Ayaan Hirsi Ali: A (living) martyr with a cause…

Last night, I was riveted to a BBC interview with Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Here’s why:

In 1989, Iranian leader and self-anointed Islamic lawgiver, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a Fatwa (death warrant) against author Salman Rushdie for writing a book, Satanic Verses. The Ayotallah deemed it “a blasphemy against Islam”.

Yet, since then, Rushdie has lived the gilded life of an international cause celebre (complete with 24/7 bodyguards – provided by Scotland Yard – that must make P Diddy blush with envy). And, for many in his jet-set circle, shaking the hand of Salman has become as coveted as one might imagine touching the garment of Jesus might have been.

Meanwhile, as I wrote in this previous article, the Ayatollah’s overly-zealous disciples issued a similar fatwa last year against Hirsi Ali. They deemed deemed her film, Submission Part 1, an insult to Islam. And to demonstrate their conviction about this fatwa, Muslim thugs promptly assassinated the acclaimed director of the film, Theo van Gogh, and knifed a message in his corpse informing Hirsi Ali that she was next.

Naturally, at this point, most people expected Hirsi Ali to flee, like Rushdie, to the insulating vortex of New York City (complete with full security accoutrements). Instead, she not only refused to leave the danger zone, but vowed to defy her Muslim (would-be) assassins by writing and producing more Submission films. Her unbowed mission: to further expose the nihilistic, chauvinistic, misogynistic and atavistic interpretations of the Koran that pass for Islamic orthodoxy in many Muslim countries today.

Indeed, Hirsi Ali attributes her confrontational activism to the rude awakening she experienced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. She realised then that Bin Laden had culled much of his jihadist rhetoric from the Koran. Here’s how she described that pivotal moment:

“I grabbed the Koran and I started to read what Bin Laden had written and…I put (his) citations next to what is written in the Koran and I realised that, yes, a lot of it is part of my religion and what do I think of that?”

And so, on the one hand, we have Rushdie being fêted by New York’s secular elites and continuing to write his Islamic fiction. On the other hand, we have Hirsi Ali working in relative obscurity and isolation as a Dutch legislator and continuing her mission “to reform Islam…from pre-modern to modern – [a transition that] Judaism and Christianity have gone through.” This makes for an interesting juxtaposition to say the least.

As for her safety, Hirsi Ali is as philosophical as she is heroic:

“It’s like the sword of Damocles that hangs above my head. I do realise that…I live like someone who has been told ‘you have some kind of terminal disease – we just don’t know when it’s going to strike’.”

But, as living martyrs go, who gets your sympathy and respect?

Technorati: Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Submission