Review: Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Free Press, 2007

“My central, motivating concern is that women in Islam are oppressed.  That oppression of women causes Muslim women and Muslim men, too, to lag behind the west. It creates a culture that generates more backwardness with every generation. It would be better for everyone—for Muslims above all—if this situation could change.”

Since it’s publication, Infidel has always been presented to me as a “women’s book.” Indeed, the final impetus to read it came as the result of a comments I saw on a feminist blog. But the quotation above is, to my mind, the central message of the entire book. Everything else is an expansion and commentary upon this idea that the debasement and dehumanization of women by Islam (not merely by some Muslims, but by Islam as a whole) is the most powerful force holding back all of Muslim culture throughout the world, and is the single biggest influence keeping most Muslims poor, ignorant, and backwards. Infidel should be read and appreciated by all thinking people, men and women, in the civilized world.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali relates in heartbreaking detail the systematic cruelty of the Islamic view of women. Honor killings, floggings, spousal abuse (commanded by the Koran!), female “excision” (not commanded by the Koran)—I know of no other culture on Earth where women are subjected to this level of depraved brutality in the name of God. Ali herself, as she reminds us periodically, is lucky to be alive. In part, the book is an account of the risks she took, the misfortunes she endured, and the malevolent forces which she has opposed—and continues to oppose today. But in reality, Infidel is a call to the west to stop calling Islam “the religion of peace.”  It is a religion of anger, oppression and violence, as she has experienced nearly every day of her life.

In all likelihood, what is needed is an Islamic "enlightenment," a period of social and religious  upheaval that will bring this medieval culture kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It happened to both of the world's other monotheistic religions, which suffered from their own blindnesses (and their own maltreatment of women). Some would say these continue today, and I am not the one to say otherwise.  But until something like an enlightenment happens in Islam, any attempt at rapprochement between it and the rest of the world will fail. Such a transformation cannot be forced from without; it must originate from within, and it will take a long time. The rest of us can only stand and wait.

Until then, however, Ali says we must not fool ourselves about the motives and means of Islam:

“When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so. People in the west swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically for fear of being called racist.”

So who is this book for, if not just for feminists? Well, women should certainly read this book. And men should read this book. Every US Senator and Representative should read it. The President—every president, past and future—should read it. A copy should be presented to every cabinet member, and every employee of the US State Department should have to pass a test to prove that he or she has read it. Religious people should read it, as should atheists, agnostics and people of no category. This is one of the most important books I have read in the past year.

Get it. Read it. Pass it on.