Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Phenomenon
By Russell Shorto
Anger, like heat, has the power to sterilize. Of course, it also burns. Anger is a defining force: you might say that what you choose to do with your anger, or what it does to you, shapes who you are.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has annealed her anger into so sharp and hard a blade that it has not only chiseled the features of her life but has cut a swath right around the earth, from Africa, where she was born and raised, to Europe, where she came of age and made history, to, now, the U.S. Her autobiography, Infidel, was published here in February and became a bestseller. As the title suggests, she has an almost pathalogical need to draw the ire of the Islamic world.
If Dickens had lived in the 21st century he would have lifted the trajectory of Hirsi Ali’s life for one of his characters. It starts under a talal tree in Somalia, where, shaded from the desert sun, her grandmother, who could make a basket from dried grass tight enough to carry water in, had her recite the lineage of their clan going back 300 years. At age five she was hoisted onto the kitchen table, her legs pulled apart, and a man who was probably “an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan” snipped out her clitoris and inner labia with a pair of scissors. As the family traveled from Mogadishu to Nairobi and then back to Somalia in the 1970s and 1980s, it was against a background of resurgent Islam. Hirsi Ali has nothing good to say about the faith into which she was born. Quran school was “mostly about Hell” and the torments there: “boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh dissolving bowels…. These details overpower you, ensuring that you will obey.” Girls were taught that when they married “we must be sexually available at any time outside our periods, ‘even on the saddle of a camel,’ as the hadith says.” Her ma’alim, or teacher, beat her so hard that at one point he fractured her skull.
Her family arranged a marriage for her with a man who had emigrated to Canada, and shipped her off to him. Instead of changing planes in Frankfurt, she hopped onto a train bound for Amsterdam, and so began what she terms “my freedom.” As it happened, she stepped, in the summer of 1992, into about as different a world from Somalia as was probably possible to find. Green lawns and trimmed hedges were as freaky as Amsterdam’s red light district. Dutch tolerance was still operative. Refugees and pretend refugees (Hirsi Ali lied and told the authorities she was fleeing political oppression) lived in a bungalow village with a swimming pool and volleyball court, free medical care, even laundry service.
Continuing her knife-like movement through the late twentieth century, she quickly learned Dutch and enrolled in Leiden University, the Harvard of the Netherlands, where she got a live-in boyfriend and immersed herself in Voltaire, Rousseau and Marx, and felt her old self dying and a new one being born. “Meeting Freud,” she writes, with the clean declarative simplicity of a children’s book author, “put me in contact with an alternative moral system.”
She became a Somali interpreter for the Dutch government, and in this capacity became aware of a blind spot in the liberal European social consciousness. The Dutch had tried to fashion a system that gave refugees the protections of their vaunted social welfare system, but their zeal to protect the newcomers’ rights and customs had unintended consequences. African Muslims who had formed communities in Holland were performing ritual female circumcision on their daughters. The Dutch fulminated against the barbarity of the practice in Africa and the Middle East, Hirsi Ali noted, but it was happening all over their own country. Her writings and TV appearances on the topic, and on the broader situation of Muslim women, resulted in a leader of the Liberal Party (which is actually rather conservative in Holland) asking her to stand for parliament.
From the moment she won, she became a lightning rod for the fury of many Muslims in Europe. Far from watering down her notions in the time-honored manner of politicians, she forged a relationship with the controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and wrote a ten-minute film that he produced that gave graphic vent to her feminist rage at Islam (a woman who has been raped and beaten has her body covered with verses from the Quran). Then, in 2004, as a result of this little piece of outrage, came the act that brought Hirsi Ali to an international stage: a Moroccan man who lived in Amsterdam killed Van Gogh and, with a knife, pinned a letter onto his chest that said Hirsi Ali would be next. The murder of Theo Van Gogh became one of the signal events of post 9/11 Europe, which focused attention on a whole welter of interconnected issues: terrorism, resurgent Islam, American hegemony, secularism-versus-fundamentalism, third world immigration, European-style multiculturalism, national identity, tolerance, and fear.
Hirsi Ali stood right at the center. “60 Minutes” did a fawning profile of her. “Time” listed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The Dutch government issued her round-the-clock bodyguards. Her Dutch venture came to a head in 2006, when the immigration minister suddenly “discovered” that Hirsi Ali had lied in requesting refugee status (in fact, Hirsi Ali had been open about the lies she told for years) and declared that, as a result, she was never a Dutch citizen at all. The action sent the little country atwitter, with seemingly half of the population feeling embarrassed and bullied by her tirades against their traditions and taking a “we’ve had enough of Hirsi Ali’s crap” position, and the other half defending her right to speak her mind on issues that affected their country and, for that matter, the planet. Proving that Dutch politics is incomprehensible to the rest of the world, the event actually brought down the government.
