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Critic of Islam finds new home in United States

WASHINGTON: As a child, Ayaan Hirsi Ali fled violence in Somalia with her family. As an adult she fled Kenya to escape an arranged marriage. She left her adopted Holland after she was caught up in political turmoil and had her life threatened. Now Hirsi Ali - a brave critic of Islam to her supporters, a bigot to her critics - has found refuge in the intellectual bastion of leading US conservatives.

Hirsi Ali joined the American Enterprise Institute last September, after 14 years in the Netherlands, where she was a member of parliament and became a central figure in two events that jolted the nation.

First, after she wrote a script for a film that depicted naked women with Quranic verses scrawled on their bodies, a Dutch-born Muslim gunned down the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. A letter threatening Ali was left on a knife plunged into van Gogh’s chest.

Next, a fight within Ali’s political party over her Dutch citizenship brought down the government.

These days, Ali is promoting her autobiography, ‘’Infidel’.’ It gives a graphic account of how she rejected her faith and the violence she says was inflicted on her in the name of Islam.

‘’I’m an apostate. That’s why the book is called ‘Infidel’,’’ she said in a telephone interview from New York.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations thinks Ali’s campaign amounts to slander and bigotry.

‘’We believe that contributes to a growing level of Muslim hatred in America,’’ said the council’s communications director, Ibrahim Hooper. ‘’It is unfortunate that she had to bring that kind of hate from Europe to the United States.’’

Her new colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute laud Ali as a brave voice taking on a taboo subject. ‘’She’s very original, a very courageous thinker, and she has independence of mind,’’ said Christina Hoff Sommers, an institute fellow who specialises, among other things, in feminism.

At the institute, Ali’s studies will involve Islam and women: the relationship between the West and Islam; women’s rights in Islam; violence against women propagated by religious and cultural arguments; and Islam in Europe.

Many institute scholars have had a close relationship with the Bush administration. Among its senior fellows are former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; John R Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations; and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney.

It may seem like odd company for a woman born in a Mogadishu hospital 37 years ago. ‘’I’ve been accused of selling out,’’ she said. ‘’I’ve been told, ‘You’re hanging the dirty laundry outside.’’’

Ali Hirsi’s book provides a graphic account of how her grandmother had her subjected to genital mutilation when she was 5 years old. She also describes a time when she was a teenager in Kenya, and a teacher cracked her skull after she challenged his insistence that students write Quranic verses on wooden boards and memorise them.

‘’I started to call him uncivilised and backward and said he lived in the time of ignorance before Islam had come around and this was an outrageous system,’’ she said.

She lied to be accepted as a refugee in Holland, became a Dutch citizen, graduated from prestigious Leiden University and won a seat in the Dutch parliament for a party that was tough on immigration. She became known as a firebrand.

That led to her collaboration with van Gogh on the short television movie, ‘’Submission’.’ In 2004, a man enraged by the movie murdered van Gogh.

Her lie when she entered the country - she used an assumed name - caught up with her last year. Because of a notorious similar case in which the government expelled a young woman, it came under pressure to cancel Ali’s citizenship. It did, and the six members of the government’s smallest coalition party resigned in protest. The government fell.

Considering van Gogh’s death, and her continuing outspokenness about Islam, Ali said she no longer felt safe without bodyguards in the presence of even moderate Muslims. ap

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