Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's biography is a page turner. Through the eyes of a little girl, we see a Somalian family's wanderings that brings them to Somalia, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia. Later on her experiences substantiate in a renouncement of Islam and a one-issue political program in Dutch politics The purpose of 'infidel' is more than a biography, it is a feminist statement against Islam as it is today.

After reading the book, I'm left with more sympathy for Ayaan's case, but questions remain. It is not clear what Hirsi Ali blames on religious Islam and what on culture. Indeed, it is difficult to separate the culture from the religion. The cruel practice of female excision, for instance, seems to me more a cultural trait rather than a practice informed by Islam.

As an immigrant, Hirsi Ali knows what to appreciate about the Netherlands, the country she fled to after an arranged marriage. To her the Netherlands represent a beacon of freedom and even morality, which she ascribes to the Dutch enlightenment.
Her move from the labor party to the liberal party is thus motivated by an increasing understanding of Dutch enlightenment as discovery of the value of the individual. This contrasts starkly with the honour based societies, such as the Somalian, where the individual submits to the family, the clan, the people...
So I wonder whether Islam denounces individuality when it requires submission. Is submission the link between many cultures and religion in muslim countries? Hirsi Ali seems to think so, she consistently describes muslim female-male relationships and Allah-follower relationships as one between slave and master.

When translated into the Dutch context, I maybe start to understand the rift and the unease at the level of the Dutch political elite, when Hirsi became a MP to the liberal party. Traditionally, the position of (muslim) immigrants has been viewed as a social issue. Muslim immigrants' bad statistical record (employment, income, education, crime) was understood as a problem that needs social mending, social policy. This fits very well with the more traditional historical materialist idea of social stratification.
Hirsi Ali, however, argues against this historical materialism and rather points at the problems as on of incompatible values, something much more difficult to solve than mere social mending.
This rift between views of society and values runs right through the Dutch left-right spectrum. Some political parties found it easier to adapt to the opened value box of pandora than others. For instance, the Christian democrats already were partly value and religious based. However, the social democrats, and I believe also the liberal party had a much harder time. The social democrats were there to protect the weak, but also a whole strata of weaker groups, not defined by its individual members. The liberals have too long seen themselves as market-making, pro-corporate agents and now all of a sudden they had to decide on issues moral positions (the morality of market-making and entrepreneurship went unchallenged).
This rift through the Dutch political landscape has led to increasing fragmentation, not coincidentally the liberals and social democrats suffered most of emerging populism.

In all of this Hirsi Ali only represented an early push of what was to come anyway; a indepth reflection of what a society stands for, its implied and explicit values. The issue of abused muslim women can well be a breaking iron to this debate. However, it is sad to see the debate being hi-jacked by populist figures like Geert Wilders. Who basically redraw the debate into a left-right debate.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali,feminism,islam,Netherlands,politics