09/27/07

Infidel

Infidel
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
2007 Free Press (Simon & Schuster)

This sort of story has always fascinated me - overcoming the odds, sticking to your guns, changing over time due to reason not circumstance.  It is, if nothing else, an inspirational story, but an immediate, poignant inspirational story given our times.  A one-woman compare and contrast between this world - the West in general - and the world Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in.

The first quote caught me because of the simplicity Theo van Gogh espoused in it while convincing Ayaan Hirsi Ali to write the screenplay that became Submission:  Part 1.  The "just do it" sort of mentality struck a nerve - especially in light of my complaints and the complaints of others regarding the attitude of Hollywood and the films they spin out.  It's also, in a nutshell, how I'm guessing Ayaan Hirsi Ali see the West.  That is, if you want something, if you want to change something then go do it, go change it - you have the ability and the capacity to do so, so just do it.  It has at its base an intrinsic optimism about people and about life - a severe contrast from the world she came from where men are treated as animals beholden to their desires so women must, therefore, be locked away.



Somehow we got onto my idea for an art exhibit on Muslim women.  Theo said, "Just do it in video.  Weite a screenplay.  Any idiot can write a screenplay.  All you have to do is write 'Exterior, Day' and 'Interior, Night.'"

At night, alone, I couldn't stop thought from coming.  Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the murder, could hear Theo pleading for his life.  "Can't we talk about this?" he asked his killer.  It was so Dutch, so sweet and innocent.  Theo must have thought there was some kind of misunderstanding that could be worked out.  he couldn't see that his killer was caught in a wholly different worldview.  nothing Theo could have said to him would have made any difference.

The DKDB was mandated to protect only royalty, diplomates, and members of parliament.  The justice minister, Piet Hein Donner, had said on the news, "We can't have on half of the population protecting the other half of the population."

People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so thatI attack my own culture out of self-hatred because I want to be white.  This is a tiresome argument.  Tell me, is freedom then only for white people?  Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestor's traditions and mutilate my daughters?  To agree to be humiliated and powerless?  To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes?  When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?

Life is better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state.  To accept subordination and abuse because Allah willed it - that, for me, would be self-hatred.

Posted by: Jason at 12:27 PM in Book Notes | No Comments | Add Comment
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