Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
What an amazing story this is. I wasn't sure I wanted to read this book. I may not have if we hadn't chosen it as our book club selection.
This is a memoir of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's life growing up in a Muslim family in Africa, then escaping to the Netherlands and then moving to the U.S.
One thing in this book that I think I will never forget is the description of her circumcision. I had heard of female circumcision before but never really allowed myself to think of the details. How horrific it is. Three women held her down, "Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia,..." She was 5 years old. And her grandmother held her down and comforted her while it was being done to both her and her sister, only 4. It's almost unbearable to think about. And it still happens.
Another thought I have after reading this book is to wonder why some people are born with the spirit and mind to escape this kind of upbringing, or any kind of hard upbringing. Why did Ayaan question the statements the adults in her life were making? Why did she decide to run away rather than go along with the inevitable? Within her is some kind of spirit that so many others in the same situation either do not have or do not act on.
I feel bad that Ayaan now believes in no God, no religion at all. She tried to be a devout Muslim. She reminded me of the soldier who worshiped the wrong god in Narnia. She believed Allah was good and loving and tried to be good and loving herself as a response. I feel sorry that she has no belief now, when she could have God's love and strength. I can absolutely see why she would give up the whole idea of God or religion. I just wish she could find the love of God somehow. Like when the soldier found Aslan after going through the door, I wish Ayaan could find that all along God has been loving her and holding her in His arms.
It is also amazing to me how much she loves her mother and father and others in her life who were so much a cause of the many bad things that happened in her life. In the introduction, Christopher Hitchens asked her about this. "Her response was twofold. First, she said, she felt on balance fortunate. She was, after all, alive to tell the tale. Second, she had seen what anger had done to her mother, a woman 'imprisoned' in resentment at the many ways that life had maltreated her." I think that beyond this, her attitude toward her mother and others shows the great power of love. Even when she tells about how her mother beat her or said terribly hurtful things to her, Ayaan finds reasons, or you might call them excuses, for what her mother does. She may say that her mother was acting out in anger for wrongs done to her or even more astonishing to me she might even say that her mother was acting out of love, just a misguided way of doing it. How powerful the love of a child for her parents.
This book also raises the question of how we should coexist with Muslims. We all try to be accepting and politically correct about it, to allow them to have their beliefs without condemning them for them. But there are some things that it seems obvious we should not allow. Something like female circumcision is most likely a fairly "easy" one. But arranged marriages is trickier. Even things like allowing the wearing of the hajib is difficult.
A phrase like "the power of story" can seem trivial and meaningless but in this story I think it takes on meaning. There is power in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story -- the power to make us think about how we should act towards others, what we should do about awful things that are happening in the world, even how we can live as a Christian in a way that shows God's love rather than the many ways Christianity can be used to control others' thinking or behavior.