DAR AL HARB - U.K.: A LONE VOICE, AYAAN HIRSI ALI, INFIDEL

Lone voice
LEE RANDALL

It sounds like the treatment for an action thriller. One November morning, a filmmaker is murdered on a Dutch street. Speared to his corpse is a note identifying the killer's next victim, a beautiful Somali refugee turned outspoken politician already living under tight security. The murder plunges the Netherlands into crisis and the government spirits her from one secret location to another, sometimes in prison-like conditions, sometimes in relative luxury, but always under guard. And still she refuses to be silenced.

Thandie Newton's services won't be required. These aren't the highlights of a Hollywood screenplay, they're central facts in the life of 37-year-old Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of the short film that enraged a strata of the Muslim community enough to result in director Theo van Gogh's 2004 murder. Submission - referring to the sole relationship a Muslim should have with God - tells of five women brutalised in the name of Islam. As their narratives unfold, audiences see verses from the Quran tattooed on their flesh. Van Gogh rejected suggestions that he remove his name from the controversial project for safety's sake, saying, "If I can't put my name on my own film, in Holland, then Holland isn't Holland any more, and I am not me."

Ali has no wish for martyrdom and remains tightly guarded. How is it, living under the sword of Damocles? The question frustrates her. She recounts a litany of near misses, not to trumpet her invincibility, but to demonstrate that death is part of life. "I come from Africa where societies were in constant upheaval. I was born too early, underweight, and somehow I survived. I get a childhood illness that other children didn't survive, but I survive. I get hit on the head and there's bleeding [in fact, her skull was fractured], and somehow I still survive. I'm not in control of the cosmos, but one thing I can do is take as many precautions as possible. I do co-operate with security - unlike other people I've seen under guard because of their work, who cheat and sneak out. I don't."

I'm like a dog with a bone. She can't describe an average day; it would compromise her safety. OK, but if you want to go for a drink after work one night, would you ring the guards and announce, "Boys, we're going out?" She smirks at my foolishness. "They're always there." They're in your flat? "They are," she replies evenly. "And yes, it's a pain in the ass."

After much pestering by the Fourth Estate, Ali, who in addition to being exquisite is tall, regal, and self-composed, has written Infidel, her autobiography. "It became important to answer those questions and be done with it, and then move on as a thinker, because that's how I like to see myself. Sometimes people need the story, but they must understand that it's subjective. It's how I've come to understand the world, my transition from a pre-modern society to a super-modern society; what I learned, what I miss, and also my own fallibility."

Her father, Hirsi Magan, was a heroic figure from a prominent family who attended university in the United States. Simultaneously traditional and enlightened, he was a loving, instructive parent, but politics kept him away from home and kept the family on the move through Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia. Ali's mother, Asha, was a dutiful, impeccably pious young woman with a lively intellect who had the courage to leave her rural home in what's now Somalia to work in Aden, albeit heavily veiled. She entered an arranged marriage and had a son but, surprisingly, asked for a divorce. She received it on the condition that she gave up her son. Back in Mogadishu and attending Magan's literacy classes, she fell for her teacher. He had a wife but married Asha anyway. They had a son, Mahad, followed by two daughters, Ayaan - born six weeks prematurely and not expected to survive - and then Haweya.

Although she had, so to speak, stuck her nose outside the tent flaps, Asha was a stern, unyielding defender of Islam who routinely beat her daughters for infractions real and imagined, and rigorously instructed them that purity was paramount. When Ali began menstruating there was no mother-daughter chat, just shrieking cries of "whore" and "prostitute". It was left to her brother to explain that this was perfectly natural and would recur monthly.

I'm shocked by how consistently women subjugate other women in Ali's tale. This earns me a wry smile. "There are a few stereotypes in the West about the oppression of women, which here was defined as a struggle between men and women. Men were in a position of superiority and they had to share and accept equality. That is the same in Islamic society but both men and women are locked together in this cage of backwardness. A lot of the oppression and abuse and betrayal is from woman to woman, from mother to daughter, older sister to younger sister.

