Ayaan Hirsi Ali: An Islamic Feminist Leaves Islam

an historical event. That a “conference” examining the historicity of the Holocaust should take place in a Muslim country hosted by a Muslim head of state is particularly tragic and, in my estimation, undermines the historicity of the faith of the people of that state. In our inherent contradictions as humans, and in order to validate our own pain, we deny the pain of others. But it is in acknowledging the pain of others that we achieve fully our humanity . A close friend of mine, a professor of religion in a Muslim country for many years, recently told me that his wife, an English teacher in that country, had wanted to use Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a text for her Muslim pupils. But the school administrators repeatedly denied her request because they deemed it inappropriate reading for young Muslims. It is sad that the current political morass in the Middle East has led to this intolerable refusal to confront a people’s collective suffering. Perhaps in acknowledging that immense past of Jewish suffering, in which the Holocaust is only the most heinous chapter, Muslims can better help the Jewish community to understand the current Muslim pain in Palestine, Iraq and other places. In finding out about others, we encourage others to find out about us. It would greatly help our Jewish brethren to know the historical facts of Jewish experience in the Muslim world, which are often heartening and humanizing and very different from their European experience. In our mutual edification, we grow together. n Hamza Yusuf is a Muslim scholar, lecturer and author, and the co-founder of the Zaytuna Institute in California, which is dedicated to reviving the traditions of classical Islamic scholarship. 28 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 I find the career of Somali-Dutch politician Ayan Hirsi Ali arresting for two reasons. The first is her life story, now told in such eloquent yet matter-of-fact detail in her book Infidel. She reveals at first hand the love and misery, the bravery and cruelty of stressed-out cultures: Somali, Saudi, Ethiopian, Kenyan, and Dutch. It is a rare experience to read the authentic voice of any thoughtful young woman growing up in hard times. Here was a Somali girl born to parents in a marriage of love, her father a politician and her mother a beautiful poet. A happy start, but she underwent genital mutilation, exile with her family to various countries, abandonment by her father, severe beating by a religious thug, her mother’s contempt, the fierce appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and the veil, and the opposite and distant dream of female choice discovered in Western romance novels. Then came the chance at age twenty-two, en route to an arranged marriage in Canada, to escape and to make her own life in Holland. And what a life, for she fought to learn Dutch and get herself an education in Western philosophy and politics and by age thirty-two had been elected a Member of Parliament . Her goal was to document and prevent the abuse of Muslim women in Holland. She came out publicly as an atheist. She wrote a movie for which the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered on the street by an Islamic radical. The killer knifed a death threat to Hirsi Ali into van Gogh’s body. This is a coming-of-age memoir to rewrite the genre. As gripping as any other I have read, this young woman’s life cuts through the rationalizations of male powermongers and gives us the individual where we usually hear only generalizations. Ayaan Hirsi Ali: An Islamic Feminist Leaves Islam by Dave Belden 6Religion+jumps_final.qxd 6/7/07 10:45 AM Page 28 J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 29 The second arresting aspect of her story is that it is not the feminist world...