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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Activist Hirsi Ali reveals her naïve take on West

Reviewed by: Melissa Martin

Posted: 05/29/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Ayaan Hirst Ali's advocacy against oppression is admirable.

Nomad

From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Knopf Canada, 277 pages, $32

Contrary to popular opinion, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not the only Muslim (or, rather, ex-Muslim) feminist.

But four years after publishing her lightning-rod autobiography, Infidel, the Somali-born woman, now 41 and living in the U.S., is the only one that most westerners can name.

She does have an incredible resumé. Once a refugee in a squalid Saudi apartment with abusive parents, Hirsi Ali underwent female genital mutilation as a girl, battled her dogmatic father, moved to the Netherlands to avoid an arranged marriage, drifted from religious devotion to atheism, wrote a screenplay with the murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and became a firebrand Dutch politician, braving death threats to speak out against oppression and stagnation in Islam.

But there's another reason why Hirsi Ali became a star and other, more ideologically nuanced, Muslim feminists have not.

In Nomad, her followup to explore her struggle to adjust to life in the Western world, we see it clearly: Hirsi Ali is famous not just because of the strength of her convictions, but because she has become a willing darling for western chauvinists.

This is no disrespect to her ability. Hirsi Ali is a gifted storyteller, and Nomad's vignettes are precise and evocative and they often underscore strong socio-political arguments.

She begins by recounting her poignant and secretive reconciliation with her religious father, reaching across a gulf of paternal shame to grip his hand on his deathbed; later, a funny anecdote about her struggle to understand personal finance punches home an argument that new immigrants should receive money-management counselling.

But in the text around these sharp memories, Nomad is less charming. Underneath the sheen of intimacy, the book is yet another tract about why a hopelessly idealized West should, as reviewer Deepak Lal writes on the book jacket, consider Islam (in its entirety) to be "the gravest threat to western liberal societies."

For instance, despite admitting (once) that America is "not utopia," Hirsi Ali consistently describes it as exactly that. In a letter to her dead grandmother, she scolds, "The infidel (westerner) insists on honesty and trust... and everywhere your trust is borne out... he is obsessed with cleanliness, a good diet... he is loyal to his wife and children."

If that's her take on the West, then let's order what she's having.

For those not of the same mindset, Nomad is an exasperating, if interesting, read. Most interesting of all is to watch her collisions of blinkered bias and cogent arguments: she writes of sympathy for observant Muslim immigrant women and their need for liberation, but when she chides her pious half-sister Sahra as "downtrodden from an objective standpoint," it looks an awful lot like contempt. (Sahra, she admits, doesn't consider herself oppressed.)

Hirsi Ali has long tussled with Muslim feminists who agree with her basic tenets -- that oppression of women is bad and freedom of choice is good -- but disagree with her doctrines. In Nomad, she briefly engages these voices, though she puts scare quotes around "feminist" and dismisses their cogent arguments as "academic nonsense." (So much for her praise of higher education.)

It's uniquely frustrating to read a woman of such intellect and force of will possessed by such a stubbornly closed-minded worldview, one which praises the free exchange of ideas but flippantly rejects those that do not similarly condemn Islam without qualification.

No wonder Hirsi Ali is such a polarizing figure. It's impossible not to be drawn in by her tales of growing up torn between worlds, by her pains and epiphanies. Her advocacy against oppression and stagnation is admirable; her black-and-white didacticism, less so.

Melissa Martin is a Free Press reporter.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 29, 2010 H8

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