Doamna Ayaan Hirsi Ali a ajuns in Olanda, a cerut azil si a devenit o critica redutabila atat a multiculturalismului cat si a propriei sale religii. (Islamul) In noiembrie trecut, regizorul unui film al carui scenariu il scrisese, despre conditia femeii in Islam, a fost ucis decalnsand o criza in Olanda referitor la atitudinea vis-a-vis de imigrare. Ucis ca si Hitoshi Igarashi traducatorul japonez al "Versetelor Satanice", injunghiat la Tokio in 1991.
Cu regret, Jihadul nu mai este de mult lupta cu propria persoana. De mult, adica de la Mahomed incoace ! Este lupta impotriva a TOT ce refuza supunerea absoluta la cuvantul Profetului. Am sa o citez pe Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "Cu prima porunca Mahomed a incercat sa intemniteze bunul simt, cu a doua a transformat in sclava partea frumoasa, romantica a omenirii". (femeia) Dicu-Sava Cristian www.dsclex.ro In masura timpului disponibil o sa traduc aticolul. She arrived in the Netherlands as an asylum seeker and became a fiery critic of both multiculturalism and her own religion, Islam. Then last November the director of a film she wrote about the subjugation of Muslim women was killed, sparking a crisis over the country's attitudes to immigration. In her first British interview since the murder, Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks to Alexander Linklater In 1989, the year that Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a devout student attending the Muslim Girls' Secondary School in Nairobi. Her father, a Somali rebel leader, had the previous year led an insurgency into the Somali region of Ayl in a failed attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of Mohammed Siad Barre. The family continued to sit out their exile in Kenya. By the age of 20, Hirsi Ali had been wearing the full hijab for four years. When news of the Rushdie fatwa reached the school, she and her fellow students felt immediate solidarity with Iran and Khomeini, even although they were not Shias. They learned that people in Britain were indignant about the threat to one of their writers, which only seemed to confirm to the girls that the western world should be taught the consequences of denigrating Islam. "We had heard that there was this book," Hirsi Ali says, "and that the author had said something horrible about the Prophet, which was extremely blasphemous. And the first thought that came into my head was simply, 'Oh, he must be killed.' " Now dressed in the open-necked uniform of a glamorous European politician, Hirsi Ali is in much the same predicament as the British writer she once wished dead. She has recently emerged from a period of deep hiding, following the ritualised killing in November of her collaborator, the film director Theo van Gogh. But she still lives under a strict security regime. We sit by the window of a restaurant on the 23rd floor of a hotel in Amsterdam - after her expressionless bodyguards have checked the place out. She has chosen this spot because the last time she stayed in the hotel her minders wouldn't let her show herself in the dining room. She still marvels at the canal-checkered view below, an image of orderliness and freedom which she found amazing on first arriving at the borders of this country 13 years ago, and which is no longer available to her. Like Rushdie, Hirsi Ali has uttered offences against Islam, and has suffered the knowledge that a colleague was murdered as a consequence (the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in Tokyo in 1991). But unlike Rushdie, Hirsi Ali's blasphemies have not been couched in postmodern literary formulations; they have been intentional, literal and graphic. In 2002, while still working as a researcher for the then conventionally multiculturalist Dutch Labour party, she publicly described the Prophet as a pervert (for taking a child as one of his wives) and as a tyrant. She took over where the eccentric populist Pim Fortuyn had left off, arguing that Islam was a backward religion, that it subordinated women and stifled art. "With the first commandment, Mohammed tried to imprison common sense," she told the Dutch liberal daily, Trouw. "And with the second commandment the beautiful, romantic side of mankind was enslaved." The threats on her life began to accumulate, both via Islamic internet sites and from more personal sources around Europe. Hirsi Ali thinks the tipping point came when she told an interviewer on Dutch radio that while being a Muslim was part of her identity, she didn't believe in God - thus confirming herself as an apostate. By September 2002, she was living under guard. It was towards the end of last year, however, that she became the source of a national crisis in the Netherlands. An 11-minute film, written by Hirsi Ali and directed by Van Gogh, was broadcast on television. It featured the stories of four women pleading with God for release from domestic, social and marital bondage. What many Muslims found intolerable were the images of naked female bodies onto which had been painted verses from the Qur'an authorising the subordination of women. By using the literal meaning of Islam - Submission - as the title of the film, Hirsi Ali was really following an old-school feminist line that, for women, uncritical submission to an Abrahamic religion means submitting to men. "I feel, at least once a week, the strength of my husband's fist on my face," one character, Amina, cries in the film. "Oh, Allah most