Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Women and Islam

You’ve started with The Clash of Civilizations by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. It was published in 1998, but its core theory first appeared as an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and was based on a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute where you now work...

This is a very important book on the post-1989 context, and what the new world order would look like after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was written almost 20 years ago now, and it seems as if Huntington’s hypothesis is getting more and more credit than Francis Fukuyama’s (The End of History) about what the world will look like.

It’s an academic book, but you feel you’ve personally lived the Clash of Civilizations?

I have moved from one civilization to another. In fact, according to Huntington’s definition of civilization, I have moved through three: the African, the Muslim and then I crossed over to the West. Huntington was actually a little reluctant to identify Africa as a civilization; he says that he wasn’t quite sure if Africa is a civilization, but just for the conceptual framework of his book he decided to call it one. But what I am mainly interested in is that I crossed from the Muslim civilization to the Western civilization. And maybe it’s not completely accurate to say that it’s a crossing, maybe it’s more of a criss-crossing. Because when I lived in Kenya, which was a former colony of Britain, I read books that were written by Westerners for Westerners. Books like Nancy Drew and George Orwell. It was a very British context – I read these books because I happened to go to school in Kenya, and the schools were modelled on the British system. The books they were offering, many of them were even published in Britain, because at the time Kenya didn’t have good publishing houses. But at the same time the Vatican of Muslim civilization, Saudi Arabia, had also come into our lives, through this woman called Sister Aziza. She came and made us aware of the fact that we were calling ourselves Muslims, but we were not true Muslims because we were not living according to scripture, we were not following the manual of what is permissible and what is prohibited, and a set of obligations and all of that. So there is that journey and I describe it in detail in my book Infidel and carry on in Nomad.

Do you want to give an example of when you really felt this clash? Something that happened to you personally, when you thought you really were stuck in the middle?

The entire book, Nomad, is about being stuck in the middle. Especially the beginning of the book, the first part that describes my family – I try to show just how stuck in the middle they are. I made the crossing because I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle; I wanted to belong to this side. And that’s a conscious choice. So, to give an example, there is my arranged/forced marriage. It’s the tradition, it’s the culture, that’s how it works: your father is your guardian, your guardian secures your future with a husband who is going to take care of you financially, for whom you will bear children and you will be an obedient wife. And I went through that and thought ‘I’m not going to do that!’ The second example I would give is September 11 2001, and that was more dramatic, because it brought home the clash of civilizations with a huge bang. It’s when people from my former civilization took airplanes and started diving into skyscrapers to make their point clear. It awakened not only me, but Muslims and Westerners all over the place, and, like everyone else, I struggled to understand it. The people who did it died, but the people who masterminded it, al Qaeda, called on all Muslims to stand with them against the Great Satan and the Little Satan [the US and Israel].

Let’s go on to your next two books, the Koran and the Hadith. Can you tell me a little bit about them and why you chose them?

The Koran is supposed to be the words of God and the Hadith are the sayings and deeds of the prophet. The Koran has the basic commands; the Hadith or the Sunna, is a sort of manual. It is supposed to be a guideline of how to understand the Koran, because people say that it’s not explicit enough. The Hadith is a compilation of six volumes and they are called the Sahith Sitta – Sitta just means six and Sahith means authentic.

So what I did after September 11 was I analysed bin Laden’s words, his quotations, his explanations, and his mission statement which is: ‘We are at war with the West. They want to destroy Islam and we need to fight back.’ I know scripture, and when Islam is attacked you all become warriors, all of you. And so I wanted to know, ‘Am I a warrior of Islam now?’ Also, are all these things that bin Laden is saying really in the Koran and in the Hadith? And, to my shock, they were. A lot of people say they are taken out of context, but they are completely not taken out of context. They are in context. They only thing that is out of context is the fact that this very old book which was put together by – well, we don’t know who the authors are, but it’s definitely more than one author – is considered to be valid in the 21st century. That’s what’s out of context. Everything else is consistent with what that book says, what the founder of Islam, Mohammed, envisioned, how he practised in his lifetime, with his religion, and the legacy he left behind. And the question that I had to answer for myself was, did I want to belong to that, or not?

I decided I didn’t want to belong to it, so the question became what do I belong to then? I had already been to university and done a Masters in politics but I made an even more conscious exploration of Western civilization. What does it stand for? There are tons and tons of books on that. But if I am to limit myself to just one, I found The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek to contain it all in a concise and a very clear way. And so if you say the Koran versus Hayek – that’s an easy choice for me.

What does the Koran say about women? If women are treated badly, isn’t that only because the Koran has been misinterpreted?

When I did the film Submission, with Theo van Gogh, I found several verses in the Koran. The most explicit were the following: firstly, chapter 4, verse 34 says ‘Men are the maintenance of women, from those you fear disobedience, warn them, leave them alone in their beds and beat them.’ And, as with all Koranic verses that are commands, like this one, there are several Hadiths that go on to explain what it means and how it should be interpreted.