Infidel
I recently finished Infidel, an autobiography by Ayaan Ali Hirsi. Hirsi Ali was born to a Somali Muslim family and raised in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. In 1992, she fled an arranged marriage and became a refugee in Holland.
The first half of Infidel is about Hirsi Ali’s youth in east Africa and Saudi Arabia. She focuses on her family and the clan system that dominates politics, culture, religion, and economics in the region. She writes very poignantly about her upbringing, but also explores the encroachment of modernity in rural Africa, the Somalian civil war and subsequent humanitarian catastrophe in the late 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic education, and social issues such as female genital mutilation and spousal abuse.
The second half of Infidel is about Hirsi Ali’s adaptation to modern secular Dutch life. She eventually earned her Masters degree in political science and became a member of the Dutch parliment. She studied and contemplated the major issues in Europe today: the integration of Muslim immigrants and the long-term viability of welfare states. She also became an apostate and the victim of violent threats by outraged Muslims. In reference to the 11 September 2001 attacks, Hirsi Ali wrote the following:
People theorized beautifully about poverty pushing people to terrorism; about colonialism and consumerism, pop culture and Western decadence eating away at people’s culture and therefore causing the carnage. But Africa is the poorest continent, I knew, and poverty doesn’t cause terrorism; truly poor people can’t look further than their next meal, and more intellectual people are usually angry at their own governments; they flock to the West. I read rants by antiracist bureaus claiming that a terrible wave of Islamophobia had been unleashed in Holland, that Holland’s inner racist attitude was now apparent. None of this psuedointellectualizing had anything to do with reality.
Other articles blamed the Americans’ “blind” support for Israel and opined that there would be more 9/11’s until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved. I didn’t completely believe that either. I myself, as a teenager, might have cheered the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, and the Palestinian dispute was completely abstract to me in Nairobi. If the hijackers had been nineteen Palestinian men, then I might have given this argument more weight, but they weren’t. None of them was poor. None of them left a letter saying there would be more attacks until Palestine was liberated. This was belief, I thought. Not frustration, poverty, colonialism, or Israel: it was about religious belief, a one-way ticket to Heaven.
I was living in Stockholm in 2001 and the issues described were and still are the major issues facing nearly every European country. Muslims have immigrated to Europe in great numbers, and generally isolate themselves in closed groups that retain the hallmarks of their clan-based societies. Hirsi Ali argues that Islam and Western values of personal liberty and equality are both unequal and incompatible. It is an argument I’m not sure I agree with entirely, but I admit that Hirsi Ali is more of an expert in the true nature of Islam. She scoffs at the media portrayal of Islam as a religion of peace and equality.
Overall, this book was exactly what I hoped it would be. The insight into clan-based societies and Islamic life were great. The insight into the adaptation of young Muslims to Western-style culture and governance will be a major issue for many years to come, especially in Europe. Sweden continues to accept hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants each year, to the point where the core of Swedish culture seems threatened by groups that refuse or are unable to assimilate. Even discussing the issue may lead one to seem unwelcoming or xenophobic, but it seems dangerous and willfully naive to hope for the best rather than investigating solutions that honor others’ cultures while also preserving our own.
books & foreign affairs & politics posted by: dan @ 25 Jan 2008 20:16 | Comments (0)