high, life with my husband is hard to bear, but I submit my will to you." On November 2, while cycling to work on a busy Amsterdam street, Theo van Gogh was shot eight times by a young, bearded man wearing a long jellaba. The portly film-maker staggered onwards and twice begged for mercy as his assailant approached. According to witnesses, van Gogh emitted the peculiarly Dutch plea, "Surely we can talk about this?" It was a dismal end for this ribald controversialist - well known in the Netherlands for his obscene broadsides against Muslims, Jews, Christians, liberals and conservatives alike. Most notoriously, Van Gogh had described Muslims as "goat-fuckers". Despite Hirsi Ali's pleas, however, he had refused to seek protection after Submission was screened, telling her: "I'm just the village idiot, they won't touch me; but you need to be careful, you're the unfaithful woman." In fact they were equal targets. The assassin drew two butcher's knives, slitting Van Gogh's throat to the spine with one and, with the other, pinning a letter to his chest. "Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you will break yourself to pieces on Islam," the letter, written in Dutch, declared amid a garbled discourse about a Jewish conspiracy in Holland. "You, oh America, will go down," it climaxed. "You, oh Europe, will go down ... You, oh Netherlands, will go down ... You, oh Hirsi Ali, will go down." In the aftermath of the murder, the already fraught issues of Dutch multiculturalism, and of community relations with the country's 900,000-strong Muslim population, became incendiary. Twelve mosques were attacked, and an Islamic primary school was twice set alight. Back in 2002, the murder of Pim Fortuyn had occasioned outrage, and a blunt reappraisal of immigration policy in the Netherlands. With Van Gogh's killing, however, the arguments went deeper, tearing into the central tenets of Dutch national identity. Mohammed Bouyeri, the man arrested for his killing, had been in many respects a model of integration: he was of Moroccan descent, but Dutch-born and Dutch-educated, and this cast him in the role of the enemy within. The popular leftwing historian Geert Mak views the response as a gross overreaction to a one-off event. Unlike the dignified response of Spaniards to the Madrid bombings, he says, "we have only one murder, and everybody goes crazy". It is possible that, as Mak puts it, Holland is "a small, provincial country," unable to bear the realities of globalisation, which has used a nasty murder as an excuse to conflate issues of Islam, immigration and security. But the country's problems are far from imaginary. Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali are not the only public figures to have been targeted with death threats. Amsterdam's Jewish mayor, Job Cohen - despite meticulous bridge-building with Muslim communities - also requires bodyguards; as does his Moroccan-born deputy, Ahmed Aboutaleb. Similarly singled out by Dutch Islamist radicals are the anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders, and the Dutch-Moroccan artist Rachid Ben Ali, whose work satirises the violence of extremists. In many ways, the Netherlands is a crucible case within Europe, because the issues surrounding immigration are so stark. For example, the economic argument deployed by both leftwing multiculturalists and free-market conservatives - that immigration revives aging populations, provides new labour resources, and generates entrepreneurial activity - simply does not apply in the Netherlands. There has been no overall economic benefit to population change since unskilled guest workers were invited to the Netherlands in the early 1970s. According to Paul Scheffer, a leading critic of multiculturalism and professor of urban sociology at Amsterdam university, up to 60% of first-generation Turkish and Moroccan populations are unemployed. "It's a huge failure," he says, "everyone can see that." Within a generation, the Netherlands has swung from blithe open-door immigration to anxious protectionism. During the 1990s, there was quite literary no immigration policy in the country, and a laissez-faire, multicultural orthodoxy reigned. Numbers of asylum seekers escalated annually from 3,500 in 1985 to over 43,000 in 2000 - pro rata among the highest in the EU. By 2001, 46% of the population of Amsterdam consisted of first- or second-generation immigrants. It is in the Netherlands that European multiculturalism, with its tendency to produce segregation, most dramatically flourished and died. It is important to be cautious of the Dutch figures. In the Netherlands, an immigrant is classified as anyone with one or more parents born abroad. But within a generation, the shift in population has by any calculation been large, rapid and difficult to handle. Perhaps the most remarkable sign of the acceleration of change is that two thirds of schoolchildren in Amsterdam now come from immigrant backgrounds. Add to this the fact that nearly 1 million of the Netherlands' 1.7 million immigrants are Muslim and it is not hard to see how issues of Islam and migration have become entangled. Which is why Hirsi Ali's full-frontal attacks on Islam generate such acute discomfort. The Netherlands, with an overall population of 16 million, has among the highest concentrations of Muslim inhabitants in the EU. Hirsi Ali argues that there is less a problem with migration in general, than with its Muslim