"My father was progressive because he had seen the wider world and had come to understand how women will contribute to society if you educate them. My mother saw only that she had to survive in the tribal society. These were her strategies: if you cook, if you clean, if you're obedient, if you're no trouble to anyone and if you're a virgin you'll get yourself a good husband. She didn't realise that society had changed."

One of Ali's chief arguments is that any society failing to understand the importance of educating women - who raise the children, after all - hasn't changed enough. "In my religious upbringing it was: accept things as they are, never ask questions, never reflect." And lest you dismiss this as a problem only affecting the Developing World (as if that were an excuse), guess again.

"How can we look away [when] we know women are being subjugated here? How can you apologise for [western] values of individual freedom, of protecting life, of curiosity and rationality and criticism that have led to so much progress and prosperity? How can you let that slip through your fingers? In a society like this, problems are approached and can be resolved because you are allowed to speak out.

"You cannot say Islam is going to become a part of the European conscience and also say we're proponents of women's emancipation. It's one or the other. I think Europe progressed very quickly because they pushed back the Church to the private sphere. Now that Islam has come and is trying to dominate the realm of reason, we are not saying, as we've done with the Catholics, 'No, you stay out of it '."

More than a billion Muslims won't change their views overnight, she says, but we can start by encouraging them to diagnose their beliefs and scrutinise their origins. The Quran reflects the concerns and mores of a primitive society. It needs an update. "By adopting the technical inventions of the West without its courage to think independently, we perpetuate the mental stagnation in Islamic culture, passing it on from one generation to the next," she argues. Thus, in her next book, she plans to bring Muhammad back to life. "I'm going to have him have a conversation, to come back and answer liberalism."

DESPITE MAGAN's oft-voiced objections, Ali's grandmother took advantage of both parents' absence to have the children circumcised. It is, Ali is careful to explain, a Somali, not a Muslim tradition. Nevertheless, according to Amnesty International figures for 2002, between 1 million and 1.4 million girls around the world suffered genital mutilation.

Not only is the excision itself horrific, done with crude instruments and without anaesthetic; it leads to a lifetime of pain and hideous medical complications. On this day the children went in order of age. Ali saw her brother held down, fighting back screams, with blood covering his legs. Next she was pinned by her grandmother and two other women while a man wielding scissors cut off her clitoris and inner labia. "I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement." Following the mutilation her legs were tied together to facilitate the formation of a scar. She was five years old.

Years later, attending school in Nairobi, Ali discovered literature - everything from Mark Twain to Danielle Steele. It conveyed startling ideas about freedom and equality between the races and sexes. Books also delivered romance, which appealed to the blossoming teenager, for it's a myth that excision kills sexual desire. Her classmates were being spirited out of school and into arranged marriages, yet they, too, yearned to fall in love. Without addressing the contradiction in her own life, Asha beat it into her daughters that marrying for love lost you the clan's protection and jeopardised your family's position, since status rests on the purity of its women.
Between 16 and 18, Ali fell under the spell of Sister Aziza. "Thick black cloth fell from the top of her head to the tips of her gloves and the very limit of her toes. It was spectacular." Sister Aziza taught that womanhood was irresistibly desirable and essentially filthy. Ali started wearing a headscarf and progressed to an all-encompassing black cloak. She felt powerful. "Underneath this screen lay a previously unsuspected but potentially lethal femininity."

Her body was covered but her mind remained open. Her religious study group taught that, "A man's sinful thoughts were always the fault of the woman who incited them. One day, I finally stood up and asked, 'What about the men? Shouldn't they cover? Don't women also have desire for male bodies? Couldn't they be tempted by the sight of men's skin?' It seemed logical to me, but the whole room fell about laughing."

