Fictions of All-Encompassing Precarity in the Works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Missionary work and colonial feminism belong in the past.

Lila Abu-Lughod¹

In the spring of 2014 Brandeis University invited Somali author Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree at their commencement ceremony. The university chose her to receive the degree because “she is a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights, and we respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world.”² However, in early April Brandeis University rescinded Hirsi Ali’s invitation to commencement and reversed its decision to offer her an honorary degree. This abrupt change in plans came as the result of student and faculty backlash to the institution’s intention to recognize Hirsi Ali and celebrate her work.

Hirsi Ali is one of the best-known Somali authors in the Western world. In 2005 she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. She has written three books—The Caged Virgin, Infidel, and Nomad: From Islam to America—and is currently a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some regard her as an outspoken supporter of women’s rights, while others view her as an Islamaphobe who employs hate speech against Muslims. In its official university statement on what became an international controversy, Brandeis claimed to respect Hirsi Ali’s work regarding women’s rights, but “that said, we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.”³ The Brandeis incident highlights how Hirsi Ali has become a controversial figure in the United States and how she provokes strong affective responses from both her supporters and her detractors.

The incident at Brandeis is not the first time Hirsi Ali has been at the center of an international controversy. In November 2003 Theo Van Gogh, a well-known Dutch filmmaker and descendent of the famous Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, was murdered while riding his bike to work. He was shot and stabbed to death by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Moroccan immigrant and Muslim extremist who had become a Dutch citizen. Bouyeri was upset by Van Gogh’s recent film, Submission, which portrays Muslim women as victims of Islam. After murdering Van Gogh, Bouyeri pinned a note to Van Gogh’s shirt that was addressed to Hirsi Ali, the screenwriter of Submission. In this note he threatened her life and threatened to destroy Holland and the United States. Hirsi Ali has been the focus of controversy for much of her life, and in the last ten years she has become a go-to expert on Muslim women and Islam in general for the media in the United States. For example, in the aftermath of the events at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in January 2015, Hirsi Ali appeared on cnn and wrote editorials for both the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Beast in which she urged the Western media to continue reprinting the cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed, because “we have to make sure that Muslim immigrants who come to the West understand that our rules protect satirists from jihadists, and not the other way round.”⁴

Hirsi Ali regards herself as a feminist, and her most widely read work, Infidel, is an autobiography in which she uses her life experiences to articulate a narrative that posits the West as a utopia for women in comparison with the Muslim world. Hirsi Ali’s claims about Muslim women’s treatment under Islam are premised on the evidence of what she purports to be her life experiences and the meaning she assigns to these experiences. She positions herself as an emancipator of Muslim women, who, she argues, inhabit a fundamentally precarious subject position under Islam. She establishes a narrative of precarity in Infidel by claiming:

I moved from the world of faith to the world of reason—from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, I know that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. The message of...