Far different from the experience of most Muslims has been the evolution of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali immigrant to the Netherlands and later to the United States, who repudiated much of her Somali culture and Islamic faith. Born in 1969, Hirsi Ali was the daughter of a prominent political opponent of the Somali government. Fleeing the country with her family, Hirsi Ali spent much of her childhood in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, where she was attracted for a time to a strict form of Islam. As a teenager, she willingly wore a hijab, the traditional covering often prescribed for Muslim women.

But in 1992, Hirsi Ali fled an arranged marriage to a man she regarded as a “bigot” and an “idiot” and found political asylum in the Netherlands. For this act of disobedience and rebellion, she was disowned by her father. In the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali flourished, moving from work as a cleaner to that of a translator in a refugee center and obtaining a master’s degree in the process. Her encounter with Western individualism and Enlightenment thought produced a growing disenchantment with Islam, and she came to see herself as an atheist. She also lived with a man for five years, got involved in politics, was elected to the Dutch parliament, and participated in the making of a film highly critical of Muslim treatment of women, for which she received numerous death threats. In 2006 she relocated to the United States, “in search of an opportunity to build a life and livelihood in freedom” as she put it. She has been working at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. By now a prominent public figure both in Europe and North America, Hirsi Ali spelled out her remarkable—and very rare—personal transformation in a number of books, articles, and interviews.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI

From Islam to America

2010

For a long time, I teetered between the clear ideals of the Enlightenment that I learned about at university [in Holland] and my submission to the equally clear dictates of Allah that I feared to disobey. Working my way through university as a Dutch-Somali translator for the Dutch social services, I met many Muslims in difficult circumstances, in homes for battered women, prisons, special education classes. . . . I could not see the connection between their religion and the oppression of women and the lack of free individual choice.

It was, ironically, Osama bin Laden who freed me of those blinkers. After 9/11 I found it impossible to ignore his claims that the murderous destruction of innocent (if infidel) lives is consistent with the Quran. I looked in the Quran and found it to be so. To me this meant I could no longer be a Muslim . . .

I see three main problems to this process of integration [of Muslims into Western culture]. . . . The first is Islam’s treatment of women. The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. By the time they menstruate, they are rendered voiceless. They are reared to become submissive robots, who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks. They are required to comply with their father’s choice of a mate, and after the wedding their lives are devoted to the sexual pleasure of their husbands and to a life of childbearing. Their education is often cut short. . . .

All Muslims are reared to believe that Muhammad, the founder of their religion, was perfectly virtuous and that the moral strictures he left behind should never be questioned. The Quran, as “revealed” to Mohammad, is considered infallible . . . and all its commands must be obeyed without question. . . .

Personally, I felt a sense of intense relief when I accepted the possibility that there is no life after death, no hell, no punishment, no burning, no sin. . . . I too still sometimes feel this pain of separation from my family and from the simplicity of Islam. . . .

The adults in my life (my mother and grandmother, other relatives and teachers) had systematically rejected and punished inquisitive behavior as insolence toward authority. In Holland I was permitted to question authority and was entitled to an answer. . . .

I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. But when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenment thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy. Muhammad says my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful of Muhammad in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?

From a Letter to My Grandmother: I do not wail for your passing, but I am filled with a sense of guilt. I wish I too had been there for you. . . . When I was in pain . . . , you called in the help of your forefathers on my behalf. . . . [Y]ou took me to the witch doctor, who took your money and your sheep, and burned wounds in my chest with a long blacksmith’s nail. . . .

I am sorry Grandmother that I was not there in your old age. . . . I would have summoned the spirits of my new world. Here they have salves to cleanse and sooth the itch in folded skin; they have hearing aids; they have walking sticks on wheels. . . .

I have lived with the infidels for almost two decades. I have come to learn, appreciate, and adopt their way of life. I know this would make you sad. . . .

Gone with you are the rigid rules of custom. . . . Gone with you is that bloodline [clan or tribal loyalties], for better or worse, and gone is the idiot tradition that meant you cherished mares and she-camels more than your daughters and granddaughters. . . . When we heard news of the birth of a girl in the family, you clicked and pouted and sometimes sulked for days. . . .

The secret of the Dutchman’s success is his ability to adapt, to invent. . . . We bow to a God who says we must not change a thing; it is he who has chosen it.

The infidel does not see life as a test, a passage to the hereafter, but as an end and a joy in itself. . . . He may take care of his parents, but has no use for a memory filled with an endless chain of ancestors. All the seeds of his toil are spent on his own offspring, not those of his brothers or uncles.

Because the infidel trusts and studies new ideas, there is abundance in the infidel lands . . . the birth of a girl is just fine. . . . The little girl sits right next to the little boy in school . . . she gets to eat as much as he does . . . and when she matures, she gets the same opportunity to seek and find a mate as he does. . . .

Grandmother, I no longer believe in the old ways. . . . I love you, and I love some of my memories of Somalia, though not all. But I will not serve the bloodline or Allah any longer. . . . I will even strive to persuade my fellow nomads to take on the ways of the infidel. . . .