component in particular, and that she should know, because she is herself a Muslim migrant. Hopes for a moderate Islam are only meaningful, she argues, if it is possible to chip away the theological brickwork - constructed, she believes, on a foundation of female oppression - which permeates the structure of the religion. But Islam, she says, is unable to endure criticism or change, and is essentially at odds with European values. With up to 20 million Muslims living in the EU, the journey she has taken in the past 16 years from Africa to Europe, from asylum seeker to politician, and from devotion to apostasy, has come to appear central to the story of the crisis of multiculturalism on the continent. This month, Time magazine selected her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world - an odd but remarkable acknowledgement for a 35-year-old Somali who four years ago was unknown, even in the Netherlands. An interesting indication of the extent to which Hirsi Ali needles people are the lurid epithets and insults she draws from across the political spectrum. While internet extremists lent her a quasi-legendary status as the "Wicked Infidel Mortadda," even a figure from the Dutch liberal left such as Geert Mak will reach for phrases such as "Somali princess" and "Joan of Arc" to explain her unsettling charisma. From a free-market perspective, the Economist rather oddly defines her as a cultural ideologue of the new right. Other commentators have dismissed her as a politician of rage, a self- hating orientalist, a liberal jihadist, and an enlightenment fundamentalist. While the name-calling tends to reveal more about Hirsi Ali's critics than it does about her, there is a more subtly personal line of attack that genuinely galls her. This is the idea that what she thinks and says is somehow born of the scars of a traumatised background. "Why are journalists obsessed with personal history?" she asks in her quiet, Africa-lilted English (one of six languages she speaks, including Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and Dutch). "From my background, being an individual is not something you take for granted. Here it is all you, me, I. There it is we, we, we. I come from a world where the word 'trauma' doesn't exist, because we are too poor. I didn't have an easy life compared to the average European. But compared to the average African, it wasn't all that bad. I know that to some people I am traumatised, that there is something wrong with me. But that just allows them not to hear what I say." The first biographical detail that those who have painted Hirsi Ali as a trauma victim point to is her extremely premature birth, shortly after the Somali government had been overthrown by Siad Barre. Her father had been jailed, and the family believed that the shock of this brought on the birth. Hirsi Ali was expected to die. "But I didn't die," she smiles. "I kept on living and crying. I got sick, and started crying, and I got sick again, and I started crying again - that's the story my mother told me. I remember bits and pieces of Somalia, with the memory of a child. I remember going to school and singing, and then my mother saying, 'When you go to school today, don't sing, because the songs that you sing are praise-songs for the man who locked up your father.' " She remembers Siad Barre's soldiers coming to the door one day and the tiny figure of her grandmother, knife in hand, standing up to the men and being tossed to the ground like a doll, in startling contravention of traditions of respect for older women as the men ransacked hidden supplies of food smuggled in by her mother. "And that's what I associate with Somalia," Hirsi Ali says, "the picture of strong women: the one who smuggles in the food, and the one who stands there with a knife against the army and says, 'You cannot come into the house.' And I became like that. And my parents and my grandmother don't appreciate that now - because of what I've said about the Qur'an. I have become them, just in a different way." >From the age of six or seven, Ayaan Hirsi's life became that of an exile, her family moving from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia and then, for 10 years, to Kenya. Cod-psychoanalysis might find other patterns of trauma in this journey, such as the time she received a beating from an imam for refusing to recite the Qur'an. But the problem for such an interpretation of Hirsi Ali is that a proper definition of trauma requires either blocking or repetition of memory, and the only people doing that have been her interviewers. Hirsi Ali corrects this oft-reported story, and turns it inside out. "He wasn't an imam," she says, "he was a mallim, a teacher, and I was a difficult girl. He caught me by the braids in my hair and began tossing my head against a wall, and then I heard a 'crack,' and he must have heard it as well, because he immediately stopped, gave me a warning, and went away. He was probably the one who was traumatised, because after that nobody wanted him back." Yet the one dark subject that Hirsi Ali's critics are really hinting at when they describe her "trauma" is the issue that she has now made a matter of policy in the Netherlands, which is to say, female circumcision. It is the issue that most offends Hirsi Ali's Muslim opponents; not because she has spoken out against the practice - plenty of Muslims have done that before - but because her critics insist that she has