Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Posted on 02/19/2007 10:52:04 PM PST by Posting
Three books by three women describe the violent suppression affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of women.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
WE ARE TOLD we are living through a clash of civilisations, a clash between militant Islam and the infidels.
This is only the surface tension. There is a clash of civilisations, but the deeper cause is not religion. It is sex. A great cultural struggle is being waged about and around the rights of women.
This month, three books by three women describe the violent suppression that affected not just their own lives but the lives of hundreds of millions of women like them.
For years, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of Infidel, was a devout Muslim. She does not spare the gritty details of her life. As a girl in Somalia, she had her clitoris removed to make her "pure". Her clitoris and labia were cut off with scissors while she screamed. The wound was sown up to form a thick band of scar tissue, a natural chastity belt. She describes her wedding night, her divorce, then the arranged marriage to a man she despised, and her escape to Europe, bringing shame and infamy to her family and clan.
In Holland, she began to ask awkward questions: "This was an infidel country. Why was it, then, so much better run, better led, and made for such better lives than the places we came from? Shouldn't the places where Allah was worshipped and His laws obeyed have been at peace and wealthy, the unbelievers' countries ignorant, poor and at war?"
Working as a translator, she finds herself in women's shelters largely full of Muslim women and police stations largely full of Muslim men. After a decade, she concluded the host society was not the problem: "If Muslims lagged so far behind even other immigrant groups, then wasn't it possible that one of the reasons could be Islam? Islam influences every aspect of believers' lives. Women are denied their social and economic rights in the name of Islam, and ignorant women bring up ignorant children."
After graduating in political science from the elite Leiden University, she begins to speak out against the domestic tyranny imported from the Muslim world. As a beautiful black Muslim willing to criticise Islam and Muslims, she is singular in Holland. She becomes a media favourite, then a political favourite, then a member of parliament. The next chapter in her life is well known. In 2004, after writing the script for a TV film critical of Islam's treatment of women, the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was butchered in the street by an Islamic fundamentalist. Police swooped in to spare Hirsi Ali the same fate.
The story of van Gogh's murder is also examined by Ian Buruma in Murder In Amsterdam. Buruma, an accomplished journalist and native Dutch speaker, provides a more detached, deeper and measured version of this story than Infidel. Like Hirsi Ali, he recognises that not long ago Europe itself was locked in the grip of religious and male dominance. "Few people in Holland remember how recently emancipation of women came to the Dutch, or to other Europeans for that matter."
Like many liberals, Buruma is so concerned with being fair to the poor and the marginalised that he understates, even patronises, the desire for social cohesion by the native Dutch population. His depictions of Dutch nationalists are often patronising. He compares Hirsi Ali with Margaret Thatcher.
Yet Buruma never adequately confronts or undermines her most provocative assertion, that the majority of Muslims in Holland have failed to integrate as have other immigrants because they don't want to integrate, because they are more racist and insular than the host society.
Hirsi Ali is not the only furious woman who risked her life and caused an international sensation in confronting sexual hypocrisy in Muslim society. In In The Name Of Honour, Mukhtar Mai tells a simple story that is Shakespearean in its melodrama and sweeping implications. Mai was living in the village of Meerwala, in southern Punjab, when she was gang-raped on the orders of a village council on June 22, 2002. It was "honour justice" imposed as punishment for a patently trumped-up charge against Mai's younger brother, who had been accused of sexual impropriety with a woman from a higher caste, and powerful clan, in the district.
"I will never forget the faces of those animals," Mai says of her rapists. "They don't even need to use their weapons. Rape kills her. Rape is the ultimate weapon: it shames the other clan for ever."
Instead of committing suicide, the normal practice, she goes to the police and names her rapists. Her memoir is her journey through the justice system, the attempt by the police to cover up the crime, the media intervention, the threats to her life, the subsequent rape trial. "In order to fight, it seems that I must lose everything: my reputation, my honour, everything that was once my life. But that's not important. I want justice."
Her voice is channelled through a French writer, Marie-Therese Cuny, whose name does not appear on the cover but who is ever-present as she turns Mai's pain into prose and her statements into drama.
A fourth book, Shame, by Jasvinder Sanghera, is no literary work but has the authority of personal witness and pain. It supports the argument put by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Mukhtar Mai that tens of millions of Asian and Muslim women suffer an invisible fate of fear, violence, submission and confinement, even in Europe. Shame also supports Hirsi Ali's claim that immigrants bring racism with them: "The worst thing that you can say to an Asian girl is that she is behaving like a white person".
Sanghera is not Muslim. Her family is Sikh, from India. They lived in a quintessentially English address, Northumberland Street, Derby, but five of the six daughters were forced into arranged marriages that proved variously disastrous.
Only Jasvinder escaped because she ran away at 16: "The photograph of the man I was supposed to marry was on the mantelpiece," she writes. "He was ugly as well as short, he looked much older than me and he had a stupid haircut."
Her sister, Robina, trapped in a violent marriage, commits suicide by burning herself to death, the fate of countless Asian wives. "If Robina had only ... found the courage to reach out and embrace the culture of the country she was born in, she needn't have died ... I knew there were other women like me and Robina. I see them every day in Derby, scuttling about like shadows." Sanghera graduates from university and opens a centre for abused Asian women, Karma Nirvana. The women come, bringing the now familiar stories of forced marriage, rape, shame, violence and abandonment.
In Pakistan, Mukhtar Mai has used her compensation payment and donations from abroad to build a school for girls in her village, a drop in the bucket of illiteracy. In Washington, where Ayaan Hirsi Ali has gone into exile, she is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she will continue to write and speak about the conditions of Muslim women. "There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice," she writes in Infidel. No one can ever say we were not told.
When certain people are infected with a communicable disease, we quarantine them for the good of society. Why aren't we doing the same for those infected with the mental disease known as Islam?
Now, you gave me the idea why Muslims need CAIR, it's just spelled badly... ;)
These people are unable to recognize the critical importance of degree.
Traditionally, all societies are dominated by men. But some treat their women much worse than others. When studying European history I must have missed the genital mutilation, forced marriage (outlawed early in the Middle Ages by the Church), and honor killings.
Actually, a good many European cultures practice honor killing. It's just that they kill the seducer or rapist, not the lady.
They were not starting from the same place. The Dutch never cut off women's genitals or condoned "honor" killings.
Holland's answer to her "dissing" Islam was to remove her from her elected Parliament position! Shame...shame.
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