A passion for the future.("Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali)(Book review)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Infidel. Free Press, 368 pages, $26

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has attracted many notable enemies in her life: not only the Muslim terrorists and wannabe-terrorists who threaten to kill her and who did kill her collaborator on the film Submission, Theo van Gogh, but also a strange band of pundits and politicians whom she has provoked and irritated out of their ideological comfort-zones. Struggling to come to terms with the current world situation, such people opt to attack the person who has identified the problem rather than deal with the problem itself.

In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma sneered at Hirsi Ali's "zealousness" in defending the values of the enlightenment. This condescending jibe caught on. In reviewing Buruma's book for The New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash described Hirsi Ali as a "slightly simplistic enlightenment fundamentalist." From such nudging it was only a small leap to the suggestion expressed by Rageh Omar (formerly of the BBC, now, seamlessly, of Al Jazeera) in his memoir Only Half of Me: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Beeb man declared, is morally equivalent to Yasin Hassan Omar, currently on trial for trying to blow up the people of London on the morning of July 21, 2005. Fundamentalists the lot of them. Each is as bad as the rest. That's the gist of it, and for this to be an acceptable, indeed "sophisticated," line among Western intellectuals today says much about the degradation of the current debate.

Prior to the publication of Infidel, English-speaking readers had only one book of Hirsi Ali's to refer to. The Caged Virgin was a compilation of essays and interviews, which included the script of Submission, but it read like an interim book, leaving as it did many gaps and questions in the reader's mind. For a woman who has been voted one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People," the dearth of information about her in English is startling. It has not helped to clarify or rebut the confusions and falsifications published about her over the last five years, not least in relation to her withdrawn (and now restored) Dutch citizenship. Now here is Infidel, an autobiography that not only answers its author's critics, but also does so with dignity, restraint, and skill, simply by relating the story of a very remarkable life.

It was Evelyn Waugh who declared that "only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography." Thirty-seven is certainly very young to be writing an autobiography, but this is no ordinary book, and the author has had no ordinary life. The vast bulk is given over to the story of a precarious childhood, in Somalia, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia. It describes the author's upbringing in a tribal and ideologically backward society that, when it meets the modern world, does so with sometimes comic, but more often tragic results.

The story of her circumcision--and that of her siblings--at the hands of tribal ciders is described in wince-making detail but with a straightforwardness that leaves no room for either self-pity or bitterness. The same trademark resurfaces in numerous passages in the book.

And there is wisdom in this approach. For as well as being the story of one girl, the reader is aware--and the author even more so--that this is also a book about countless others who never have written, and never will write, their own stories. The reader senses this in Hirsi Ali's description of the gulf that existed for her and her childhood friends between what they once ...