‘Caged Virgin’ boldly rejects Islam's abuse (Hirsi Ali's bestseller)

‘‘I do not despise Islam,’’ writes Somali-Dutch activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the outset of her fiercely independent first book, ‘‘The Caged Virgin,’’ a bestseller in Europe that consolidated her reputation as the Continent’s sternest critic of Islam. ‘‘I am thoroughly conscious of the noble values that the religion promotes, such as charity, hospitality and compassion for the weak and poor.’’

Furthermore, Hirsi Ali acknowledges, ‘‘I know countless wonderful Muslim men who treat their mothers, sisters and spouses decently.’’

Sounds reasonable and moderate. Why, then, must Hirsi Ali live under 24/7 guard from Dutch security after years of regular death threats? Why did a Moroccan-Dutch jihadist savagely murder the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who helped Hirsi Ali make a TV documentary about Muslim abuse of women, and then promise that Hirsi Ali would be next?

The answer, ‘‘The Caged Virgin’’ makes clear, is that Hirsi Ali refuses to accept what she considers immoral aspects of the religion in which she was raised simply because many Muslims are good people. She also won’t ignore Islam’s cruelest practices just because they rest beside kindly principles.

In the West’s tradition of rational thought, this is called making distinctions. Within Islam, it’s often deemed heresy. If one accepts the view that the Koran is, in Hirsi Ali’s phrase, ‘‘a perfect, timeless representation of the unchanging word of God,’’ that Muhammad is ‘‘the most perfect being,’’ and that neither should ever be criticized, then Hirsi Ali is very heretical indeed. In her view, the chief sin of Islam is how it treats women.

‘‘In the name of Islam,’’ she writes, ‘‘women are subjected to cruel and horrible practices, including female genital mutilation and disownment.’’

A Koranic verse ‘‘gives men the right to beat their wives.’’ Muslim tradition allows fathers to marry off a daughter by fiat, a practice Hirsi Ali describes as ‘‘an arranged rape approved of by her whole family.’’ Muslim women ‘‘are virtually excluded from any public and political life,’’ and legislation ‘‘puts women at a severe disadvantage.’’

The cause is what Hirsi Ali calls ‘‘tribal morality,’’ Islam’s obsession with a woman’s virginity. Because Islam makes it a ‘‘dogma,’’ writes Hirsi Ali, ‘‘a woman who withdraws from the virgins’ cage is branded a whore’’ and the ‘‘essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen.’’

As an interpreter for immigrant Muslim women in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali discovered how battered this regime of imposed inferiority sometimes leaves Muslim women. When Dutch social workers would ask them what they wanted, Hirsi Ali observed, many would answer, ‘‘What my husband wants,’’ or ‘‘As Allah wishes.’’ The author comments: ‘‘They had never learned to want anything for themselves.’’

Yet Hirsi Ali brings more to bear against these beliefs and practices than indignation and anger.

She draws on Western champions of critical reason with stinging force, remarking that she’d ‘‘like to invite all people like me who had an Islamic upbringing’’ to ‘‘contrast J.S. Mill’s essay, ‘On the Subjection of Women’ (1869) with what the Prophet Muhammad has to say. . . .’’

This is not pretty to watch. Muhammad, she notes, ‘‘fell in love with Aisha, his best friend’s 9-year-old daughter. Her father said, ‘Please wait until she has reached adulthood.’ But Muhammad did not want to wait.’’ Muhammad married Aisha when she was 9. ‘‘By our Western standards,’’ Hirsi Ali writes, Muhammad is ‘‘perverse’’ and ‘‘a despicable individual. He says women should stay indoors, wear a veil, avoid certain types of work, can’t have the same rights of inheritance as their husbands, and should be stoned if they commit adultery.’’

To Muslims who reject Western mores in judging Muhammad, she retorts, ‘‘the fact that the Wright brothers were not Islamic has not stopped Muslims from traveling by air. By adopting the technical inventions of the West without its courage to think independently, we perpetuate the mental stagnation in Islamic culture.’’

To Muslims who shrug off criticism, she responds: ‘‘If nothing is wrong with Islam, why then are so many Muslims on the run? . . . Why do we Muslims move to the West while at the same time condemning it? What does the West have that we don’t?” Her conclusion? Muslims must begin to ‘‘be critical of their religion and to review it.’’

‘‘The Caged Virgin’’ interweaves this philosophical critique with reportage on the plight of Muslim women, ‘‘Ten Tips for Muslim Women Who Want to Leave,’’ and the author’s own history as a woman subjected to genital mutilation, beaten in her youth by a Koranic teacher who fractured her skull, and bequeathed in marriage to a man she’d never met by her imperious father - the final straw that led her to seek asylum in the Netherlands.

The personal glimpses she permits us - her sister’s mental breakdown and death, how Dutch thinker Herman Philipse’s ‘‘Atheist Manifesto’’ liberated her intellectually after 9/11, her wish ‘‘to write philosophical treatises, like Karl Popper’’ - lend authenticity to her struggle.

At certain moments in cultural history, a particular book or pamphlet - think of Tom Paine’s ‘‘Common Sense’’ - catches fire by taking a spark already burning in people’s hearts and minds and setting it ablaze on the printed page. ‘‘The Caged Virgin’’ is such a book. We live in such a moment.

...She also won’t ignore Islam’s cruelest practices just because they rest beside kindly principles...In the West’s tradition of rational thought, this is called making distinctions. Within Islam, it’s often deemed heresy.

I am sorry. You can not cherry pick ideas from the koran and tell me that islam is good. but...

Throw "but" into a sentence and it makes every thought and idea in front of it a lie. Until islam goes through a reformation, like Christianity did, the only part of those sentences I will even remotely consider as truth are the ones that follow the "but"; but they subjugate women, but they practice genital mutilation, but the kill infidels.

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