Hirsi Ali: The 'heretic' who says Muslims need to re-think sex, money, and violence ... and the concept of time

After “Ma” and “Da” (and variants thereof), what is the first word uttered by very young children just learning to speak? I checked this with the writer, Paul Theroux, father to Louis and Marcel. He reckons it’s “Why”. But in my experience (I have two sons) the first serious word they utter is “No”. The “Yes” option comes along later. Maybe it’s harder to form, phonetically speaking. But intellectually speaking, “yes” is a bit of a problem. Who wants to be a “yes-man” or “yes-woman”? Isn’t that too much like being a doormat? Which may well explain why Jean-Paul Sartre argued – in Being and Nothingness – that the act of negation is at the core of our being. Human beings are defined by opposition, by their ability to say no. To say that something is not the case. That I am not a thing. Or simply to notice that (in Sartre’s classic example) Pierre has not turned up at the café for their rendezvous and that the whole cafe is therefore “haunted by his absence”.

It is possible that Ayaan Hirsi Ali may have been feeling something similar with regard to me. I was late for our meeting. It was taking place in a location somewhere mysterious on the west coast of the US. At an undefined time this week. And the air conditioning was ridiculous. No wonder she had the sniffles. Let me stress though, I did not totally stand her up. I was only about 10 minutes late. Bloody traffic. I think that doesn’t narrow it down too much. A muscular but perfectly affable security guy had to give me the once over. Concluded I was reasonably harmless. This is what you have to go through if you are Hirsi Ali – heavy air-conditioning and extremely heavy bodyguards. She had to wear a scarf too, but only around her neck.

Despite all of which she seemed in high good humour. I like her. Not everyone does. She knows that. It’s not just trolls either. She was the scriptwriter and voice of the short film, Submission (technically, Submission Part 1), deconstructing the treatment of Muslim women in Holland, which led to the director, Theo van Gogh, being assassinated back in 2004. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, pinned a note to Van Gogh’s chest, with a knife, saying that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next. A lot of people have repeated that kind of threat ever since. Hence her personal cordon sanitaire.

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She was born to a Muslim family in Somalia, shuttled between Kenya, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia as a kid, and then, aged 22, was married off by her father to a man he thought was ideal for her in Canada. She didn’t like him though: he was bald and he didn’t read any novels (she describes their meeting, hilariously, in Infidel, 2007). So she got off the plane in Germany and ended up with refugee status in Holland, where she dropped out of Islam and dropped into the Dutch parliament as an MP. Then she took off again and has ended up on the West Coast, married to a historian, with a five-year old son of her own. And an awful lot of hate mail.

When I happened to mention her name to a Somali friend of mine (who I believe is Muslim), she sent me the longest text I have ever received on my phone. And nearly all of it was denouncing her fellow Somali as a liar and what not. And then I got another message just the other day from a lapsed Muslim American woman describing her as “a mouthpiece of a well-organised Islamophobia network”.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali laughed at the “Islamophobia” jibe. “There is no conspiracy. Unfortunately. But if you’re an ex-Muslim there are people who want to kill you on account of deserting Islam. It’s reasonable to be a little concerned. That’s not phobia, it’s rational fear. ”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the kind of person you wouldn’t mind hanging out with for hours and shooting the breeze about this and that. And reading her books feels like that too. She is transparent about everything. How she expected buses to crash when she finally took off the headscarf, on account of drivers being driven mad with desire. And was rather disappointed when “nothing happened.”

She had already said “No” to being married to a guy she had not chosen when she stepped off the plane – a heroic effort of will given that everything in her upbringing and education was designed to persuade her to say “Yes”. There is a resonant line in her book, Nomad (2010) where she is describing how hopeless she used to be with money: “Because I have been brought up to say yes, I cannot say no to salesgirls.” Which sort of explains why, in a similar way, her father was shocked when she turned down the proposed husband: “I cannot take a no from you.”

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So he goes ahead and has the marriage ceremony take place anyway. Only without her. She didn’t actually need to be there or show her face. It was easier without. Nobody was haunted by her absence or anything. The guys who turned up for the wedding were just fine with that. It was all arranged. No problem. She would only complicate things if she was there.

The French writer Michel Houellebecq wrote a novel called Submission, which may be a deliberate echo of the Ali/Van Gogh film and happened to be released on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015. In this dystopian satire on France, an Islamic party has won the election and the usual Houllebecquian sexually frustrated loser hero, in this case a Sorbonne professor, eventually converts to Islam with some notion of acquiring a droit de seigneur over his young female students.

Hirsi Ali argued that “Islam” means submission or obedience, not just of women but men similarly. “It seems to the outsider that boys have more freedom than girls, but they really don’t.” But as a young girl she had a massive hierarchy to contend with, of parents and clan and what she calls “bearded men preaching seventh-century laws.” She had to adapt from a “collectivist society” to an “individualist society” in Holland. “Finding the ability to say No, and feeling OK about it in my conscience, was a real emancipation for me.”