described it either as a universal feature of Muslim life, or one that is explicitly sanctioned by the Qur'an. Neither is the case. Rather, Hirsi Ali views it as a product of specific tribal practice combined with a broader cult of virginity, which is indeed upheld by the Qur'an (as it is by the Old Testament). It is a subject that, again, forces her back to her Somali childhood, if only to dispel cliches. "From experience, I would say it is mostly women trying to protect other women from pain," she explains. "Not physical pain, but the pain of people being suspicious that you are not a virgin. That is more traumatic, perhaps, than the physical pain. In tribal life, the only way a male, particularly high up in the clan, can give his name to someone else is if he knows for certain that it is his child. And the weak link is the woman. The one way to guarantee that a woman is not going to have other people's babies is if she remains a virgin. In Arab countries, which segregate men and women, they do it by keeping women in the house. But we were from a semi-desert area, where if, like my grandfather, you have nine daughters, you need the labour of women outside. So you cut off the clitoris of the woman, sew together what is left, and you know that she will not be seduced. It is a matter of control." In Hirsi Ali's case, her father had instructed her mother not to circumcise their daughters because, having studied in America, he had decided to reject the whole clan principle. But when her grandmother heard about this she was appalled and it was organised while her mother was away, when Hirsi Ali was about five. "As a child it is something you are proud of," Hirsi Ali says. "I remember the celebrations. I remember the goodies and the gifts. And I remember being caught by these two women - one of them my grandmother. But they couldn't find a woman to do it. They found a man, and fortunately for those girls circumcised by men, it's much milder. So I wasn't circumcised in the way that I should have been." Despite his opposition to female circumcision, Hirsi Ali's father, on his return from the US, contracted his daughter to marry a cousin living in Canada. "My father had been away for 11 years," Hirsi Ali laughs. "Who did he think he was, marrying me off? But because I also love and admire my father, I spoke to the man he wanted me to marry, and I asked him what kind of life we were going to have together. And he said, 'Well, you're going to have six sons for me.' And I told my father I didn't want this, and he said he couldn't go back on his word." When Hirsi Ali refused to attend, they carried out the ceremony without her. "Clan members came together, papers were signed, and I was married." That, very nearly, was Hirsi Ali's life settled. The only problem was how to get her into Canada, and the solution was to go via a cousin in Germany, who could organise the papers. Hirsi Ali spent two nights in Germany and then, on a whim, bolted. She took a train to the Netherlands, and walked out on her husband, her family and her culture. "I thought, if I don't try it now, I'll never know. I thought, if they discover me in Holland, and take me to Canada, then I'll live peacefully with my husband. But I had to try. And, I must admit, it was easy. You just had to take the train anywhere. And I asked for asylum under another name - my name is Ayaan Hirsi Magan, and I told them that my name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali." Hirsi Ali describes the process of her own immigration into the Netherlands when we next meet, this time in the Hague, where she is a member of parliament for the VVD liberal party, one of the three-party coalition currently in power. In 1992 - having deleted the story of her life in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya; and having gained entry as a single Somali woman fleeing danger - she was sent to an asylum seekers' centre in Leintern, in the municipality of Ede, which a decade later would become famous in the Netherlands as the place where the kids cheered the 9/11 attacks. At that time things were made comparatively easy for asylum seekers. She was designated as an A-status refugee, which allowed her to stay indefinitely (this designation is almost impossible to get now). She stayed in her centre for 11 months, doing cleaning jobs and helping other Somalis with their own procedures, translating for women who had been rejected by their families after losing their honour (virginity), translating for social services, and interviewing battered wives. She was not allowed a paid job, but housing and food were taken care of by the government, and when she left in 1993 to do a secretarial course, she was receiving 20-30 gilders a week from the state, as "pocket money". It is hard to gauge what Hirsi Ali's flight really cost her. Her father has since forgiven her, and told her that she is officially divorced (he still hopes that she will return to the Muslim fold), though at the time he wrote what she describes as "an extremely cruel letter," declaring that he would never have anything to do with her again. By contrast, the main difficulties Hirsi Ali encountered with the immigration system, were just dreary bureaucracy and the ponderous well-meaning labour officers who kept directing her to work she didn't want. The idea that she might go to university was dismissed so she called up a social academy herself, was allowed to enrol, gained a