In 1995, before most of us in the West knew the name of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I published a novel in which the newly married fictional heroine stepped off the bus and disappeared, leaving her sleeping husband aboard. It wasn’t until Hirsi Ali published Infidel in 2006 that we learned the details of her real-life 1992 escape, when, enroute to Canada and an arranged marriage, she boarded a train to Holland and broke free.

When I wrote the breakaway scene of The Romance Reader, a novel set in a Hasidic community in upstate New York, I considered it an example of how fiction, meant to catch life, can be better than reality, lighter-footed because winged, as real life is largely not, but Hirsi-Ali’s personal experiences as depicted in her memoirs, Infidel and Nomad, come uncannily close to winged fiction. This strangely fortuitous quality, I want to argue, reveals something about Hirsi Ali herself, a characteristic that’s remained elusive to her readers, reviewers, and interviewers.

The parallels in our stories are not entirely surprising: We both emerged from religious and culturally repressive societies. I was raised in the Hasidic worlds of Jerusalem, Brooklyn, and Monsey, New York; the Somali-born Hirsi Ali came of age in both a tribal and an Islamic culture, complete with the repressions and personal violations we’ve come to expect from both.

Her trajectory is distressingly familiar: the entrapment of an arranged marriage brought Hirsi-Ali to a point of crisis. In the dramatic arc of storytelling, such a crisis demands a decisive action that will serve as the climax, from which the story can then drop towards resolution, or irresolution, depending on the author’s sensibility, whether she is comfortable with complexity and nuance rather than easy answers. Dramatically, Hirsi Ali’s story satisfies: she tells no one when she boards a train to Holland. She even changes her name, making it difficult for her father to find her. Elements in this marriage plot would qualify it for the genre of romance, that is, if love not escape were the way it ended; indeed, by Hirsi Ali’s own account, this chapter of her life was inspired in part by the romance novels she and her friends read.[1]

Illicit paperback romances, she writes, passed secretly from one young reader to another, awakened her to the possibilities of love between men and women: “The allure of romance called to us from the pages of books . . . these were trashy soap opera–like novels, but they were exciting—sexually exciting. And buried in all of these books was a message: women had a choice. Heroines fell in love, they fought off family obstacles and questions of wealth and status, and they married the men they chose.” She and her sister and their friends learn from these novels that somewhere in the world love is the standard, not the exception, in marriage. But these romances with their happy endings also set Hirsi Ali up for the painful disappointment of her own very real life experiences, with an early secret marriage to a dashing cousin and its fumbled and painful consummation, and then the second more respectable one arranged by her father, from which she escapes.[2]

Though Hirsi Ali’s life story has the drama of a good novel, her response to the world as she finds it shows none of fiction’s nuance, ambiguity, and moderation; in her writings, lectures, and interviews, she reaches for the simple solution and quick answer. Always and everywhere, she insists on depicting Islam and Muslims as the enemy, her tribal culture as backward. Our multicultural values and sympathies, she argues, are a form of suicide. Accommodating this religion and its religious schools will bring an end to Western freedom, she warns, without noting that freedom of religion is one of the freedoms our constitution guarantees. In Nomad, she tells of meeting with a priest at the Vatican to try to inspire the church to a fight against Islam, and it is as if she had never heard of the Spanish Inquisition. In another passage, she notes the size of our continent and muses that guns make sense in such vastness. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I might wonder what gun ownership even means to an émigré from Somalia, a country that has been at war with itself and its people since before Hirsi Ali was born.

But it’s harder to overlook the way her writing moves rather regularly from anecdote to didacticism, so that every experience is made to serve a simplistic conclusive purpose—Islam bad, Muslims very bad—and reminds me of my own worst experiences with religion, when subtle biblical stories were distorted to produce a moral.[3] Even as a young woman, when Hirsi Ali is living away from home for the first time in what was then still the beautiful coastal city of Mogadishu, a certain rigidity is apparent. When a young Muslim cleric falls in love with her and wants more physical contact than Islam allows, she wonders rather primly about how he can reconcile his religion with his merely human desire. Though the writing takes place a good number of years later, from an adult’s more experienced perspective, Hirsi Ali merely uses her experience of Muslim life as evidence against it, so that this young cleric who loved her becomes only another example of Islamic corruption, of how Islam prohibits natural human impulses.

It is also true that this lack of complexity has served Hirsi Ali rather well. Reading her critique of Islam in a Dutch newspaper, conservative politicians in the Netherlands were quick to realize that as a Somali Muslim–born immigrant who is also beautiful and well-spoken, Hirsi Ali could serve their anti-immigrant cause well by putting the best possible face on the most xenophobic sentiments. Banking on the old notion that an insider can get away with racism the way that a Jew who tells an antisemitic joke is not called an antisemite, these politicians realized they could use her, and Hirsi Ali agreed to be used. But to take the offered position, she had to switch her allegiance from the center-left Labor Party (PvdA) and the Beckman Foundation, where she’d served as a fellow, to the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), and she surprised many of her friends by doing so without much apparent inner conflict. An opportunity had presented itself, and much as any ambitious politician would, she compromised her ideals of Western democracy and the freedom it had offered her.

