Di bukunya The Caged Virgin, Hirsi Ali menceriterakan mengenai disunatnya
wanita. Suatu perbuatan barbar untuk menjaga keperawanan wanita. Saya kutip
penjelasannya mengenai sunat wanita yang ekstrim:
quote: "The process involves the cutting away of the girl's clitoris, the
outer and inner labia, as well as the scraping of the walls of her vagina with
a sharp object - a fragment of glass, a razor blade, or a potato knife, and
then the binding together of her legs, so that the walls of the vagina can grow
together." unquote
Menurut Hirsi Ali, banyak wanita Muslim di Eropa yang sudah tidak perawan
lagi, sebelum perkawinannya, maka dia mengunjungi dokter tertentu untuk
'mengembalikan' keperawanannya, sebab kalau ketahuan bahwa dia sudah tidak
perawan lagi, maka itu membawa aib di keluarganya.
Budaya dimana harga diri atau kehormatan suatu keluarga tergantung dari
keperawanan anak wanitanya, yang kemudian sesudah menikah dikurung dirumah,
hanya sebagai pabrik bikin anak dan melayani suami dan rumah tangga, sungguh
sangat menyedihkan.
Wanita2 yang disunat banyak yang kemudian mempunyai ber-macam2 masalah
kesehatan.
Sunny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1178431592731&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
May. 7, 2007 21:54 | Updated May. 7, 2007 22:12
Hirsi Ali's challenge to humanity
By CAROLINE GLICK
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is arguably the bravest and most remarkable woman of our
times.
To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be
assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles
to force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained
enslavement of women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it. A
series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief.
Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was
killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because
the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in
which little boys would be playing with little girls. The idea that that boys
and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers.
It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little
boys and girls. On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at
the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the
notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an
insult to Islam. On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires
across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of
Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had
been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had
filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They
built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for
Allah, they decided to butcher little girls. And the brutality is not limited
to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights
activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah
Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in
Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.
LATE LAST year Hirsi Ali published her memoir,
Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two
competing human impulses - conformity and individualism. In her own life, the
clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and
Western cultural collapse. Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically
active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist
dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali's childhood
in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand
of the Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran. Hirsi Ali's
rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later
as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam
just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in
Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and
had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals. Living in
Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the "true Islam." Why,
she wondered were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their
apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi
she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful.
Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why could she
not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all that her normal
human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were
sinful and evil?
AS SHE puts it, "I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of the
rules, especially for women. How could a just God - a God so just that almost
every page of the Koran praises his fairness - desire that women be treated so
unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman's testimony is worth
half of a man's, I would think, Why? If God is merciful, why did He demand that
His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did
unbelievers have to go to Hell?" In her words, "The spark of will inside me
grew even as I studied and practiced to submit." Ali credits Harlequin romance
novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with
their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes were her first glimpse at the
possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she
was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right. Her
impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform.
As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Muslim and even joined the
Muslim Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of submission she began wearing a
full-body burka. But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will
had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the terror she saw as a
Muslim girl, believing they must be distorting the Koran. "Surely," she writes,
"Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were
disobedient? Surely a woman's statement in court should be worth the same as a
man's?" Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she found that
everything the preachers had said was written in the book. AT 21, HIRSI Ali
emancipated herself. Fleeing from an arranged marriage to a Somali immigrant in
Canada, she sought and received asylum in Holland. There, she embraced Dutch
society and freedoms and quickly flourished in a true rag-to-riches immigrant
tale. She learned Dutch fluently and began supporting
herself as a translator. In just four years she had bridged the cultural
divide between Africa and Europe and began studying political science with the
creme de la creme of Dutch society at the University of Leiden. A mere decade
after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch citizen, she was a pubic figure, an
outspoken social critic of Islam in Europe. In January 2003, she was elected to
Parliament as a member of the conservative Liberal Party. IN HOLLAND, Hirsi
Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny -
the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by
the Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she
refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take
action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim
minority. Hirsi Ali's labors brought her to Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the two
produced the film Submission, Part One. The short film
shows a young Muslim woman wearing a see-through burka. Passages of the Koran
permitting the abuse of women are written on her body. The woman prays in
submission to Allah all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At
the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and calls into
question the reasonableness of her submission. The film's provocative message
placed both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh's lives in imminent danger. And on November
21, 2004 Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam.
The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's chest in which he threatened to
murder Hirsi Ali "in the name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful."
While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard in
army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for the Dutch
establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality
on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the country and the
parliament. Although the public outcry that ensued forced the government to
restore her citizenship, the message was clear. HIRSI ALI moved to
Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she continues
to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration
under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just last month, her work brought an
imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy. In her
life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She
holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the
evil it propagates in the name of divinity. She holds a mirror
up to the Free World and demands that we defend our freedom against the
onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline. So too, she demands our
compassion for the women of Islam. She says we must see the suffering beneath
the veil and work to alleviate it. Whether it means that we must mass produce
and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance novels throughout
the Islamic world; challenge veiled women to explain why they ascribe to a
faith that gives men the divine right to beat and rape women; or simply hold
Muslim communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which our
civilization is based, the West must help these women free themselves from
oppression. Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold voices
like Hirsi Ali's. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali has lived under threat of
death for her views. We must understand that only when she, and people like
her can walk on the streets unafraid will we have properly defended
our freedom.