And she has kept on saying no ever since. I guess that’s what being a Heretic (the title of her 2015 polemic) is basically about. Maybe it’s no surprise that she was once awarded the Richard Dawkins prize by the Atheist Alliance International. She has also won the Simone de Beauvoir prize for promoting the freedom of women. Hirsi Ali’s minimum demand is the right for everyone to say No if they feel like it, but especially women, whether to men or God. Without feeling tortured about it. Or being tortured. Seems fair enough to me. No doubt the idea of trying to control women and dictate their lives and loves long predates any notion of religion. But religion, notably of the monotheistic kind, bought into the idea and made subordination and subservience sacred.

In Heretic Hirsi Ali says there are three things that Muslims need to re-think: sex, money, and violence. “I want to add one more thing to that list,” she said. “Time.” Hirsi Ali will talk about anything and everything. Preferably everything, given enough time. I had a feeling she was subtly drawing attention to my own slack time-keeping. “When I was a kid in Somalia, people would say, ‘Oh, let’s meet at noon’. No one had any idea who would turn up or when. So it was a shock when I got to Holland. I had to adjust. And when I started teaching I would have students who were like I used to be and would turn up maybe half an hour late or an hour. I had to explain to them there was no point to turning up an hour late because I just wouldn’t be there any more. The class was only an hour.”

All her big ideas are grounded in small experiences like this. The problem with the Islamic conception of time is that mere chronology, the Newtonian clock ticking away, keeping everything in order, is irrelevant in comparison with the theological sense of eternity, in which time is effectively abolished. What matters, she argues, in this way of thinking, is only the Hereafter, and thus heaven and hell. Mere terrestrial time is seen as limited and relatively insignificant. Only a stepping stone to the infinite. This, says Hirsi Ali, is the “core” of Islam. “So working hard and making money, or recreational things like going to the pub or watching soccer or going to the movies – all this is rejected as sinful or futile.”

She wonders “if depriving impressionable young men of entertainment and female companionship doesn’t make them more susceptible to calls for self-annihilation.”

She is a woman on a mission (which is what gets some people’s goat). But one thing that strikes me in the way she speaks is that she has managed to get away from thinking of Islam as something peculiar and particular, a thing apart. She is de-ghettoising the subject. It’s actually part of human culture and history and philosophy and therefore is potentially subject to the same kinds of analysis. For example, the same non-linear, non-evolutionary notion of time infects Plato’s thinking (timeless archetypes and the epistemē must be superior to earthly beings and knowledge) and so much of Eastern thinking too (“maya” in the Upanishads, life as we live it, is rejected as an illusion, a constellation of appearances).

With a quick metaphysical flip, the real is turned on its head to become the unreal. Hence the Good, the True and the Beautiful reside elsewhere, in some deathless, supra-sensory realm. We have a habit of desperately seeking the transcendent. We inhabit myths.

It occurs to me that Hirsi Ali’s story is not a million miles away from James Joyce’s. His semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is all about how to become a Jesuit dropout – an ex-Jesuit in Ireland. Around a century ago, the young James Joyce (or Stephen Dedalus) was obsessing about the inferno, just as Dante did in the Divine Comedy in the 14th century. It’s not so surprising if people are still obsessing about it now. Least of all in the US, which arose out of a bid for religious freedom. “Islam is a set of ideas,” she says, “not a skin colour or a sexual orientation.” But Joyce and Hirsi Ali would agree that ideas about hell and heaven can have serious consequences for how you behave in the real world. Hirsi Ali is more Lennon: no hell, no heaven. But above all, just no, and the right to say it – without being beaten or seen as a traitor/whore or denounced as an “apostate” and executed.

Being an ex-Muslim doesn’t really define Hirsi Ali. I think of her as (a) a good writer (she snorted at this) and (b) a neo-existentialist. She pays attention to the small everyday things, the “infra-ordinary” and not just the extraordinary. I (she would say, and I would too) think this life and this world are worth taking an interest in just because I probably won’t be going to any other worlds, and similarly I am not that likely to be reincarnated either, in any form. With no better place (or worse) to go to, I am in no hurry for oblivion and annihilation.

Another thing I liked about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I asked her if she would need to check her quotes, before publication. A lot of people in her position would. She said she didn’t need to. “I trust you,” she said, and smiled. I appreciate that. And the feeling is reciprocated. Maybe that is the fundamental problem with all religions. They don’t trust humans enough. So you bring in the Almighty to act as moral arbiter - to make up your mind for you. I’d rather put my trust in someone I can see and hear, no matter how imperfect, than in angels and sky gods, no matter how wonderful. Finally, you have to learn to trust yourself. Or as James Joyce put it in the final lines of Portrait of the Artist, “Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience”.

Andy Martin is the author of ‘Reacher Said Nothing’ and teaches at the University of Cambridge