Fleeing her own arranged marriage, travelling to Germany and ultimately on to Holland, where she sought asylum, she was stunned by western arrangements. No piles of rubbish in the streets; a shower; a duvet! But most of all: "The women were bare - they seemed naked - their legs, their whole arms, their faces and hair and shoulders were all completely uncovered. Men and women were sitting together with easy familiarity. They held hands in broad daylight, not hiding ... and everyone seemed to find this completely normal."

It's a measure of the ideological distance she's travelled that Ali not only renounced the veil, but all it signifies. It seems, I suggest, that the veil denigrates men as much as women, since it presumes they lack self control and discretion? She nods. "A woman who veils herself voluntarily is screaming out, 'You are a rapist' to men. The morality on which the veil rests is that if I'm uncovered it will cause a man so much lust that he can't control himself. He's going to have sex with me. If that happens, brothers and fathers will get angry and go after the man. That way the social case is closed.

"Thus it's the responsibility of families to confine their women. But if there's this urgent need to go outside you must go covered to prevent men in the street from losing their minds." She chuckles at the absurdity, but explains that the problem is adolescent boys not being taught that they can and should restrain their lust.

"I don't know if you've been in an Arab country or an Islamic neighbourhood," she asks. "Take a bus in Cairo: men will be touching you. They'll be asking you to have sex with them. They'll approach you in a way that is so indecent and I don't blame them one tiny bit, because they've been taught by both their mothers and their fathers that their lust can just carry them away."
That attitude has arrived in the West, she warns. "That means boys in communities where the veil has become important are not raised to control their sexuality, therefore they'll be a nuisance to society. They are only brought up to respect women who cover themselves. We have a bunch of highly educated women who say I am putting on the veil voluntarily - but those women, what they are saying is that you and I are whores because we don't cover our modesty, and they're saying to all men: there is a potential rapist in you. This makes it the business of the whole society not only Muslims."

This is one of the reasons multiculturalism is misguided, she says. "The whole approach is that ethnic minorities may hang on to their cultures and customs and are exempted from a lot of obligations that the rest of society is held to. They have freedoms the rest of society doesn't have. In France there was the story of polygamy which they tolerated. There's female genital mutilation, there's domestic violence. I don't understand what has pushed liberals to the mindset that they accept this sort of abuse and argue it in the name of freedom."

Guilt, I suggest? She rolls her eyes and graces me with a real smile - a full-blown affair exposing dazzling teeth set in a generous upturned crescent. "It doesn't make sense any more to say, 'My forefathers oppressed your forefathers and I feel so guilty about that that I'll just let you beat your wife and I'm going to exempt you from justice.' "

What then? Well, educate Muslim women the same as any others. Do not force them into a marriage and life not of their choosing. Abolish Muslim schools, where children are unequal and certain subjects are taboo, such as evolution and sex education.

Sounds like the United States, I say. Living there now, what's her take on schools refusing to teach these vital subjects? "Suicidal! Before the age of 18 it is up to the state [ie: schools] and the wider society to groom children to appreciate and defend a liberal democratic society. If you deny children science and logic and self-criticism, then as a society you're committing suicide. It doesn't matter if you import radicalism or whether it's homegrown, it will lead to the same dogmatic and, in the end, violent disintegration.

"Americans tell me this only takes place in a small Midwestern town, and blah, blah blah. Every ideology started small. The Islamic brotherhood that we are fighting now started in the 19th century with one man and one book. Communism started with Marx and look what it can bring about. The argument that something is small is not valid."

What is not small is Ali's passion and commitment. She speaks softly but forcefully and writes so lucidly that the complicated principles of a debate she quite rightly insists was here before her and will persist beyond her, unfold and reveal themselves with utter clarity.

And now she really must be gone. Try as I might, I still can't fathom your life, I tell her.

Standing across the room, collecting her belongings, she turns and moves closer. Offering the most dazzling smile yet, she laughs. "I have many friends who love me. Don't worry. I have fun!"

Pertinent Links:

1) Lone voice