c. 2007 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ For the past three years, bodyguards have shadowed Ayaan Hirsi Ali after the controversial author and critic of Islam received repeated death threats. But that hasn’t stopped the slender, soft-spoken Somali native from saying what she thinks.

Two burly bodyguards stand outside her office door as Hirsi Ali discusses her recently released book, “Infidel,” which details her escape from an arranged marriage in Somalia, election to the Dutch Parliament and role as a women’s rights advocate. The book has soared to the No. 6 spot on The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction.

“I’ve been lucky,” says Hirsi Ali, 37, who left the Netherlands last year for a spot at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. “I’ve survived it all.”

Hirsi Ali’s criticism of Islam in public statements and in the book has caused many devout Muslims to condemn her, a small number of whom have threatened violence, making the bodyguards a necessity.

“People kept telling me, `You’re an infidel, you’re an infidel, you’re an infidel,”’ says Hirsi Ali, who was raised a Muslim but now considers herself an “apostate.” “Yes, I’m an infidel, and I’m proud of it.”

It is difficult to imagine someone with Hirsi Ali’s quiet dignity fleeing death threats or fearing for her life. But after the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was gunned down by a Muslim extremist in Amsterdam in 2004, she had reason for concern.

Hirsi Ali and van Gogh had collaborated on a film, “Submission: Part 1,” that criticized the Muslim world’s treatment of women by showing abused women in translucent clothing with words from the Quran painted on their bodies.

After shooting van Gogh, his killer stabbed a note onto the filmmaker’s chest threatening Hirsi Ali as well.

“As long as there are Muslim individuals who feel that by killing an apostate they will go to heaven, that danger (to my life) is present,” Hirsi Ali says.

Many of her statements, in the book and in her public life, have prompted a vehement reaction from the Muslim community, although the majority of responses are nonviolent.

Still, Hirsi Ali believes Westerners don’t criticize Islam enough, preferring political correctness to a sharp _ and she says, needed _ critique.

“If you tell an American who is a Christian, `You should … argue that Islam is bad,’ an American will say, `No, no, no. Christianity is a great religion. Islam is a great religion, too, and I want to respect it … As a religious person, I respect other religions,”’ she says. “That’s a terrible, terrible assumption.”

Christians today, even their most extreme elements, cannot be compared to Muslims extremists, she adds.

“You really have to be … the ostrich, sticking your head in the sand, to pretend that Islam and Christianity are the same,” she says.

Hirsi Ali is particularly emphatic in her criticism of how Islam treats women, and believes their oppression is a seminal reason for the isolation and poverty in Europe’s disaffected Muslim immigrant communities.

“If you give women the opportunity to have a proper education, become financially independent and be the sexual owners of their own bodies, then the problem of integration will solve itself,” she says.

“Women are important,” she adds. “They choose a mate, and if you choose someone that is not right for you, you end up creating a family that is dysfunctional. And dysfunctional families produce children, especially boys, that are violent. So a dysfunctional family, in the end, contributes to a dysfunctional society. We are not really allowed to say that, but it’s true.”

In the book, Hirsi Ali speaks out about female genital mutilation, which she was forced to undergo as a child in Africa, and honor killings, in which young women are killed for offenses like choosing their own spouse or defying their family. She also discusses how she saw these practices perpetuated in European immigrant communities.

Hirsi Ali says the state must be responsible for protecting Muslim women and children from these sorts of trials. She also believes the state and private individuals must show second- and third-generation immigrants living in poverty that options exist outside of radical Islam.

“The radical Muslims, they consider their philosophy universal,” she says. “They monopolize the hearts and minds of these people … There’s no competition. There are no Christian evangelicals going in there, trying to persuade these young people, `Please become a Christian; Jesus is love.”’

“There are no secular humanists going in and telling them, `This is what critical thinking is, this is what freedom is,”’ she adds. “There is no competition telling them, `Look at Iran, do you want to live under that? The Taliban. Is this what you wanted? You’re from Morocco, your parents came here to work, they did a great deal to educate you and you’re going to repay them by blowing yourself up? Is this the kind of life you want to live?”’

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Hirsi Ali believes a counter-movement is necessary, designed to show youth in poor neighborhoods that there are options beyond the veil or prostitution, beyond radicalism or nothing at all.

“You have feminist movements, anti-racist movements, anti-Nazi movements, all trying to solve the problems of the 1920s and the 1930s, but we’re in the 21st century, with a whole host of new problems,” she says. “Islamists don’t have good intentions, and they take advantage of this confusion. They take advantage of the fundamental rights and freedoms in the countries in which they live, they take advantage of the lack of competition and they’re winning more and more souls.”

KRE/JM END BOYLE

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