Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Free Press
£12.99

Towards the close of this rather remarkable book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali reflects on her current status as a prisoner of security guards and a target of Islamist fanatics, and matter-of-factly concludes that she’s a very lucky young woman to be in such a privileged situation: “When I was born, my mother initially thought death had taken me away. But it didn’t. When I got malaria and pneumonia, I recovered. When my genitals were cut, the wound healed. When a bandit held a knife to my throat, he decided not to slit it. When my Koran teacher fractured my skull, the doctor who treated me kept death at bay.”

There is a point of great interest here. Whether she realises it or not, she is speaking almost in the tones of Islamicfatalism — of that famous inshallah that deposes all things in the hands and lap of the Almighty.

Her book describes an arduous journey away from belief and towards the adoption of a philosophic atheism, but her tone and style show that the harsh initial training was not at all wasted on her.

Once one has decided to read this narrative ironically, the exercise swiftly becomes an absorbing one. Ayaan (I shall call her this for the sake of simplicity) could well have become what we laconically call a “statistic”. In addition to the perils cited above, she survived the civil war in Somalia and several dangerous relocations to adjoining African and Gulf states where the conditions were scarcely an improvement. If only the threats had all been simply external, her book would still constitute a strong shelf-member in the category of old-fashioned cliff-hanging read. But at every juncture she had also to guard herself against threats from within the family, the tribe, the clan and, perhaps above all, from the mentality by which females infundamentalist societies are both subordinated and schooled to subordinate themselves. Surrounded by sadists who thought they were doing the will of God, she did not appreciate that she was herself in danger of becoming a masochist.

The absence of self-pity is somehow the most salient presence in the tale. A time comes when she, as a little child, is ordered to submit to female circumcision. Some of the details of this barbaric ritual may be known to you: if they are not, then you need only read these few sparse paragraphs to fix the idea in your mind forever. The ordeal was only an interlude in a rain of blows from parents and relatives (chiefly the female ones, it has to be said) and a string of insults that were intended to persuade her that she was fit for nothing but drudgery and the eventual fate of being married off to a male stranger in whose desires she could detect no hint of consideration. At every stage of her development as a female, she was made to feel guilt, shame and disgust.

Yet, reading this account of cal-lousness and misery, I never felt even the beginnings of a tear. Ayaan rather oddly mutates from Islamic passivity through quasi-Christian charity. She can always understand that her superstitious grandmother, her desperate mother, her exorbitantly selfish father and brother and her hysterical sister and other siblings, are doing what they do because theyare suffering as well, and because family solidarity is better than nothing in a pitiless world. There is no hint of rancour in what she sets down. She has forgiven things that the average spoilt child of the West would plead in mitigation if accused of premeditated murder. And this stoicism gradually discloses its own purpose, which is to show that all concerned in the drama are themselves victims of a cruel and grandiose religion.

It is extremely difficult to reject the teachings of absolutism and revelation when one has known nothing else. But Ayaan shows the inexorable means by which the tiniest doubt, even when confronted by the mightiest faith, can become heretical. The first questionings are small enough: why must the law be different for girls and for women? Then comes the discovery of literature: even a shabby paperback seems to have as muchmoral precept as a sermon, if not more. The whiskered fathers of all religions have always known that you can’t be just a little bit heretical, so the next stage is to notice that you will go just as straight to hell even for the tiniest sin. At this point, and having observed that religious devotion seemed to have turned her own society into a slum, Ayaan noticed that repeated attempts were also being made to turn her into a chattel for a man, or men, she had never met. The little revolt and the big revolt became one and the same: “The moral dilemmas I found in books were so interesting they kept me awake.

The answers to them were unexpected and difficult, but they had an internal logic you could understand. Reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I understood that the two characters were just one person, that both evil and good live in each of us at one time. This was more exciting than rereading the Hadith.”

That should have been it. This girl is going to run away the first chance she gets. And run she did, to good old liberal Holland, to escape bullying and tedium and war and famine and another proposal to give her away without consent. She even meets a nice boyfriend who sees the point of her and considers himself lucky. RL Stevenson himself could not have confected a finer romance. Except that, even in Holland, the long arm of the Somali wars and the wider war would not cease reaching after her. In Dutch ghettoes for Moroccans and Turks, she discovers the old routines of wife-beating and genital mutilation being imported by fanatical immigrants. Among Dutch leftists, she finds a refusal to believe that anything “multicultural” can be wrong. Switching parties after 9/11, she is elected to parliament as a Liberal. Through cell-phone networks and other devices, she is tracked by the clan she tried to escape. In the climax of the book, her friend Theo van Gogh isbutchered like a sheep in an Amsterdam street, for the offence of having made a short film with her, about the humiliation of Muslim females.

If there was going to be any anger in the book, it should probably have occurred at this moment. Or at the immediately succeeding moment, when Ayaan suddenly found herself ostracised and denounced for having concealed her true identity when petitioning as a refugee. At last, the Dutch take a hard line against a bogus asylum seeker: the only one who tried to warn them! But again, and with infinite patience, she concedes much to the other side, repeats her conviction that Islamic demagogues are as dangerous in Europe as they were in Somalia, praises Holland for its staunch tradition of hospitality and enlightenment, and withdraws gracefully to live in the United States (where, I might add, we could do with her). I rather admired the way in which, describing all this, she left the reader to do the work. If I had been suddenly turned upon by a Liberal party colleague, a “law-and-order” opportunist and former prison warder with the luscious name of Rita Verdonk I might have been inclined to make something of it. But Ayaan simply presents the facts as they are, admits that she had fibbed a bit on her (genuine) claim to be an endangered refugee, and bows out with a sweet and determined smile on her face. If not wanted in Holland, she will not impose herself.

One can see her face through the barbed wire of many a stricken refugee camp, and at the doors of many an asylum for the about-to-be-deported. It is not God who decides who will be fortunate in such situations. Infidel shows that a determined woman can change more history than her own.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. Infidel is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.99 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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