feels dishonourable, but yet a reviewer has got to appraise without fear or bias.

This was the dilemma faced by book critics when Rushdie’s life was under the fatwa. Rushdie exuberantly praises Ali because she tells: ‘the unvarnished, uncomfortable truth’. In a personal memoir, however, ‘truths’ are more tricksy, always subjective. After publication, rows inevitably break out, relished, I suspect by publishers. With Ali, as always there is likely to be hyper-agitation over her version adding yet more pizzazz to a dramatic life.

She can write with light, luminous prose. Part 1 is pacey, details political, personal and religious struggles in Somalia as lived by a family and clan, takes us into exile to Kenya and Saudi Arabia and packs the pages with terrifically delineated characters
( too many though – they crowd the pages). Somalia becomes here a pulsating nation, its ambitions of independence ending in utter failure. Her father’s life symbolizes this fall from grace. A political idealist and avowed modernist he ill used his wives and agreed to hand this daughter to a marriage suitor without her consent, ended up a bitter disappointment.

Like millions of African children Ali’s childhood was tough. When five, under the talal tree, innocent yet already held responsible, she was forced to retrace the long road to her inherited identity. ‘I have managed to count my forefathers back for three hundred years…’ “Get it right” my grandmother warns, shaking a switch at me. “The names will make you strong. They are your bloodline. If you honour them they will keep you alive. If you dishonour them you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone” ‘ Witchy words, How they must have scared her; how they made her the unbending women she has turned into. Other relatives verbally abuse her, beat her, training to make her stoic and proud.

Ali experiences family love and hate, betrayals and sacrifices, strong women who can turn viciously cruel. Her description of her own genital mutilation is masterful, told without too much lingering on the agony and all the more agonizing for that. (My heart sang when later she says they never could cut away her desires and sexual pleasure.) When a young woman, she becomes an ardent, purist Muslim, fully veiled, without self doubts. You understand how later she can turn her back on the faith, now her total enemy. Ali has no capacity for nuance or complex thought.

She escapes the arranged marriage to end up in the Netherlands and her story and the telling of it lose authenticity. She now writes with careless arrogance and spite.
‘ …infuriatingly stupid analysts- especially those who called themselves Arabist, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world wrote reams of commentary ..all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero which Muslim scholars had done for more than eight hundred years ago …these were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew’. The world she knows does not include any enlightened Muslims. Islam puts all women into a cage, she claims. Not her own mother and grandmother though, obviously. Gross, shrill claims are brandished but not evidenced .
With Ali we also have to allow for falsehoods and duplicity. Her fabrications to get political asylum in the Netherlands were recently exposed yet Ali, spent years condemning ‘foreign’ asylum seekers who do the same. She has claimed her dead sister Hawey escaped to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage; in this book she says she came away because her sister was pregnant by a married man.

No matter. She has got into political high places, moved from the left to the right, is a mascot of liberal fundamentalists. The seraph is much adored. However, there are emerging sceptics, even among her previous Dutch supporters. So off she flies to a right wing US think tank to carry on this treacherous ( in both senses) journey away from what she was. I think of her grandmother’s warnings and hope she doesn’t end up forsaken and all alone.

Published in Independent Arts and Books Review