Insights into the role of family dynamics and how they play out are what readers look for in memoir. You don’t quite get that from Hirsi Ali. Though she writes scenes that show her as her father’s favorite, that she came of age assured of his love, she doesn’t credit this unconditional love with her ability to escape, as her brother and sister did not, or with her later success. When as a young girl living in Saudi Arabia she is unable to venture outdoors without a male escort, she notes that she wanted the public life of her father rather than the private, miserable, one of her mother. And indeed, she ends up pursuing what any Somali would consider a male rather than female life trajectory. About this masculine role model: an expatriate operating out of Ethiopia and Kenya, Mr. Hirsi Magan worked to take back Somalia from the corrupt tribe that was in control, that is, when he wasn’t in jail for his political activities. But he was also a pragmatist, the reader learns. A secular man who believed in progress and shunned tribal superstitious life—he was educated in the West—he embraced Islam when he realized the religion could serve to unify tribal Somalia. His secular ideals also didn’t prevent him from taking second and third wives. And though his own marriages were motivated by love, he insisted on a traditional arranged marriage for his daughter and signed the marriage contract on her behalf despite her protests. The point is that similar contradictions appear also in Hirsi Ali’s life, in which personal ideals yield to exigency often enough to be notable. Indeed, the contradictions both father and daughter exhibit—ideals and ideology on the one hand, ambition on the other—are what make them interesting characters, novelistic characters even. Though in their personal lives, they both move toward secular freedom, making decisions for others, a conservative, patriarchal tendency—a remnant from childhood perhaps—takes over. The inability to discern and acknowledge this inner duality and work comfortably within difficult ambiguity are what finally mark Hirsi Ali’s career as opportunistic rather than heroic.

In a Palo Alto interview with Iranian author Suzanne Pari, Hirsi Ali spoke of giving up her early academic ambitions:

“I wanted to write papers full of footnotes and statistics. Nobody was interested,” she recalled. People wanted to know instead how she made the break from her past; they wanted to know, in particular, about the family she described in Infidel. How is her mother? “I don’t know. She’s in Kenya. Get lost!” . . . “I’d stay shut up about my mother. I’ve just written a paper!” They’re interested in experiences. Most people in the United States and Europe have not had those experiences.” So she shared her story instead.

Giving audiences what they want pays off: Hirsi Ali’s memoirs are international bestsellers as her research papers could never have been. Statistics and footnotes take time to gather, time to write up and publish, and are more often than not read only by other academics or officials in charge of gathering such numbers; in other words, they do their work out of the limelight and remain largely obscure. Hirsi Ali’s career, spurred by a fortuitous combination of the god-given and the manmade, defied obscurity from the beginning. Accustomed early, as she was, to a certain amount of notoriety, her choice to write in the popular, often notorious form, the memoir, makes perfect sense and brought her to worldwide attention.

And it’s easy to see why: This is a troubling female story complete with unfortunate mothers bitter about their own fates, who nevertheless go on to perpetrate on their daughters the violence of the patriarchy they themselves have suffered under, and it rings unbearably true of my own experience. Much of this book is uncannily familiar to me: for example, this conversation between Hirsi Ali and her father, from the opening chapter of Nomad:

You must remember, Ayaan, that our health and our lives are in the hands of Allah. I am on my way to the hereafter. My dear child, what I want you to do is read just one chapter of the Quran . . . He recited—in Arabic, of course, though we were speaking Somali—a chapter called “The Resurrection.” . . . I told my father that I would not lie to him, and that I no longer believed in the example of the Prophet. He cut me off, and his tone became passionate, impatient, then retributive . . . he warned me not to risk my hereafter . . . I let him talk. I didn’t make false promises to convert . . . He broke into a series of supplications: “May Allah protect you, may He bring you back to the straight path, may He take you to heaven in the hereafter, may Allah bless you and keep you healthy.” And at the end of every supplication I responded with the required formula: “Amin.” May it be so.

