Ayaan Hirsi Ali – the lady who picked up Islam’s gauntlet

Last spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali took her “Dutch mother” — the woman who taught her the language and cared for her after she arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992 — to lunch at the Dudok brasserie, near the Parliament in The Hague. As always, Hirsi Ali’s armed security detail was there. They have been her companions since she started receiving death threats in September 2002.

Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. “I turned around,” she recalls in her elegant English, “and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, ‘Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.’ ” Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia and has been a member of the Dutch Parliament since January 2003, had endorsed the view that Islam is a backward religion, condemned the way women live under it and said that by today’s standards, the prophet Muhammad would be considered a perverse tyrant. She had also announced that she was no longer a believing Muslim. The punishment for such apostasy is, according to strict interpretations of Islam, death. That day at the Dudok, several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. “I turned around,” she recalls in her elegant English, “and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, ‘Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.’ ” Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

Hirsi Ali was born into Somalia's Darod clan. Her rebellion against her Islamic roots has estranged her somewhat from her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, whom she had always emulated. Her father, who now lives in England, was an iconoclastic Somali intellectual and politician who studied in Italy and earned a degree from Columbia University in 1966. He returned to Africa strengthened in his Muslim faith, his daughter says, but also deeply touched by North America. ''If such a young nation as the U.S. could make it to superpower status,'' she recalls him saying, ''we could do it as well.''

An anti-Communist, he agitated against the Marxist dictatorship of Mohammed Siad Barre, who came to power in 1969, the year Hirsi Ali was born. Hirsi Magan spent part of the 1980's as a leader of a guerrilla force in the Democratic Front for the Salvation of Somalia. Hirsi Ali's mother -- the second of the two wives Hirsi Magan had at the time -- was illiterate but wielded domestic clout. Women had certain narrowly defined areas of power. It was Hirsi Ali's grandmother who managed, following regional custom, to have Hirsi Ali and her sister ritually ''circumcised'' at age 5, against the wishes (and without the knowledge) of Hirsi Magan. From age 6, Hirsi Ali and her siblings shared their father's political exile, in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia and then, for 10 years, in Kenya. In the course of her travels, Hirsi Ali learned five languages: Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and English, which she speaks in a lilting accent picked up from the Indian teachers who taught her at the Muslim Girls' Secondary School on Park Road in Nairobi.

Hirsi Ali was an obedient, serious girl. Her religious observance drifted between the devout and the fanatical. But this did not stop her growing realization that there was less scope for women than for men in her world, or her sense that Islam was to blame for it. A crisis came in 1992, when her father contracted her in marriage to a Somali-Canadian cousin she did not know. After a wedding ceremony in Kenya, she followed him on a flight to Canada. During a layover in Germany, scheduled for the completion of her immigration paperwork, she decided to bolt -- an idea that did not occur to her, she says, until she arrived in Europe. She fled across the border on a train to the Netherlands, fearful that the Somali-German guardian assigned her by her clan would find her if she stayed in Germany. (Ten years later, her father would phone to inform her that she had been formally divorced under Islamic tradition.)

In the Netherlands, she changed her name (from Ayaan Hirsi Magan), falsified her birth date and applied successfully for political asylum. She found a job as a cleaning lady (''I would rather clean than beg'') in the Riedel juice factory in Ede, a heavily Moroccan city that has since become notorious in the Netherlands as the place where a television camera caught children and teenagers celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Story Credit: New York Times

Read complete story at: New York Times.

On a related topic Olivier Guitta has a powerfully disturbing look at the horrors faced by some European Muslim women, who are victims of a repressive, misogynous culture deliberately promoted and enforced in a real, honest-to-goodness conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood and our friends the Saudis.

The atrocious treatment of women in the Arab world is well-known, but people are much less aware of the plight of some European Muslim women. The increasing degradation of Muslim women in Europe is largely due to the work of the Wahhabi and Muslim Brotherhood propaganda over the last 15 years. In European countries, some Muslims —especially the younger generation — are faced with an identity crisis. They do not feel Western even though they were born in the West and are European citizens. But they do not feel Arab either. So they choose a new nationality: Islamist.

Indeed, in some areas and regarding some issues, European Muslim women are no better off than their Arab Muslim counterparts. Here are just some examples of the abuse suffered by some European Muslim women:

- Forced to wear the hijab, i.e. headscarf

- Forced to marry someone according to the family’s will

- Must undergo excision “procedure”

- Gang rapes for not “respecting” Islam

- Killed by a relative for “dishonoring” the name of the family.

Most Muslim French women who wear the hijab are forced to do so by their family or because of pressure from the community. In many testimonies young women have stated that they were wearing it not to be “bothered” by the men in their community. There were multiple cases in the suburbs of Paris of gang rapes of women who were too “Westernized”.

In a book entitled Wed By Force (Oh Editions, Paris, May 2004), Leila — the author could not reveal her last name — tells of her own nightmarish existence. She was raped by one of her brothers when she was quite young and did not tell anyone — even her mother — because she would have not been believed. She was regularly beaten up by her father because she was a little rebellious. She just wanted to behave like a girl her age but it was impossible because otherwise she would ruin the family’s reputation. Like her other Muslim friends, she had to respect the law of silence. She also depicts how her family chose a husband for her. He was 15 years older than she and she does not know him.

You may guess that Leila lives in Saudi Arabia but she lives in the suburbs of Paris in 2005. She is a French citizen born in France of Moroccan parents. Unfortunately, Leila is not alone. Statistics do not lie: each year, in France, 50,000 women are wed against their will.

Story Credit: Tech Central Station

Read Complete Story at: Tech Central Station