Infidel is by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who was born in Somalia and raised in a Muslim family.
This book was rather painful to read because of the suffering she had to endure. It was eye-opening, though, and definitely worth reading, just to begin to understand what it is like for many people living in oppressive cultures today. We take our freedoms for granted. As an American woman, I can dress how I want, go where I want and do what I want. I don’t have to have anyone’s permission and no one tells me “you can’t.” (Well, mostly). This is amazing freedom and something Ayaan didn’t experience until she was an adult and ended up living in Europe.
Throughout her childhood and teen years, she was “excised” (genital mutilation), regularly beaten, did all the cooking and cleaning for her household even as a young child, and repeatedly told how stupid she was. And her parents were more progressive than many! She did attend school which was good (although she was often beaten there too). To quote Ayaan: “Adults never explained anything. They saw children as akin to small animals, creatures who had to be tugged and beaten into adulthood before they were worthy of information and discussion.” Everything was about the meticulous following of rules. “A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind.”
The point of this kind of up-bringing is to make a girl into a dutiful wife. “If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. She is a devoted, welcoming, well-trained work animal this is baarri.”
Even with all this teaching, Ayaan got hold of Western books, including romance novels. She was reading about women with unimagined freedom. Then, when her father chose a husband for her, she begged him not to make her marry him. Her father insisted. Her new husband was Canadian, so she was sent on her way to meet him there, but managed to escape her “protectors” and flee to Holland. She had always been told that “uncovered” women would cause men to go into a frenzy, and that society would then be in chaos. However, when she got to Europe, she saw uncovered women everywhere and no one was even paying attention to them. Far from chaos, she saw neat, clean, orderly cities where even the busses arrived exactly on schedule. She began to realize that she could no longer believe the things she had been taught. The Muslim-ruled countries she grew up in were violent, backward, war-torn places full of poverty and suffering. The “infidel” countries she saw were safe, peaceful, prosperous places.
This book is Ayaan’s story of growing up in one culture, then experiencing a whole different way of thinking. By the end of the book, she becomes a politician and a think-tank consultant—a far cry from her Somali roots. She ends up totally rejecting Islam and becoming an atheist, reviled and threatened by family members and other Muslims who see her out-spokeness as a threat.
This last quarter of the book dragged a bit as she talked mostly about her struggles with the parliament in Holland and trying to get people there to understand that Muslim women and children in Holland were still being oppressed and abused by their families. Ayaan had to go into hiding at times because of death threats. But this is such a worth-while read. It will open your eyes to another culture and how it affects people’s world-view and sense of self. Be warned that it will make you hurt for people who are denied the basic freedoms we enjoy.
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