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Infidel: The Story of My Enlightenment

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Free Press, HK$187

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir, Infidel, is,  in every respect, as much a biography  as it is an extended commentary on what she regards as the inevitable clash of Islamic and western values.

It traces Hirsi Ali's journey from  her beginnings as a near-destitute Somalian girl to her time as a member of the Dutch parliament (a remarkable story in its own right), but also from a young woman whose life's ambition was to become a baari or obedient  wife, to a public figure and intellectual who made her name as one of the world's most pointed critics of Islamic culture and an advocate for Muslim women's rights.

Infidel begins in the  capital Mogadishu where Hirsi Ali was born the daughter of a revolutionary politician who sought to overthrow the government of Siad Barre,  the dictator who was to rule Somalia for 22 years.

From the outset it's clear that Hirsi Ali's memoir is  intended to foreshadow her ultimate rejection of the Islamic faith. With an unremitting sense of detail she chronicles her upbringing - from her gruesome experience of  circumcision to her grandmother's teachings on the nobility and necessity of female servitude - which  fuelled her  criticisms of Islamic culture. But this memoir is more than a catalogue of grievances deftly interwoven into the story of Hirsi Ali's own life, and it makes for a suspenseful tale.

Her father's revolutionary activities prompted the  family to move to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and later Kenya,  where the author's internal struggle with Islam intensified as she considered  the hypocrisy of the treatment of women in Islamic societies after a  brief flirtation with the global Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Forced into an unwanted marriage to  a distant Canadian cousin, Hirsi Ali's anger transformed into rebellion as she deserted her family by claiming asylum in the Netherlands en route to her new husband's home, fabricating details on her application in the process.

Overcome with admiration for a western government committed to previously alien concepts such as the rule of law and the welfare state, Hirsi Ali's conversion  was complete  when she finally repudiated Islam, viewing  it as little more than a convenient structure for oppressing women.

Her views led to an unlikely career  in Dutch politics. She was successfully  elected to federal parliament on a platform of immigration reform and raising awareness of the plight of women in the Netherlands'  sizeable migrant community.

As a parliamentarian  she became an object of international fascination and  gained access to an audience that was widely receptive to her criticisms, which were becoming steadily more pointed - in one of the first interviews published after she took office she  called the Prophet  Mohammed a pervert.

It was also as a parliamentarian that Hirsi Ali found a willing collaborator  in Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.  She worked with him on the  film Submission, about the subordinate role of women in Muslim communities, for which van Gogh was brutally murdered on the streets of Amsterdam by an Islamic fanatic.

The murderer left a note at the scene of the crime - pinned through  van Gogh's chest - warning Hirsi Ali that she was the next target.

Hirsi Ali spent months in hiding  only to re-emerge  to the news  that she was to be expelled from parliament (and very nearly the Netherlands) for lying on her  application for refugee status.

Infidel is a powerful contribution  to the debate on the status of women within Islam. Hirsi Ali's understated description of her own subjugation interspersed with her critique of Islam  will undoubtedly cement her status as the west's boldest and most popular critic of  the culture.

What Infidel fails to do is convincingly make the association between Islam and female subordination: is Islam alone to  blame for so many of the oppressive traditions such as genital mutilation, domestic violence and the litany  of other abusive practices Hirsi Ali criticises? None  is endorsed by the Koran (their Islamic proponents typically draw their authority  from 'hadith' or less authoritative interpretations of  the Prophet's teachings) and all have a long history  of tribal practice that  predates  Islamic influence.

The western societies Hirsi Ali idealises were also  founded on religious teachings that  could  be interpreted  as mandates for oppressing women. (After all, St Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Church's greatest theologian,  described women as 'defective  and misbegotten'.)

What is it, then, that makes Islamic society so different?



Infidel: The Story of My Enlightenment