Shaking Pillars of Islam
A Somali-born Dutch lawmaker is the target of extremists in Europe for insisting that abuse of Muslim women isn't on just the religion's fringe.
By Sebastian Rotella
Times Staff Writer
November 7, 2005
After he shot Theo van Gogh and slashed his throat, the assassin plunged a second knife into his victim, pinning to the chest a bloodstained message to the woman who was the killer's nemesis: Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
"You mince no words about your hostility against Islam, and for this your masters have rewarded you with a seat in Parliament," declared the letter left by the assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri. "I'd bet my life that you are sweating with FEAR when you read this
Belhaj, 35, thinks that Ali exaggerates Islamic culture as a root of domestic abuse that also results from the hardship and frustration of the immigrant experience. She accuses Ali of spurring Muslim backlash.
"She somehow frustrated the emancipation of women that was going on already," said Belhaj, who describes herself as Muslim but not religious. "There are things in the Koran that are anti-women. But her attacks have raised anger among women, and they are retreating into Islamic identity."
Ali makes no apologies. She plans a sequel to last year's "Submission," the short film that she wrote and Van Gogh directed. Some Muslims were offended by the images of Koranic verses written on bodies of actresses who recounted woes at the hands of men. During the trial that ended in his conviction, Bouyeri said he had killed Van Gogh for slandering God.
The cast and crew of the new film will remain anonymous. It will tell the stories of four Muslim men. They will have verses of the Koran written on their bodies; one will be gay.
"You should never bow down to terror," Ali said. "I think it's a good reaction to say 'Submission, Part 2' is going to come and I am protected and we are not going to keep quiet."
Indignant Muslim leaders sued to block the sequel, but a judge ruled against them while warning Ali to avoid offending people.
Ali was born in Somalia, where her father led opposition to that country's dictatorship. Persecution forced the family into exile in Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya. Ali was devout as a girl, but she became disenchanted with what she saw as a pervasive mentality of submission: of worshippers to God and of women to men.
In her book, "Unsubmissive," she describes enduring the "cruel ritual" of genital mutilation when she was 5 and a beating by a religion professor that fractured her skull. The Islam she experienced was full of tyranny, backwardness and intolerance, she said.
"Islam has not yet known its century of Enlightenment," she writes in the book, to be published in the United States next year.
Ali was 22 when her father forced her to marry a cousin living in Canada. She was sent from Africa to Germany to await immigration papers.
Instead, she fled to the Netherlands.
She got refugee status and worked as an interpreter for social service agencies, learning on the front lines about the shadow world of female immigrants struggling with abusive husbands, secret abortions and other nightmares.
Ali eventually divorced her unwanted husband. She earned a master's degree in political science at Leyden University. She immersed herself in the writings of John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper and Baruch Spinoza. She had a romance with a fellow student and lived with him for five years, but remains single today and has no children.
Her gateway to politics was a job with the center-left Labor Party researching Dutch "multicultural" policy toward immigrants. Faithful to traditions of compromise and religious coexistence, the state provided generous welfare benefits, Islamic schools and native-language television. Authorities did little to impose a Dutch identity. Yet unemployment and resentment plagued a community that is mostly Moroccan and Turkish and numbers close to a million in a nation of 16 million.
Ali concluded that treating immigrants as groups, rather than individuals, led to isolation rather than integration. Official reluctance to judge other cultures reinforced archaic values that clashed with a society where gay marriage, drug use and prostitution are legal, she said. Multiculturalism helped keep many immigrant women mired in illiteracy and servitude, she argued.
Ali proposed shutting Islamic schools and other drastic remedies. She moved to the center-right VVD party and won election to parliament in 2003. Recurring threats forced police to give her 24-hour security.
The next year, the Van Gogh assassination unleashed the dangerous forces she had warned about. The news reached her at her office during a morning meeting. Bodyguards rushed her to hide-outs at military and police bases. SWAT teams rounded up extremists trained in foreign camps who allegedly had plotted to kill her.
The authorities "didn't know where the threat came from," she recalled. "They didn't know how big it was. The information from the secret services, instead of trickling in, it was now coming in buckets."
After secret talks with U.S. officials, who previously assisted investigations of threats against her, a Dutch military jet flew her to Maine. She spent weeks in Massachusetts and California, and remains grateful to the U.S. for the refuge.
Ali said she accepted temporary exile reluctantly because Dutch leaders were worried about further violence and uproar. By January, she was back. Anti-terrorist agents had decided that the potential threats were under control.
"I think next time we have to do it in a different way," she said. "That wasn't the most elegant way to do things. I would have preferred to stay
