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The STORY of AYAAN HIRSI ALI, to 2007 (1 of 4)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan grew up in Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya, the daughter of a Somalian political leader forced to live in exile. She was a devout Muslim. When she was seventeen she was horrified when told by the Kenyan boy that she was interested in that he was an atheist. She writes that she "could not believe such an evil thing was possible, coming from someone so kind and so handsome." She thought of hell and burst out: "But you will burn!" She saw it as impossible to marry someone not a Muslim, that her clan "simply would not stand for it." If she married him, she thought, he might even be killed.

While her family was in exile in Kenya she attended a secretarial college, learned English and had contact with Western culture by reading fiction about a character, Nancy Drew, who solved mysteries and functioned as an equal with men. But she remained Muslim to her core. Like other Muslims around her she wore the habib with her school uniform and adhered to the conservative Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was an anti-Western conservatism that came from the colonialism that Somalis had endured. A part of this conservatism was support for the fatwa death sentence against Salman Rushdie, issued when she was nineteen.

Something instinctive intervened. Mediocrities have no problem hooking up with other mediocrities, but exceptional people don't have it that easy. Ayaan rebelled against having to marry someone she considered a mediocrity. That would have been torture for her. She fled her family and went to the Netherlands where she lied about her status as a refugee in Kenya. Her real name was Magan. She changed it to Ali, and she was given residency.

The Dutch government lent her money for survival. She worked cleaning and sorting mail. She learned Dutch. She was driven by a curiosity and a desire for the kind of education respected by her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, a devout Muslim who had a degree in anthropology from Columbia University, New York. Impressed with how well Dutch society worked, she studied political science at Leiden University while working as a translator for a refugee center. She earned a masters degree at the age of thirty, in the year 2000.

She was repelled by her job as a "manipulative" salesperson and quit after a few weeks. "That was it," she writes, "for me and business." She took a job as a researcher at a scientific institute linked to Holland's Labour Party.

By now, at the age of 31, she spoke six languages: English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic and Dutch. She had acquired a respect for the West as embodied among the Dutch people. She enjoyed their "live and let live" attitude. She had been living with a male companion her age, and she was impressed by a society that worked well politically.

She writes that "European history was a gripping chronicle" and that Holland had come from nothing: "mud and poverty and foreign rule."

Even the land was constructed by a collective effort. The sea tides roaring over half the country were too powerful to confront individually, so the Dutch learned to be clever and work together. They cut channels through the silt to control the flooding and built new land where the sea had been. ...They learned to be resourceful and persistent. They learned negotiation. They learned that reason is better than force. Above all, they learned to compromise." (Infidel, p. 238)

She describes ideas she had acquired that were subversive to her as a Muslim:

I came to realize how deeply the Dutch are attached to freedom... Four hundred years ago, when European thinkers severed the hard bands of church dogma that had constrained people's mind, Holland was the center of free thought. (Infidel, p. 238)

Ayaan writes that almost every page that she read challenged her as a Muslim. "Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas," she writes. She writes of her exposure to Darwin, who "said creation stories were a fairy tale," Freud, she adds, "said we had power over ourselves." Spinoza "said there were no miracles, no angels, no need to pray to anything outside ourselves: God was us, and nature." Emil Durkheim "said humans fantasized religion to give themselves a sense of security."

Ayaan remained a Muslim. She writes that she tried to stuff the new ideas she was exposed to "behind a little shutter in my brain." This included the contrast between Dutch politics and the Koran, which holds that "there can be no government without God."

Then came September 11, 2001.