Infidel: Review

Book Review

The most authentic people are those who quest after truth. The quest can be extremely agonising and even life-threatening when it questions certain truths that are held as absolutes by large numbers of people. Ayyan Hirsi Ali undertook that quest and her book Infidel: my life is the story of that quest.

The book has two parts which are titled ‘My Childhood’ and ‘My Freedom’. Born in Somalia, the author had a terrible childhood that was totally controlled by the rigid traditions and conventions of her clan and her religion. Somalia practises a very fundamentalist version of Islam which regards girls as subhuman creatures who have to be subservient to men in every imaginable way. A woman is not supposed to have any individuality of her own in that version of Islam. She is a man’s slave. Even as a wife, she is not supposed to enjoy her sexuality; her religion sews up her sex in the ritual of female circumcision. She is only a hatchery for producing offspring for her man who may marry other women as he pleases.

Ayyan’s father himself had three wives. He seldom cared for the family as he was a political activist who often lived away from the country itself. Ayyan’s mother wouldn’t go for work since she was a faithful Muslim woman who believed that women were not supposed to work outside the home. Hence the family had to depend on the clan for subsistence. The book presents many members of the clan as well as other people whom Ayyan had to encounter in those days. We get to see how most of these people were deluded by the primitiveness of their religious faith which made them believe that all their misery was part of Allah’s eternal plan for them.

As she grew up, Ayyan began to question her religion and its rigid and prejudiced codes. The second part of the book shows us how she slowly moves away from Allah and his perverse prophet whom the author accuses of paedophilia among other vices. The Prophet legislated every aspect of life, says the book. Even your body parts are not your own, let alone your thoughts. The Quran dictates what is permitted and what is forbidden. Even to this day. Thus the holy book “froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.”

Ayyan came to the conclusion that the Quran was not a holy document. “It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.” True Islam, she says in another place, “leads to cruelty.”

The author ran into a lot of problems because of such opinions which she expressed loudly and clearly. She could afford such candidness because she was living in Holland to which country she had run away in order to escape from a marriage which was arranged by her father against her wishes. Holland even allowed her to become a member of its parliament. But even Holland “where prostitution and soft drugs are licit, where euthanasia and abortion are practised…” could not ensure the safety of a woman whose thoughts rebelled against a dominant religion of the world.

Infidel is the story of a fundamental rebellion. Its author is someone who will fit into Albert Camus’s classical definition of a rebel as one who says no to a system and goes on to create an alternative system. Ayyan deserves to be read.