csua.org/u/fx6 -> www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03ALI.html?ex=1270267200&en=7272f7f8332d2c15&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
Daughter of the Enlightenment By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Published: April 3, 2005 L ast spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali took her ''Dutch mother'' -- the woman who taught her the language and cared for her after she arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992 -- to lunch at the Dudok brasserie, near the Parliament in The Hague. They have been her companions since she started receiving death threats in September 2002. Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia and has been a member of the Dutch Parliament since January 2003, had endorsed the view that Islam is a backward religion, condemned the way women live under it and said that by today's standards, the prophet Muhammad would be considered a perverse tyrant. She had also announced that she was no longer a believing Muslim. The punishment for such apostasy is, according to strict interpretations of Islam, death. That day at the Dudok, several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder.
The story is, like much in Hirsi Ali's life, an inseparable mix of the terrifying and the tender. Sipping tea and nibbling from a bowl of chocolate-covered raisins in a house in the Dutch countryside in February, she made every attempt to soft-pedal it. It had been dark for several hours and they'd positioned their bulletproof vehicles as inconspicuously as possible along the street. Relaxing on a sofa, she had folded herself into so small a shape that she seemed to disappear behind the throw pillow that she hugged to her knees. Every few minutes she pulled a thick, black woolen shawl around her shoulders and clutched it close under her chin against the cold. Hirsi Ali has a calm and syllogistic way of dropping verbal bombs all over the place, using words European politicians never do: Decadent. With the 2002 murder of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn and the slaying last fall of the director Theo van Gogh, the Netherlands, arguably the most open society of all, has become reacquainted with political violence. Hirsi Ali, a politician who has thought hard about these issues in her own life, has emerged as perhaps the country's best-known politician and certainly its most imperiled. Her rebellion against her Islamic roots has estranged her somewhat from her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, whom she had always emulated. Her father, who now lives in England, was an iconoclastic Somali intellectual and politician who studied in Italy and earned a degree from Columbia University in 1966. He returned to Africa strengthened in his Muslim faith, his daughter says, but also deeply touched by North America. Hirsi Magan spent part of the 1980's as a leader of a guerrilla force in the Democratic Front for the Salvation of Somalia. Hirsi Ali's mother -- the second of the two wives Hirsi Magan had at the time -- was illiterate but wielded domestic clout. It was Hirsi Ali's grandmother who managed, following regional custom, to have Hirsi Ali and her sister ritually ''circumcised'' at age 5, against the wishes (and without the knowledge) of Hirsi Magan. From age 6, Hirsi Ali and her siblings shared their father's political exile, in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia and then, for 10 years, in Kenya. In the course of her travels, Hirsi Ali learned five languages: Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and English, which she speaks in a lilting accent picked up from the Indian teachers who taught her at the Muslim Girls' Secondary School on Park Road in Nairobi.
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