In other words she’s saying that Muslims should leave Islam.
I highly respect her, but I do reject the tactic of referring exclusively to ”islamism” as the problem, when in fact it’s Islam, just Islam, she knows that as well as anyone who has honestly studied the subject.
Hirsi Ali: The ‘heretic’ who says Muslims need to re-think sex, money, and violence … and the concept of time
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most forceful and provocative feminist critics challenging Islam today. She is also in hiding. Andy Martin meets her in an undisclosed location and finds a woman on a mission, a woman who found the power to say No and the freedom it gave her
After “Ma” and “Da” (and variants thereof), what is the first word uttered by very young children just learning to speak? I checked this with the writer, Paul Theroux, father to Louis and Marcel. He reckons it’s “Why”. But in my experience (I have two sons) the first serious word they utter is “No”. The “Yes” option comes along later. Maybe it’s harder to form, phonetically speaking. But intellectually speaking, “yes” is a bit of a problem. Who wants to be a “yes-man” or “yes-woman”? Isn’t that too much like being a doormat? Which may well explain why Jean-Paul Sartre argued – in Being and Nothingness – that the act of negation is at the core of our being. Human beings are defined by opposition, by their ability to say no. To say that something is not the case. That I am not a thing. Or simply to notice that (in Sartre’s classic example) Pierre has not turned up at the café for their rendezvous and that the whole cafe is therefore “haunted by his absence”.
It is possible that Ayaan Hirsi Ali may have been feeling something similar with regard to me. I was late for our meeting. It was taking place in a location somewhere mysterious on the west coast of the US. At an undefined time this week. And the air conditioning was ridiculous. No wonder she had the sniffles. Let me stress though, I did not totally stand her up. I was only about 10 minutes late. Bloody traffic. I think that doesn’t narrow it down too much. A muscular but perfectly affable security guy had to give me the once over. Concluded I was reasonably harmless. This is what you have to go through if you are Hirsi Ali – heavy air-conditioning and extremely heavy bodyguards. She had to wear a scarf too, but only around her neck.
Despite all of which she seemed in high good humour. I like her. Not everyone does. She knows that. It’s not just trolls either. She was the scriptwriter and voice of the short film, Submission (technically, Submission Part 1), deconstructing the treatment of Muslim women in Holland, which led to the director, Theo van Gogh, being assassinated back in 2004. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, pinned a note to Van Gogh’s chest, with a knife, saying that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next. A lot of people have repeated that kind of threat ever since. Hence her personal cordon sanitaire.