diploma and, in 1995, got a place at Leiden University to study political science. The choice of subject speaks for itself, she says. "I wanted to understand why all we asylum seekers were coming here, and why everything worked in this country, and why you could walk undisturbed through the streets at night, and why there was no corruption, and why on the other side of the world there was so much corruption and so much conflict." At university, Hirsi Ali's world-view was turned upside down. "It was like being in paradise," she says. "Imagine. Everybody is reasonable. Everybody is tolerant. Everybody is happy. Your biggest worries are, 'Will I get my points?' and 'Do I have a boyfriend?' and 'Did I party well last night?' And then you have vacations." Suddenly, she found herself able to earn money and travel freely. She went to China, wandered Europe, and returned to Africa. And her Muslim observances slowly fell away. She took off her headscarf, began eating during Ramadan, found herself a boyfriend and began to avoid other Muslims who reminded her of her fall. One day, some students declared they were going to take her drinking. "And I said, 'I can't; it's forbidden by God; I'll go to hell.' And they said, 'Wooah, that's cool!' And my first drink was a martini. After one glass, I was completely drunk." Hirsi Ali's frolic in the pastures of Dutch liberal education was not to last long, however. In 2000 she read an article by the well-known leftwing writer Paul Scheffer, entitled The Multicultural Drama, which was to mark the beginning of a convulsion in the Dutch immigration debate. Scheffer's argument was that unemployment among immigrant communities was bringing the Netherlands' welfare system to a point of crisis, and that the country's failure to integrate large numbers of new citizens was turning cultural diversity into a social problem. At the time, it was widely dismissed as racist scaremongering by the political classes of the then ruling Labour party. Hirsi Ali herself remembers reading Scheffer and thinking, "He doesn't live in the same country that I live in. He's exaggerating. And the unemployment statistics - living in Leiden, I couldn't see them." But shortly after leaving university, Hirsi Ali found herself researching precisely this issue for the Labour party. Working for a leftwing thinktank, she says, was a bit like an extension of student life, with everyone agreeing with each other. But the Labour party itself was increasingly divided over immigration, and the rising popularity of Pim Fortuyn was stripping away the party's support. "There were those who said we have to keep the welfare state intact, and we don't want newcomers taking the jobs of old labour members," Hirsi Ali recalls. "And there was the other side which said, no, we must accept other cultures." Unsurprisingly, the policy unit assigned its bright new Somali researcher to an immigration brief. No one expected her to come back with proposals for a reversal of 100 years of Dutch history. What Hirsi Ali found herself confronting was the central feature of social organisation in the Netherlands, known as "pillarisation". It is a principle that dates back to the 17th century when Amsterdam was Europe's busiest mercantile centre and when common sense dictated that, if business were to thrive, religious differences had to be set aside and antagonistic groups kept physically separate. Article 23 of the Dutch constitution, which established rights for the setting up of separate schools and institutions, is itself a central pillar of the Dutch system, and, in the 1960s, was conveniently reinterpreted as the standard of a new multicultural orthodoxy - officially expressed as "integration with maintenance of one's own identity". It was in this respect that Dutch society found itself in seeming harmony with the new Muslim populations who began to arrive from the 1970s - partly from the former colony of Surinam, but mostly from Morocco and Turkey. Muslims wanted their own schools and mosques, and the Dutch government happily provided for and funded them. Just as there had been Catholic, Protestant and secular "pillars" in the Netherlands, there could now be a Muslim one too. Hirsi Ali's recommendations to the Labour policy unit were blunt and radical: close all 41 Islamic schools, put a break on immigration and change article 23. Jaws hit the table. The reaction she got indicated how badly she had started trampling on taboos. Job Cohen, who would emerge as one of the key bridge-builders in Dutch-Muslim relations, suggested that Hirsi Ali focus on integration. Influenced by the events of September 11, however, she began to publish articles arguing that Islam was not capable of integrating into a society that was itself not very good at integration. Furthermore, she concluded, if you looked into the condition of women in Muslim communities you found an intractable problem, one which liberals and multiculturalists refused to address. "I called it the paradox of the left," she says. "On the one hand they support ideals of equality and emancipation, but in this case they do nothing about it; they even facilitate the oppression." The petite researcher who had been sent off to look into immigration had turned into a mighty handful, even before she started attracting death threats. In 2002 she accepted an invitation to stand as a member of parliament for the opposition VVD party and - disillusioned with the Dutch left - accepted. After the death of Fortuyn, Labour suffered a historic defeat at the polls. Hirsi Ali found herself in government, under guard and in the middle of a dispute about Islam and democracy which continues to rattle through Europe. While it may appear easy to dismiss Hirsi Ali as the migrant who has reacted against her "traumatic" background and become a reactionary as a result, it is only possible to do so without actually listening to her. This is what she says: "You have to understand why people move, the type of people that move, how they do it, the expectations involved. It is about being in a small place somewhere in the world and thinking 'I want out'. It's about coming here and ending up in a kitchen, and being exploited, and having the choice of going back, but deciding to stay. And then you have to discover why these people want to say. And what you discover does not make you a chauvinist pig. If you understand that, you can really understand what globalisation is about, and adapt and modify migration laws. "I am not against migration. It is simply pragmatic to restrict migration, while at the same time encouraging integration and fighting discrimination. I support the idea of the free movement of goods, people, money and jobs in Europe. But that will only work if universal human rights are also adopted by the newcomers. And if they are not, then you run of the risk of losing what you have here, and what other people want when they come here, which is freedom." And yet, for all that, Hirsi Ali has become associated with the politics of migration generally, what really interests her is Islam - specifically, the conflict between "universal" human rights and the theological rigidities of traditional religion. There are others in the Netherlands who support some of her broad aims, but reject her tactics. Haci Karacaer, the widely respected leader of the Dutch-Turkish Milli G�r�s organisation, agrees with her that "pillarisation" in the Muslim community needs to be broken up, just as it does in the Netherlands as a whole. He sympathises with her advocacy of women's rights. And he agrees with her also that fundamentalism is not being tackled properly from within. "The average Muslim, the moderate Muslim, doesn't speak," Karacaer says. "So you can't see the diversity in Islamic society in Europe. In Britain and France, it's better. There, Islamic society is much more differentiated." It is when Hirsi Ali universalises her attacks on Islam, Karacaer says, that she alienates those she should be winning over. "Her style has unnecessarily polarised a lot of things." So is Hirsi Ali tarring all Muslim cultures with one definition of the meaning of Islam? "People who ask me that question assume that geography is more important for Muslims than what is contained in the holy Qur'an. Of course the circumstances in which people live in Turkey are different from those in Morocco or Somalia. But when it comes to the relationship between men and women, in all these countries there is a red line of the woman being subordinate to the male. And most Muslim men justify this subordinacy with the Qur'an. There are so many meanings Europeans miss. We Muslims are brought up with the idea that there is just one relationship possible with God - submission. That's Islam: submission to the will of Allah. I want to bring about a different relationship, in which you say, 'Dear God, I would like to have a conversation with You.' Instead of submission, you get a relationship of dialogue. Let's just assume it's possible." The idea of dialogue with God, of challenging God, is a leitmotif threading its way through Hirsi Ali's declarations. And it may be this theme - the one that Protestantism, particularly in its Calvinist and Presbyterian manifestations, unleashed on Christianity - that drives her. What she is really talking about is reformation, but of a religion that has no church, no Caliphate. Hirsi Ali is an activist, for sure, but her targets are not so much political as theological. And what she wants to do now is to produce a follow-up to Submission - this time, the story of the men. She has just won a court case, brought by a group of Muslims aiming to prevent her going ahead with the project. The final hearing was a classically Dutch scene of strenuous consensus-building, in which the Muslims had done the proper civic thing by bringing their complaint to the courts, and where the judge rejected their attempt to inhibit artistic expression, but only after he had warned Hirsi Ali that she was pushing - albeit not crossing - the "boundaries of what is tolerable." It is painfully moving to think of this smart, quiet Somali woman, who looks so small walking away between her bodyguards, believing herself to be dangerous. But she is. Anyone who wants to work with her will have to calculate the risk. "I don't want somebody else to be murdered," she says. "But if I stop doing what I'm doing, it will be like another murder. That's the real trauma, perhaps, the thought of going through what happened to Theo van Gogh again. We told each other we would make part two, and the thing that keeps me going is the thought, 'I have to do it, I have to do it, I have to do it.'" The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1485433,00.html ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Give underprivileged students the materials they need to learn. 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