This book reveals vivid, beatific memories of this former African Muslim’s life that is now lived under security protection. Hirsi Ali recounts her profound experience of gender oppression and general subservience within the confines of Islam, her former religion. I read this and felt everything: nostalgia, frustration, repulsion, nausea, sadness, happiness. In a composite discussion of her life, Hirsi Ali describes her gradual realization that she is an atheist, not a Muslim as she’d tried to believe her entire life. Particularly interesting were her accounts of daily life growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya with her family. Her family members struggled with the task of maintaining their tribal identities while following closely on the upsurge of increasingly devout practice of Islam. One memory she tells that particularly speaks to her cause against the unbridled violence in Islam is the scene of her and her siblings’ circumcisions, not at birth which could be arguably the least traumatic, but at the ages of four, five, and six. Without numbing, a doctor used scissors to cut off her inner labia and clitoris, “like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat.” He then used a bent needle to sew the wound and used his teeth to break the thread. .
Her story is full up of dramatic familial and career struggles and her efforts to survive when everyone has tried to beat her down. Her Qur’an teacher fractured her skull for alleged insubordination, her mother visibly deteriorates with the burdens of her life and of poverty; her family is torn about and beaten down. Hirsi Ali spares none of the sickening details of what she and her mother, sisters, aunts, and friends were all subjected to in the name of ancient tradition of Islam.
After fleeing to Denmark to seek refugee status, the young intellectual developed a clearer picture of Islam’s effects on cities and families, on men, wives, and children. She supports fiercely the need to openly acknowledge Islam’s inherent persecution and abuse of women and exploitative tendencies. She tries to relate to the position of a defensive woman in submission, one who insists that nothing is wrong and that everything is as it should be. By the time she has a seat in Dutch Parliament, her understanding of Islam as a cruel and rampant religion has fully unfolded as she has seen the successful workings of a society where women are free to live their lives: men are not thrown into sexual frenzy at the gesture of a womanly outline, the whole of society is not crippled with sexually-repressed perversion, and women and wives don’t have to submit to the “victim” role to have a place in society.
Incredibly powerful and informative, Infidel deserves thoughtful consideration and a wide readership. It offers clarifying insights into a society that is bogged down with an unmatchable sense of victimization and aggression, into a system of brainwashing so powerful that it is fully isolated from criticism of any kind without the risk of death. I believe her.
This woman survived the unthinkable murder of her colleague in 2004 when a letter addressed to her was stabbed into Theo van Gogh’s corpse; she now lives under constant security so she isn’t murdered by one of the huge number of villainous Muslims calling for her blood. This is the result of our continual failure to address the very real threat that Islam wields to the modern world
-BB
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