A very interesting article. Ayaan Hirsi Ali says things that many Muslims would like to speak about but do not. I think many Muslim converts can relate to her as well.
Excerpt:
Her critique of Islam as a “moral framework not compatible with the modern westernised way of living” is rooted in a critique of her family, her father’s unbending will and particularly her mother, a woman who she says was pulled apart by the contradictions of maintaining her faith in a modern society and an identity crisis from which Hirsi Ali herself suffered. (She speaks six languages – English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic and Dutch.) The phrasing she uses is startlingly direct. When she writes that “violence is an integral part” of Islamic social discipline, or says in our interview that “Muhammad’s example is terrible, don’t follow it”, it is deliberately, almost narcissistically provocative, the result, one imagines, of a siege mentality and the defensive self-assurance that goes with it. To Hirsi Ali, the act of speaking out, of saying what no one else will say, seems at this stage to be almost a pathology; to override all other considerations.
Read more here -> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/08/ayaan-hirsi-ali-interview
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Yeah, I can understand her points. It’s just that… I feel that Hirsi Ali and I are sitting on very different extremes. We, of course, see Islam the way we have experienced it. While for her it’s all about suffering and violence, I have been, if I may say so, live in a peaceful Islam. I wasn’t genital-mutilated. My religious teacher told me to be good and kind to people, no matter what their religion and background are. Nobody around me told me that I might not get education and should just marry young – they even encourage me to get higher and higher education. Nobody forced me to wear a hijab, although somehow I grew up liking moderate clothes. I’m a university degree holder, I have a career, I can go out where and when I like, I watch and read what I want, I witness women around me rise to important positions like governors, ministers, and even to presidency.
(Perhaps surprisingly, it was a Christian female friend who got told by her mother that continuing to university would be useless because she’d end up a housewife anyway, although this I guess was due more to her cultural/ethnic background.)
Even so I understand that there are many Muslim women who experience various degrees of worse things between me and Hirsi Ali. And her voice needs to be heard, so does the voices of the other women, to stop these horrible things that happen to not only Muslim women, but also Muslim children and men, although I don’t always agree by her way to link every injustice and violence she’s witnessed or heard to Islam. I mean, if similar things happen in Italy, we don’t say ‘a Catholic man hit his Catholic wife in a Catholic country’. We’d understand that probably it’s something else that made him hit her, after all, unless if there’s a strong link that proves it.