This is a half review, half general rant that I wrote when half way through reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most controversial activists of our time, and yet to me she embodies my perfect role model: she’s resilient, brave, strong, utterly fearless and just refuses to be silenced.
Her autobiography, Infidel, has to be one of the most important books I’ve ever read, because it alerts its readers to the tragic issues that are happening right now in Africa and the Middle East – and indeed in Europe too. In a world where western leaders appear to prefer maintaining a public image of political correctness over saving the lives of innocent little girls and women, memoirs like Ayaan’s become increasingly more relevant.
FGM was performed on Ayaan when she was 5 years old. I say “performed” for want of a better, less medical term, because it was a very crude procedure: her grandmother held Ayaan down as she screamed, confused and scared, while two ‘uncles’ whom she had never met before hacked away between her legs with a rusty knife. 98% of women in Somalia, where Ayaan was born, have undergone female circumcision. Read that sentence again and then whinge at me about tampon tax and the alleged gender pay gap.
This is what irritates me about the reception of Infidel and Ayaan herself in western countries. I can’t understand why people choose to turn a blind eye to the sufferings of little girls like Ayaan. People’s reactions range from labelling her an Islamophobe and ignoring her plight, to accusing her of making it all up. Their dangerous ideas about multiculturalism and a bizarre live-and-let-live attitude serve by definition to encourage the torture and suffering of innocent people in order to avoid an “Islamophobic” or “nationalist” personal image.
I was on an online classics course over lockdown last year, and the kids on this course made a WhatsApp group chat to keep in touch after the course finished. It quickly became apparent that they weren’t there to talk about classics, because they discovered something else they all had in common: their sickening progressive views on sexism and feminism, among other things. All the girls on this group appeared to be claiming that they lived in a vile, oppressive country where the patriarchy obstructed their way to their fundamental human rights, and of course the boys agreed that sexism was still a fiercely prevalent issue in the UK. When I tried to tell them that I, as a female, was by no means oppressed, they explained that my home-education must have sheltered me so extensively from everyday society, that I was so – and I quote – “out of touch with the modern world” that I simply hadn’t noticed the crushing and oppressive examples of sexism which every woman supposedly encounters every day of the week in good ol’ bright and sunny England.
When asked to give me some examples of this alleged sexism, they began whining about school dress codes, “period poverty”, and being interrupted by their male friends while they (the girls) are talking. I couldn’t actually believe what I was hearing. I dared to make the suggestion that we stop whining about what these girls termed “microaggressions” (what I term “life”) and turn attention to issues like FGM and the general rape and murder of African and Middle Eastern women just because they’re women.
The kids on this chat (including the boys) were horrified. They said something about stopping it at the source, and apparently that involves letting millions more women in other countries suffer and die while we tell western boys to stop interrupting their female friends, and put a stop to banter in male locker rooms, and tell schools to remove all skirt length limits so girls can waltz in in their underwear if they want to.
They removed me from that WhatsApp group, but not before one of the girls (who was white) showed everyone some hijabs she’d bought online. When someone asked if she was Muslim, she said that no, she just thought they were “pretty” and also she liked to “dress modestly”. I asked her what was so immodest about having her hair uncovered and she evaded the question with some noteworthy skill.
A lot of things happened on that group chat, but I have to say I was most angered by that particular incident. Women are murdered, imprisoned, raped and tortured for taking their hijabs off, and here was a little white girl showcasing them because she thought them pretty. While extremely brave Middle Eastern women risk their lives to wave their hijabs in the air on so-called White Wednesdays in a desperate attempt to catch the attention of those in the West who can help, those in the West who can help are glorifying this symbol of female oppression while simultaneously ranting about western microaggressions.
It’s time we stopped victimising ourselves and whinging about minor inconveniences, and started helping women who are actually in danger right now, as you’re reading this. Allowing this to happen to little Muslim girls when we would never tolerate this if it were happening to middle-class white girls is surely the very definition of racism and misogyny. We should be fighting for all girls and women to have the same rights the world over. Infidel highlights some of the crucial issues that are really at hand, and shows the difference a determined woman can make to a world that desperately needs saving.