Enjoying Being a Girl

"I am Ayaan, the daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan."

Thus begins the extraordinary story of a woman born into a family of desert nomads, circumcised as a child, educated by radical imams in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, taught to believe that if she uncovered her hair, terrible tragedies would ensue. It's a story that, with a few different twists, really could have led to a wretched life and a lonely death, as her grandmother warned. But instead, Hirsi Ali escaped -- and transformed herself into an internationally renowned spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women.

Note: This is the Washington Post at its most "politically correct" - referring to genital mutilation as circumcision.

In 2004, Hirsi Ali helped a Dutch director, Theo van Gogh, make a controversial film, "Submission," about Muslim women suffering from forced marriages and wife beating. Van Gogh was murdered by an angry Muslim radical in response, and Hirsi Ali went into hiding.

Curiously, what seems to rankle Europeans most is the enthusiasm with which Hirsi Ali has adopted their own secularism, and the fervor with which she has embraced their own Western values. Though this is a continent whose intellectuals routinely disparage the pope as an irrelevant dinosaur, Hirsi Ali's rejection of religion in favor of reason, intellect, and emancipation seems to make everyone nervous. Typical is the British feminist who complained that not only does Hirsi Ali paint "the whole of the Islamic world with one black brush," she also "paints the whole of the western world with rosy tints," which is of course far more objectionable.

The left in this country hasn't embraced her... Probably because she is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank... Which is also probably why Newsweek's article about her is titled, "A Bombthrower's Life."

Oddly, the people Ali writes about, the real bombthrowers, would never be called bombthrowers by Newsweek.