Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
After September 11 I analysed bin Laden’s words, his quotations, his explanations. I wanted to know, 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.
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.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. She sought political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 in order to escape an arranged marriage. She became a member of the Dutch parliament and made a film with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh that led to his assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004. She is currently a fellow at the right –wing think tank American Enterprise Institute and head of the AHA Foundation (www.theahafoundation.org), a charity that helps protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.
