It is not often that one learns of a person with the capacity to totally change their way of thinking, their cultural habits, their actions and their philosophy. Such a person is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of "Infidel" and "The Caged Virgin". Her book "Infidel" is her autobiography-the history of the development of her mind. She traces for us how she was born and raised in the traditional Muslim environment, of Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya African when 2 of these countries were in civil war.
At the age of 5 she and her sister (age 4) were excised-the female version of circumcision-for details you'll have to read the gruesome part yourself. Her sister never really recovered from this trauma and as a young adult she died of mental illness. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was made of stronger stuff and survived by enveloping herself in the religion of Islam as well as in a headscarf and huge blackcloak. She assumed the role of a meek, modest lowly female. But her destiny changed when in her early twenties she was on her way to Canada to a forced marriage.
The book is filled with first hand observations of life in a Western world and we can follow her transformation from submission to the tribe to indiviualism. For example newly arrived in Frankfurt she observes that white men and women "were sitting together, not at bars but with easy familiarity, as if they were equal. They held hands in broad daylight, not hiding from anyone, and everyone else seemed to find this completely normal".
After a while she takes off her big coat so as not to stick out so much and she felt anonymous. There was no "social control" and as she puts it: "no eyes silently accused me of being a whore." In the rigid Muslim nations of the world women are always suspect of being whores and therefore must be covered up to avoid tempting males. Even if she is raped it is not the man's fault but the woman just for being female. It's in the Quoran.
Ayaan continues in "Infidel" marvelling at the city she has fled to.
"I walked till my feet hurt. Everything was so well kept. The grooves between the cobbles on the street were clean. The shopfronts gleamed. I remember thinking, "This is amazing, how can it be so?" I was used to heaps of stinking rubbish and streets pockmarked with huge potholes, where the dirt comes at you and nothing ever stays clean. In Nairobi, apart from a few wealthy enclaves reseved for the super rich government officials and millionaire businessmen, people live on top of each other, in slum houses made of bare cinder block or cardboard and metal sheets. There are beggars and bag snatchers and orphans living on rubbish heaps; ...I felt as though I had been thrown in to another world, calm and orderly, as in the novels I'd read and certain films, but somehow I had never really believed them before."
Ah, the novels. Even as she "studied and practiced to submit" there was "a spark of will" inside her She was an avid reader of western novels. She read anything she could get her hands on as she was growing up. Sexy, Romance Novels, Thrillers, Nancy Drew novels, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wuthering Heights, Cry the Beloved Country, Valley of the Dolls etc. "All these books, even trashy ones, carried with them ideas-races were equal, women were equal to men-and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me. Even our plain old biology and science textbooks seemed to follow a powerful narrative: you went out with knowledge and sought to advance humanity."
If you want to catch a glimpse of the horror that is Islam read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book "Infidel". Then you will also glimpse the mindset of a thousand years ago still alive and well today for women in the Muslim world - that of a "caged virgin" which is just as much a mental cage as a physical cage.
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