Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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It is odd to use the word legacy to describe a person as young as Ali, only thirty seven years old who was still studying political science for her master's degree six years ago, yet today marks a further development in her legacy. The Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende resigned from office following the collapse of his government due to tensions over the issue of whether or not to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali of her citizenship. Ali is a refuge who sought asylum in the Netherlands 1992 after fleeing an arranged marriage her traditionalist Muslim family had arranged for her. In order to defy her family's efforts to track her, she falsified information concerning her age and name before attending school, finally earning an MA in political science and recieving a fellowship with the Wiardi Beckman Foundation. She was candid concerning the falsification on her asylum paperwork during her bid for parlialment in 2003, which she won. A traditional Muslim turned secular Muslim (her term), she seemed to be a beacon of intelligence regarding multiethnicity, adopting a leading-country strategy of ethnic relations influenced by her studies of Herman Philipse's Athiestich Manifest. While she proffesses to still being part Muslim, she no longer believes in prophecy, and is an outspoken critic of traditional Islamic culture's treatment of women, particularly regarding the issues of female genital mutilation, spousal abuse, arranged marriage.

After penning a script entitled "submission" in which a woman is punished for adultery and another silenced from complaining about the physical abuse she recieves from her husband, both within an ethnic Musliam context, she joined filmaker Theo Van Gogh in making a film version of the script which was aired on television. What followed was a national tragedy; in November of 2004 Van Gogh was murdered in plain day by a fundamentalist who left a note attached to a knife stabbed in Van Gogh's chest naming Ali, or "Hirshi Ali" as the note read, in a crude attempt to semitize her name, to be the next target. Following this Ali went into hiding, where she remained for most of a year.

In the months following Ali's resurgence the Jyllian Posten scandal occured, in which a Dutch paper published a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohhamad. The issues of freedom of speech and how it may balance against the responsibility of potentially offending others with speech richly deserves debate, but what followed went far beyond civil discourse; many Islamic clerics in the middle east stirred up crowds, creating riots which claimed both lives and property. Dutch politicians were asked to apologize for the paper's content and violent threats were issued against the staff of the paper and Dutch citizens in general. One cleric went so far as to lament that if only the fatwah against Salman Rushdie had been successful, these denigrations of Islam would not be possible. The Dutch government, to its credit, did not apologize for the content of a privately owned paper which had no government affiliation. Ali, emerged from hiding, called for republication of the cartoons in an assertion of freedom of speech over religious intolerance as a moral priority. What happened next in the Dutch parliament is a shameful act of capitulation to the fear of extremist reprisal; Ali was evicted from her apartment on the grounds that people felt unsafe living in the same building as her, and several members of the government called for her citizenship to be revoked on the grounds that she had lied on her entry papers. While news concering her falsifications had never been an issue before and were three years old by then, Ali felt pressured to resign her post and move out of the Netherlands. She has since taken residence in the United States and joined conservative Washington think-tank the American Enterprise Institute. With her American visa in the balance, to defend her Dutch citizenship she was forced in secret by minister and party leader Rita Verdonk to sign a letter apologizing for misrepresenting herself on her passport, a letter which she was opposed to signing but did so in order to retain her passport. A friend of hers posted the exchanges that occured that day on his blog, which became well known after Ali revealed that indeed she had been forced to sign the letter against her will. The scandal over Ali's forced signing of a document in order for PM Rita Verdonk to procure political capital in exchange for citizenship tore apart the government yesterday, ending with the resignation of the Prime Minister.

In the next posting I will be exploring Hirsi Ali's views and words, and how an intelligent female Muslim immigrant worked her way into the fortress of insular multi-culti liberalism like a Trojan horse. At only thirty seven years of age, Ali may be one of the most important political voices of our time.