Hirsi Ali, meanwhile, made another exit. This time she took the offer of a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing thinktank in Washington, where she is now installed.
I happen to have met her for lunch in New York one day in January, a few months after she had begun the American portion of her odyssey. (I had asked for a phone interview for a magazine article; she had read a book of mine and suggested a face-to-face meeting.) Spending time with her gave me the chance to size up someone who, for better or worse, has actually altered the landscape through which we all move. Hirsi Ali cuts across political types. Her hard line on immigration (she believes Euro-style multiculturalism is a disaster that allows Muslim radicals to infiltrate Europe) charms the right wingers she now works among. But she has also become a virulent atheist of the Karl Marx, religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses school, and she told me with a satisfied laugh, of her AEI comrades, “They don’t like my views on religion.”
In person Hirsi Ali is striking to say the least: tall, thin as a knife, coal-dark, with sharp high cheekbones. She is also a fashionista, who wears designer labels with arrogant panache. The arrogance is offset somewhat by a vivid sense of humor: she giggles, she likes a good time.
In the U.S. she has been lionized, but the Dutch have a more nuanced view of her. There, she was seen as an opportunist, who advanced herself as much as she did her cause of making the world take note of the plight of women in Muslim Africa. And it has often been noted that for a champion of Muslim women, very few of her enthusiasts are Muslim women. So who are her enthusiasts? Mostly Americans, it seems, and of both political stripes: if there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats agree on, it is that genital mutilation isn’t cool. Europeans, meanwhile, who are scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to live with millions of recent Muslim immigrants, are more guarded.
There is a deep inconsistency in Hirsi Ali’s views, of which she herself is aware. Her experience of the laxity and moral flabbiness of the European welfare state has led her to adopt an American-style “let them pick themselves up by their bootstraps” approach to the less fortunate. She prefers privatizing over government intervention. “Yes,” she agreed with a dark chuckle when I noted that all that she has today-fame, wealth, opportunity-is thanks to the Dutch welfare state, which she despises for its softness and for the way it allowed injustice to flourish. But she sees herself as an exception: not one of the many who were content to wallow at the state trough but one of the few who burned to excel.
Some in Europe refer to Hirsi Ali as an Enlightenment Fundamentalist: part of a subcategory of Muslims in Europe who have replaced the hardcore Islam of their upbringing with a radical belief in science, reason, and “progress,” western-style. As she said to me, “The West was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason. The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the message of the Enlightenment, to make Europeans and Americans remember that their modern society didn’t just fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle that led to this complex functioning society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that.”
There are problems with this perspective of hers. One is that the Islam in which Hirsi Ali was reared doesn’t necessarily apply across the board. The other is that we westerners aren’t all marching down the boulevards of our respective enlightened capitals bearing placards with the images of Voltaire and John Locke. Some of us are eating Cool Ranch Doritos and watching “American Idol.”
Still, anger can be so pure. Hirsi Ali is the most persuasive right winger I’ve ever met-not because the right is right but because the left has been so pathetically, programmatically wrong. The most vital part of the Hirsi Ali phenomenon is her role as global gadfly. Buckets of ink get spilled repeating the same news stories and analyses while important subjects remain invisible. Why should a tolerant and open society tolerate groups that are officially intolerant of open societies? And, come on, polygamy? Hirsi Ali says some necessary things that others, especially leftists, don’t want to say or hear.
Of course, it’s easier for Americans to nod in agreement with much of her tirade because we aren’t caught in the same immigration stream that is flowing through western Europe. And from her perspective it’s probably smarter for Hirsi Ali to be in the U.S. now. She may be a bit naïve about the country (she suggested to me that when her book came out here she assumed she would have the same superstar, on-the-sidewalk recognizability in America that she had in Holland), but she knows where the power is: even before the Dutch immigration minister racheted up the heat on her, she was in talks with AEI, planning to make the jump.
And while she is certainly an exotic presence on Washington’s insipid sidewalks, in a way the U.S. is now the perfect place for her. Where else can one mix it up with policy wonks by day and then do Bill Maher and The Colbert Report? Here she can fill pages in both The American Spectator and US Weekly; she can stand, photographically, next to Bush or Britney, and outshine either (admittedly not very hard to do). Rather appropriately, as I left the hotel in Chelsea where we had met for lunch, I literally bumped into Rod Stewart getting into the elevator. From the Somali desert to the celebrity wasteland: the journey may not be so vast after all.
