Woman Speak

‘When fundamentalists run out of arguments, they call you an infidel’

Ayaan Hirsi Ali says "The spread of Islam is the greatest problem in history today. Even if people don't resort to terror and violence, it's a closing of the Muslim mind. A closing of the human mind. Because Islam doesn't allow you to think for yourself. Islam also persuades you to invest in life after death. That's bad for people, even if they don't become violent. It's much better to invest in a theology that helps you to invest in life here on earth."

On women and the Burqa she says: "The veil stands for the idea that a wpman's body is seductive -it arouses the man. And if that happens, the men cannot control their sexuality -so the best way to help men control their sexuality is to cover women. ... I think that the women who now wear and flaunt it will have to ask themselves the following question - is it for me to protect a man from his own sexuality, or should he learn to control his own desires and urges? We've seen in India, in China, the West,men are capable of controlling their urges - and so that makes the burqa redundant."

She says that educated women flaunting the Burqa are actually making political, not religious statements, implying that Sharia law is better than the established law of the country.  Comments anyone?

And who's this person? Born Ayaan Hirsi Magan on 13 November 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia) this intellectual, feminist activist, writer, and politician is the estranged daughter of the late Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh's movie Submission led to death threats. Since van Gogh's assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004, she has lived in seclusion under the protection of Dutch authorities.

When she was eight, her family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament.

 

In 2005, Time magazine named Ayaan as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards including Norway's Human Rights Service's Bellwether of the Year Award, the Danish Freedom Prize, the Swedish Democracy Prize (awarded in 2005 by the Liberal Party) and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship.

 
 In 2006 she published her memoir, which appeared in English translation in 2007 titled Infidel
 
“It is important to off-set Islamic values with Western values. In Islam, men and women are not equal, a woman’s testimony is worth half of a man’s, and homosexuality is not acceptable. Is there a way to have a discussion with Muslim fundamentalists about Islam without offending them? No,” says Ali, who feels that Islam needs to go through the same “enlightenment” process that other religions have gone though.



“When you have a discussion about values with fundamentalists, when they run out of arguments, they start accusing the other of shutting down the conversation. They call you a traitor, an infidel,” says Ali, whose memoir Infidel was published in English in 2007.
 
 
Ayaan was in India for the Jaipur Lit-Fest