Replace Allah with Ha’shem, the Quran with the Torah, the Prophet with Moses, and Amin with Amen, and this conversation becomes a word-for-word facsimile of the ones I’ve been having with my father these last twenty years. But, if only because her first response mirrors my own early response to readers of The Romance Reader, I remain intrigued by Hirsi Ali’s irritation with audiences interested in the personal rather than the scholarly, in the merely circumstantial rather than the academic achievements that show hard work and brains. In 1995, when I was onstage in Toronto to introduce and read from The Romance Reader, someone in the audience raised her hand and asked me to stop what I was doing and just tell the story of my life. Foolish ingénue that I was then, I felt insulted. Though I’d studied the form of the novel and worked hard to compose in it, my audience was interested in the personal rather than the work, in real life rather than composed fiction. And it’s pretty clear now that if I’d gone on to write nonfiction about the Hasidic world I was born and raised in, my work would have found a larger readership. But I remain dedicated to the novel as a powerful form; I am interested in its early development and feel charged with pushing and pulling at it, to keep it fresh. Hirsi Ali, on the other hand, gives readers what they want: real life. She is not a novelist, she has no allegiance to the novel, and even as a memoirist, she’s uninterested in anything meta, though the form has given her so much. What does interest Hirsi Ali?

She is very good at remaining on message and she uses whatever comes to hand as a platform from which to deliver it. In the summer of 2003, she worked with Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, on a ten-minute film, Submission: Part One, in which verses of the Quran are written on the body of a nude model covered only in a transparent veil. The transparency, Hirsi Ali writes, “is necessary because it challenges Allah to look at what he created: the body of woman.” Using the language of the emancipated West rather too appealingly, Hirsi Ali describes the film as “first and foremost about the relation of the individual with Allah.” In fact, from the point of view of any Muslim individual, for whom a relationship with Allah is a largely submissive one, verses of the Quran superimposed on a nude female form is deeply, confrontationally transgressive. Certainly, the film accomplishes what Hirsi Ali has made her raison d’être, a critique of Islam, but just as her writing lacks subtlety, so too this film, which is finally too didactic to qualify as art. Still it cost Theo Van Gogh his life, and finally, by way of another scandal or two, brought Hirsi Ali to the United States.

As an employee of the American Enterprise Institute, Hirsi Ali has regained something of a scholarly platform, but her conclusions continue to be appallingly immoderate. Writing about the informal fatwah against “South Park,” she suggests that Hollywood take on Islam with films that make images of Mohammed prevalent enough to desensitize the Muslim world. This would also spread the risk, she adds, and render the Muslim response harmless. “The aim is to confront hypersensitive Muslims with more targets than they can possibly contend with,” she writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Her didactically prescriptive ideas about how to use (I might say abuse) art to serve politics are deeply abhorrent to artistic sensibilities, which don’t put out for purely utilitarian purposes. “Leave the headlines to the journalists,” Chekhov advises writers. But though Hirsi Ali writes, she makes no claims for herself as an artist. She and her work are inclined elsewhere. She established a foundation to combat crimes against women, including female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and honor violence, and one hopes this foundation is doing good work. She also appears regularly on television panels and on the lecture circuit, where she warns us against our best instincts to extend our freedoms to the other. On the controversy of the misnamed Ground Zero mosque, Hirsi Ali argued against worldwide cooperation, and criticized Obama as a “one-worlder.” She recommended instead a strategy that aims to divide and conquer, though it has brought us to the East-West impasse we are in now. To give these old ideas the authority of expertise, she borrowed from the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s thesis to depict the world as a clash of civilizations, but you would never know from her citation that what Huntington recommended was a balance of power between ethno-religious civilizations, including Islam and the West, and that he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As the West realizes that its heavy-handed presence in Muslim countries serves the extremist cause too well by giving the disenfranchised a common enemy and distracting them from the real work at hand—adapting traditional, religious life to a complex modern world and emancipating themselves from autocracies that have been in place for decades—it will be of interest to see how Hirsi Ali herself adapts. So far she has proven herself a survivor, quick to shed her missteps and mistakes with a shrug and a smile and perhaps another book that combines the personal with the prescriptive, apologia with manifesto. Questioned about her attempt to incite the Catholic Church against Islam, she laughed, “I was very naughty.” Since she lives in a country with a constitution that guarantees the right to free expression, she will not be burned at the stake. Though she remains puritanically insistent on her simplistic black and white understanding of a deeply complex world, we have evolved, so perhaps we will not be forcing her to wear the scarlet letter “N,” for “Naughty,” she claims for herself.

NOTES

    1. The titles read by Hirsi Ali and her friends in Somalia turn out to be the same ones Rachel Benjamin of The Romance Reader reads, geographical, cultural, and religious differences notwithstanding. There are cheap Harlequins, but also books by Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier, and Victoria Holt.return to text

    2. Paradoxically, these traditionally arranged marriages, in which the virgin is a commodity rather than beloved, have none of the sacredness of modern love and marriage as we know it.return to text

    3. My own father was most guilty of such distortion, but I like to think that he reserved his simplistic interpretations only for the womenfolk. It was his misfortune that his daughters read and understood the original biblical Hebrew and commentaries and could laugh at such facile misuse of the texts.return to text