Ayaan Ali Hirsi and the Big Bad Wolf

This is the story of a little girl who cried "wolf". A girl who invoked the bogey of the big bad wolf that threatened to eat her up, little red riding hood and all, and threw herself on the doorstep of the kindly woodcutter and implored him for his mercy. Except now we find out that the wolf wasn’t quite so hungry after all and the little girl might have just exaggerated the story a tiny little bit...

Of course I’m talking about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who sought asylum in Holland, was granted Dutch citizenship, and became a Dutch MP under the aegis of a right-wing party, the VVD, that held extreme views on immigration and asylum.

She’s now been found to have lied on her asylum application: Hirsi Ali lied about her real name, her date of birth, and also failed to mention that she and her family had been living in Kenya for the past eleven years; she made it look as though she’d just left Somalia and was fleeing to Europe with executioners on her heels. Her right-wing mentor the Dutch minister Rita Verdonk is the one who investigated her case after being pressured to do so by other political party members. There were calls for her to be stripped of her Dutch citizenship, although it is unclear whether or not she is still considered a Dutch citizen; but at any rate she has resigned from the Dutch Parliament. As a result, Hirsi Ali will be moving to the United States, sponsored by a far-right organization called the American Enterprise Institute (you can’t say she didn’t cover all her bases as she also applied to the Brookings Institute which is well known for its often liberal outlook and its donations by famous left-wingers).

Hirsi Ali is clearly moving around the world with a clear-cut agenda: to bash Islam. She is one of many who Tariq Ramadan pointed out have "made a profession out of bashing Islam", which, along with people like Irshad Manji and the like, is a poor excuse for going along with the poorest stereotypes about the religion.

My Quran teacher informed me this morning that she’d watched the short film "Submission" that Hirsi Ali wrote and made with murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, about the so-called treatment of women in Islam. The movie is a monologue narrated by an Eastern-looking woman (dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin), who talks about being a good Muslim but being sexually abused by an uncle, then disallowed to carry on a love affair with a young man she met in a marketplace. The visuals include: a woman lying in a prone position with a lacerated bloody dress; a woman with a naked back that has been lacerated; numerous bruises on the women’s bodies and faces; and a woman wearing a black chiffon abaya standing on a prayer mat, completely transparent at the front, with verses of the Quran painted on her naked body.

The film is only eleven minutes long but that’s all it takes to evoke the most visceral reaction from even progressive, moderate Muslims such as my teacher; I watched half of it myself after locating it on the Internet (it was all I could bother taking in), and I have never seen a more trashy, useless film in all my life. The depiction of the Quranic verses on the women’s bodies is insulting enough, but the complete pandering to the worst stereotypes about "how women are treated in the Islamic world" is even more insulting to any woman - or man - with any intelligence at all. Censorship and artistic repression are dangers in my book but so is propaganda; the artist has an obligation to try to tell the truth, and this film is nothing but lies.

As is, so it turns out, Hirsi Ali’s story about being forced into an arranged marriage with an unseen cousin - reports vary but there is reason to believe she was actually present at the wedding and willing at the time to travel with him to Canada where he lived. On her way to Canada, however, she broke journey in Germany, traveled to the Netherlands, and told them that her life was in danger and requested asylum. The poor cousin must have wondered what hit him but in retrospect I think he must be glad he didn’t have to live with such a troublemaker.

Women must stand up for themselves, they must speak out against injustice, no matter what form or shape it takes. Islam cannot be used to justify oppression over women or their bodies or their futures; but if one were to examine the real Islam instead of the patriarchal mumbo-jumbo that passes for the Muslim way of life in most of our countries, we’d realize that Islam and women’s oppression are antithetical terms that really don’t deserve to exist in the same sentence. But it serves more than one oppressor to not make such an examination: the patriarchal chauvinists that fear the usurping of their power base; as well as the anti-Islamic elements that need an enemy to revile in order to gain a following for their own evil activities.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali said she didn’t want to be a victim, and that’s why she escaped to the Netherlands. But it seems she is pretty happy to be a liar and a cheat; she seems happy to sell out in order to please her far-right, neo-con masters, whether in Europe or America; and she doesn’t seem at all unhappy that the sensationalist, ridiculous movie she made did absolutely nothing to further the cause of Muslim women anywhere, and instead got her co-writer killed. It’s been said that Hirsi Ali has gone through traumatic experiences in her life, but then again, so has Mukhtaran Mai, and the difference in the two women’s stances to fighting injustice could not be further apart. In the case of Hirsi Ali, this is a woman who is deeply selfish; who, I suspect, cares not a fig for her Muslim sisters anywhere, but can only be happy when people are hailing her as a hero for standing up to something that, just like little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, is really only a fairytale. The kind with teeth.