Who is prejudiced?

Ronit Fraid
Sunday July 18, 2010
from ICJS

Response to article reproduced below...
The only prejudice confirmed by Hilary McPhee’s article is her own! Why does she keep reminding us that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is beautiful as if this somehow detracts from the validity and genuineness of Hirsi Ali’s message. The subtext reads as anti feminist to the core and as proof of McPhee’s own prejudice. Thus, as Hirsi Ali is attractive and others find her so, she must be motivated by a desire for celebrity status in publishing her books and going on speaking tours.
Prejudice and delusion have nothing to do with Hirsi Ali’s perspective. As we anticipate with sorrow and despair, the prospective stoning to death of a woman in Iran, witnesses the fact that Muslim women in all parts of the world, including the West, suffer from inequality and lack of basic freedoms. Witness for example, that Saudi women can’t drive or even leave the house without permission from a male relative, girl children are married off as infants in many Muslim societies, many Muslim girls are subject to the barbarity of female circumcision (as Hirsi Ali was in her childhood) , honour killings occur all over the Muslim world even in the West, the list of injustices and human rights violations against Muslim women is long indeed! These realities do not constitute as McPhee seems to suggest, cultural differences. No, for those misguided multicultural feminists who will not stand up and speak out in defence of their Muslim sisters, be very clear, these are human rights issues and human rights violations in the extreme.
Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional, as Ms McPhee reports but she omits to mention Hirsi Ali’s main contention which is that it is dysfunctional by virtue of the culture within which it exists, a culture which is dysfunctional because of the way it treats its women.
McPhee seems to accept as normal that Hirsi Ali should have received death threats and requires heavy security for the rest of her life as a result of her critique of Islam. It is not normal and not acceptable. McPhee further implies that Hirsi Ali is motivated by… a desire for cultlike celebrity. Methinks that it is delusional to believe that anyone of Hirsi Ali’s (admitted) intelligence would choose to risk their life, be compelled to live under tight security (probably forever) and effectively lose their most basic freedoms for the sake of celebrity, a few book sales or speaking engagements, no matter how lucrative or otherwise rewarding.
And as far as Muslims being better off as Christians, it is hardly debatable that for many Muslim women all over the world, this would indeed constitute an improvement in their quality of life.


Prejudice confirmed

Hilary McPhee The Age July 17, 2010

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's convert-like zeal is both disturbing and delusional, writes Hilary McPhee.

AYAAN Hirsi Ali has brains and beauty and is a gift to those of us who like our prejudices confirmed. In Australia, where she returns regularly to promote her books, she reinforces our idea of the Muslim world as monolithic, mediaeval and dangerous. Islam is all bad, religion is the problem, Allah is the villain. The West is better in every respect. These days she proclaims the American way with stars in her eyes.

Hirsi Ali's early life was difficult and spent on the move between Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Had she grown up elsewhere — in parts of the Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey or Teheran perhaps — she might have been able to give us a more complex and sympathetic picture of the Muslim world, but I suspect not. As each of us is shaped by family and culture, it was her dysfunctional family that formed her, and gave her the courage and impetus to escape — a harsh mother she despised, an educated politicised father she idealised until "he fell back into a trance of submission to Allah", a younger sister she had hopes for but who married and retreated from the life being offered in Europe.

Hirsi Ali's story is extraordinary and her books, mixtures of memoir and analysis wearing their dramatic single-word titles like brand names, are highly popular throughout the West. A Muslim apostate is both consolation and vindication in uncertain times.

Infidel told the story of her family and her flight to Holland to escape an arranged marriage, how she learnt the ropes of the welfare system and the workforce, before gaining a university education. How she became a member of the Dutch Parliament, worked with immigrant women, scripted the film Submission, of Koranic verses projected onto a naked woman's body, a provocation for which the producer, Theo van Gogh, was murdered and she received death threats. From then on, she was provided with bodyguards by the Dutch Government until a political furore over her citizenship status caused her to leave Holland for the US.

In 2006, she accepted a job with the ultra-conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, which had provided much of the rationale for military intervention in Iraq and for rebuilding the image of Israel in the world through a conservative alliance with America. Nomad is dedicated to the past president, Chris DeMuth, "my surrogate abeh" (father).

Hirsi Ali describes this time as her intellectual coming-of-age. With her now private bodyguards, she travels the US and those parts of the world that welcome her message, lecturing on the evils of Islam and explaining her remedies, scornful of more than 1.5 billion Muslims. After Allah, Muslim women receive most of the blame — childlike, unable to manage money, trapped in their marriages, pouring their frustration into damaging their daughters.

We are never reminded that more than 50 countries from Indonesia to Iran through Africa and the Middle East have Muslim majorities and vastly different cultures and histories.

A perspective on the role played by poverty, illiteracy and rural conservatism is missing.

The books aren't much good. Infidel, ghostwritten in Dutch and published in English translation in 2007, came at the right time and sold hugely. Nomad is an awkward retelling of her story through the lens of imagined contact with her sister and her dying father, her hated mother and her dead grandmother. Framed by a chapter called "A Letter to My Grandmother" and an epilogue called "A Letter to My Unborn Daughter", are large chunks of out-of-date polemic echoing Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington. The "clash of civilisations" gets a rerun.

Her targets are predictable. Multiculturalism is utopian, producing victims and welfare dependence. Feminists are naive to suggest that many women in the West are also manipulated, complicit, objectified. Germaine Greer cops it for cultural relativism; Tariq Ramadan for being Tariq Ramadan.

There is a depressing absence of hope or empathy. Micro-financing, which has for years been helping women out of poverty, doesn't rate a mention; nor does the improved literacy in some Islamic countries; nor the belated but huge investment in education in some rich Arab countries. The growing numbers of Muslim women in public life and scholars reinterpreting the Koran and Shar'ia, described by Isobel Coleman in Paradise Beneath Her Feet, do not fit her thesis and are ignored.

Hirsi Ali has joined the ranks of celebrity atheists. Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens speak of her beauty and tiny wrists. The latter is in a state of adoration: "For me the three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali."

I wonder what they make of one of the "remedies" in Nomad that Muslims would be better off being Christian and that the Vatican joins the campaign to save Muslims from themselves.

There is something disturbing and slightly delusional here, the zeal of the convert protecting herself from facing the consequences of her own actions and theories, perhaps. The cult that surrounds Hirsi Ali could engulf her. She's a one-woman band against her own culture, a hero to herself as well to the men who worship her. I can't help but fear for her.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in conversation on July 29 at the Capitol Theatre. Bookings: wheelercen-tre.com.

Hilary McPhee, editor, writer and former publisher, has been liv-ing and working in the Middle East. Her selection of recent Australian writing, Wordlines, is published by Five Mile Press this month.
Thanks Ronit Fraid