What A Bio

More on Ali, here. She's only 35 but has led a remarkable life. I'd make the second movie with her in a second.

Can we imagine the scope of her project? She is proposing a reformation of Islam. I compared her to Martin Luther King before - that's wrong - she's more like Martin Luther.

Her premise: Islam, currently about submission to God (and for women, to men), should reform and become about a dialog with God. This is why people want to kill her. This is like a replay of the 17th century. A section:

An interesting indication of the extent to which Hirsi Ali needles people are the lurid epithets and insults she draws from across the political spectrum. While internet extremists lent her a quasi-legendary status as the "Wicked Infidel Mortadda," even a figure from the Dutch liberal left such as Geert Mak will reach for phrases such as "Somali princess" and "Joan of Arc" to explain her unsettling charisma. From a free-market perspective, the Economist rather oddly defines her as a cultural ideologue of the new right. Other commentators have dismissed her as a politician of rage, a self-hating orientalist, a liberal jihadist, and an enlightenment fundamentalist.

While the name-calling tends to reveal more about Hirsi Ali's critics than it does about her, there is a more subtly personal line of attack that genuinely galls her. This is the idea that what she thinks and says is somehow born of the scars of a traumatised background. "Why are journalists obsessed with personal history?" she asks in her quiet, Africa-lilted English (one of six languages she speaks, including Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and Dutch). "From my background, being an individual is not something you take for granted. Here it is all you, me, I. There it is we, we, we. I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad. I know that to some people I am traumatised, that there is something wrong with me. But that just allows them not to hear what I say."

The first biographical detail that those who have painted Hirsi Ali as a trauma victim point to is her extremely premature birth, shortly after the Somali government had been overthrown by Siad Barre. Her father had been jailed, and the family believed that the shock of this brought on the birth. Hirsi Ali was expected to die. "But I didn't die," she smiles. "I kept on living and crying. I got sick, and started crying, and I got sick again, and I started crying again - that's the story my mother told me.

More on Ali, here.

Excerpt:



Before being elected to parliament, she worked as a translator and social worker among immigrant women who are treated as sexual chattel—or as the object of "honor killings"—by their menfolk, and she has case histories that will freeze your blood. These, however, are in some ways less depressing than the excuses made by qualified liberals for their continuation. At all costs, it seems, others must be allowed "their culture" and—what is more—must be allowed the freedom not to be offended by the smallest criticism of it. If they do feel offended, their very first resort is to violence and intimidation, sometimes with the support of the embassies of foreign states. (How interesting it is that the two European states most recently attacked in this way—Holland and Denmark—should be the ones that have made the greatest effort to be welcoming to immigrants.) Considering that this book is written by a woman who was circumcised against her will at a young age and then very nearly handed over as a bargain with a stranger, it is written with quite astonishing humor and restraint.

But here is the grave and sad news. After being forced into hiding by fascist killers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali found that the Dutch government and people were slightly embarrassed to have such a prominent "Third World" spokeswoman in their midst. She was first kept as a virtual prisoner, which made it almost impossible for her to do her job as an elected representative. When she complained in the press, she was eventually found an apartment in a protected building. Then the other residents of the block filed suit and complained that her presence exposed them to risk. In spite of testimony from the Dutch police, who assured the court that the building was now one of the safest in all Holland, a court has upheld the demand from her neighbors and fellow citizens that she be evicted from her home. In these circumstances, she is considering resigning from parliament and perhaps leaving her adopted country altogether. This is not the only example that I know of a supposedly liberal society collaborating in its own destruction, but I hope at least that it will shame us all into making The Caged Virgin a best seller.