Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Somali, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and now a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. Controversy for Ali came to a head as Theo van Gogh was assassinated for directing a film she wrote on the treatment of women in conservative Islam.

Submission Pt 1

It doesn’t look like she’s pulling any punches in her new book ‘Infidel’.

From Guernica:

So the only way to preserve Islam on the one hand and counter them as moderate Muslims is to say “Well you guys are right. All this stuff is in the Qu’ran. The Qu’ran is written by human beings. And as human beings, endowed with reason, we can change this because we don’t think that it’s beneficial. Or even if we are not going to change it, we are going to believe that in its context, because the Qu’ran was written in a different time, in a different context, in a different age. We’re going to move on; we’re going to take from the Qu’ran those things that we think are compatible with human hearts.” But the minute you start doing that, that’s when hell comes in, and the radicals will say “Oh, but then you are not a believer because you are refuting what God says.”

So that’s why I say in the book, Ok, in that case, let’s review the individual relationship between God or the concept of God and the individual… If we only see God as an entity that we submit to, but like other religions—and I think Jews have done this, Christians have done this; certainly Protestants have done this—instead see God as an entity that you can argue with, and that means propagating the idea that if you argue with God he won’t send you to hell—[laughs]—

Guernica: Otherwise it’s hard to win that argument.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Yes, of course—because he tells you “shut up.” So we have to get rid of this idea that God is an entity that only says “I say so” (because in that case God is a dictator) and then you have an argument. And then you can probably win the hearts and minds of young people who just want to live. Not only young people; also older ordinary people who just want to lead a normal life, and for whom life is difficult enough as it is. Without coming with all this jihadi bullshit.

I’m looking forward to her newer new book though…

I’m working on another book, called Shortcut to Enlightenment, Part 1. I’m waking the prophet Muhammed up in the New York Public Library. When he got his revelation, he got it in a cave, and he was illiterate. In my story, he’s literate and he wakes up in a library. And he gets to see New York and he gets to think that this empire was built by his people, his followers; and he discovers a few inconsistencies, such as what he sees as uninhibited capitalism … So then he thinks, “No, this is not my philosophy, the people who built this are not my followers.”
So he goes and finds out what his followers have been up to since his death—and he’s very, very surprised. Because they’re killing each other, they’re targeting everyone else, they’re weak. And so then he’s very, very sad; and in that saddened state he encounters John Stuart Mill. And so they have a dialogue on the position of women in society and the relationship between men and women.

And in another chapter he has a conversation on the relationship of the individual and the community. And in another chapter he has a dialogue with Karl Popper on the open society and its enemies. And Karl Popper asserts that Islam is an enemy of the open society. And the last chapter is about what happens to the prophet after these dialogues. Does he convert to the ideas of these liberals or does he stick to his own?