Seven Years Ago Today: Saint Ayaan

By Moristotle

[Originally published on August 20, 2010, not a word different, same image as then.
    And I did read a “Travis McGee” in the days following, but it didn’t have the same zing that it had had for me when I read it twenty or thirty years earlier.]

To my admiring mind, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a contemporary heroine, a person who, were she a Catholic (and passed on to her reward), might very well be nominated for canonization.
    In hushed silence this afternoon, I finished reading her 2007 memoir, Infidel. Reading it was a gut-wrenching experience. On the basis of reading only my several excerpts from the book, an old friend allowed that “I’m not sure my stomach is strong enough to read further.” That’s modest for a man who spends a few weeks most years sharing the wilds of North America, unarmed, with grizzly bears and other creatures that might dispute their relative position on the food chain.
    Nevertheless, I offer the concluding paragraphs of this moving book:

In March 2005, Time magazine informed me that I would be named one of its one hundred “most influential people in the world today.” I went straight out to buy a copy of the magazine, of course, but I was weeks early; that issue wouldn’t come out until mid-April. So the magazine I bought wasn’t about me, it was about poverty in Africa. The woman on the cover was young and thin, with three small children. She was wrapped in the same kind of cloth my grandmother used to wear, and the look in her eyes was hopeless.
    It threw me back to Somalia, to Kenya, to poverty and disease and fear. I thought about the woman in that photograph, and about the millions of women who must live as she does. Time had just named me to their category, “Leaders and Revolutionaries.” What do you do with a responsibility like that?....

Sister Azizad used to warn us of the decadence of the West: the corrupt, licentious, perverted, idolatrous, money-grubbing, soulless countries of Europe. But to me, there is far worse moral corruption in Islamic countries. In those societies, cruelty is implacable and inequality is the law of the land. Dissidents are tortured. Women are policed both by the state and by their families to whom the state gives the power to rule their lives.
    In the past fifty years the Muslim world has been catapulted into modernity. From my grandmother to me is a journey of just two generations, but the reality of that voyage is millennial. Even today you can take a truck across the border into Somalia and find you have gone back thousands of years in time.
    People adapt. People who never sat on chairs before can learn to drive cars and operate complex machinery; they master these skills very quickly. Similarly, Muslims don’t have to take six hundred years to go through a reformation in the way they think about equality and individual rights.
    When I approached Theo [the Dutch film-maker who was murdered for his involvement in the production of the short film exposing the treatment of Muslim women] to help me make Submission, I had three messages to get across. First, men, and even women, may look up and speak to Allah: it is possible for believers to have a dialogue with God and look closely at Him. Second, the rigid interpretation of the Qur’an in Islam today causes intolerable misery for women. Through globalization, more and more people who hold these ideas have traveled to Europe with the women they own and brutalize, and it is no longer possible for Europeans and other Westerners to pretend that severe violations of human rights occur only far away. The third message is the film’s final phrase: “I may no longer submit.” It is possible to free oneself – to adapt one’s faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of oppression.
    I am told that Submission is too aggressive a film. Its criticism of Islam is apparently too painful for Muslims to bear. Tell me, how much more painful is it to be these women, trapped in that cage? [pp. 349-350]

And I, not nearly so strong as this valiant young woman (about my daughter’s age), feel that I need to read something light (maybe a John D. MacDonald “Travis McGee“) for a respite before I read her sequel, this year’s Nomad, which we are warned by one reviewer might read less “as a coming-to-America emotional journey” than “as an anti-Islamic screed.”
    I assume the reviewer means “screed” is the sense of a diatribe, “a bitter, sharply abusive denunciation, attack, or criticism.” Well, Saint Ayaan seems to have had abundant experience to justify an attack on Islam, however bitter, sharp, and abusive a critique it might be.

Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle