Bill's Book Blog:  

INFIDEL, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Apart from the prestige of having this book on the New York Times bestseller list when published in 2008, Ayaan made news a couple of weeks ago when Brandeis University rescinded its offer of an honorary degree because students objected to her writing as “hate speech”.  Which it certainly is.

INFIDEL is an autobiography of a most remarkable human.   Most of the work is devoted to her growing up in Somalia where she was born of a Muslim family and a suffered tumultuous moving as a child among dysfunctional  and destitute klansmen In Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya.   It is an appalling tale of cruel poverty and routine abuse of females by men, including grisly circumcision.  She was beaten by her father, grandfather and brother through her teens, because such behavior was “willed by Allah”.   Incredibly she was able not only to keep her sanity but to learn in addition to her native Somalian, Swahili, Arabic and English.  She also remained a devout Muslim.

In her late teens her father commanded her to marry an older Somalian man who lived in Canada, and whom she not only did not know but found personally revolting.  During the flight to Canada she had an unexpected opportunity in Frankfurt to miss the plane to Canada and go instead to Amsterdam where she was able to pass herself off as a refugee and gain a right to stay. 

The civil rights of all citizens and her acceptance in Holland were such a wonderful departure from the only culture she had ever known that she worked hard to become a Dutch citizen.  She was able to get work regularly as an interpreter (there were a lot of Muslim migrants in Holland at that time).  She made Dutch friends, some influential, and in a couple of years after she became fluent in Dutch she became a citizen. 

She also began to write and publish in periodicals.  She became known.  She became popular and when elections  came she ran for and was elected to the Dutch Parliament.  Obviously I am over-simplifying this story. 

She was also undergoing a profound rethinking of her personal philosophy.  The free, happy society she now enjoyed was such a profound departure from that she had known as a child that it now transformed her.  She was no longer a Muslim.  She became an INFIDEL.  Among Muslims that is an act punishable by death. 

The Netherlands has been for many years an open and accepting culture.  Narcotics are legal.  Amsterdam has a notorious red light district where semi-nude girls offer their wares in lighted windows.  Migrants were welcomed with few restraints.  Many were Muslims who did not share Dutch tolerances.  Honor killings of refugee women became commonplace, a fact the Dutch population was reluctant to accept.

Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film maker, and incidentally a descendant of the painter, asked Ayaan to join him in a short film addressing this problem, and it was shown on TV.  All hell broke loose.  Theo was murdered by a Moroccan Muslim on a street in Amsterdam and the Dutch government put Ayaan under full time armed security guards.  Eventually the conditions of her refugee status came out and her citizenship was revoked.   She had to leave Holland.  She now lives in the United States of America.

As should be apparent I am an admirer of Ayaad.  If her tale is Hate Speech I say “If it’s true, let’s hear more of it.”  I do not regard her observations as a tirade against Islam so much as a revelation of the dark practices of an increasingly blind extremist faction which needs to be exposed as brutal and irrational.  Ayaad is my hero.

Saturday, February 19, 2000, London & Istanbul, a journal by Bill Lawrence, Saracen International CEO

This was a day I will not soon forget.