Re: Who are you?

Description: Born in a newly independent Somalia, Hirsi Ali discusses the clash of East and West.

Question: Who are you?

Transcript: My name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I am a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Transcript: I was born at a time, say, about a decade after the independence of Somalia.  What I have always carried with me around that time is the impression of my parents and their generation, which was, “Finally we’re free from the colonial yoke. We can determine our own destiny.  We’re going to have our own nation, our own flag, our own parliament, our own army.  There will be no pressure from outside.”  There was that.  And I was born in 1969 on the 13th of November, and just the month before that on the 21st of October there was a military coup; which means for that generation in Somalia that looked so much forward to independence, in less than 10 years that dream of freedom was thwarted and disappointed.  And that’s one part that I carry with me.  The second part that I carry is I grew up with the vocabulary of freedom, and shape your own destiny and that kind of thing.  That was on a national basis, but it affected me individually as well.  And also my father was thrown into jail, which made my future and that of my brother, and sister, and other half sisters different from children whose fathers were killed, or whose parents were killed, or who went into exile immediately.  My father escaped from jail and became a part of the opposition – Somali opposition – in Ethiopia.  And finally when he escaped jail, he went to Saudi Arabia, my mother went to Saudi Arabia and we ended up there.  And I’ve always had the pull on the one hand towards the west representing my father.  He was educated in Italy and here in the United States, and he was all about individual freedoms and democracy and that kind of thing . . .  sort of modernity.  And my mother, who after she had left her nomadic life at the age of 19, had gone to Aden, was very much influenced by the Arab-Islamic way of life.  And going to Saudi Arabia, for her, was getting as close as possible to Allah, and the prophet, and the holy house and so on.  And she was very happy that one year that we were there in Saudi Arabia.  So that is as far as surroundings shape the part of your age . . . the part of your life that is dependent on others, that was the context that I came out of.

Question: What role has Islam played in your life?

Transcript: I would like to make a distinction between age zero to about 15 or 16 years, before I was . . . before I came in touch with a woman called . . . we called Sister Aziza in my secondary school in Kenya and the time after that.  Before I met Sister Aziza, the Islam of my family was not political.  So I do not remember either my father or my mother saying that a society has to be . . . sharia should be the rule of a country or a society – with one exception.  In the one year that we were in Saudi Arabia, there was no distinction between a secular sphere and, you know, let’s say the realm of Caesar and the realm of God.  These were intertwined in Islam.  And in the one year that we were in Saudi Arabia, we lived according to sharia, and the state was run through Islamic law.  So the beheadings, for instance, amputations every Friday, the stonings, that kind of thing, that happened.  And there was a distinction.  When atrocities in Somalia were carried out by a secular dictatorship such as Mohammed Siad Barre, my mother would denounce, condemn those atrocities.  But when atrocities were carried out in the state of Saudi Arabia – things were amputated, people’s heads were cut off – that was sharia law.  That was something that the victim deserved because he violated the law of God.  But we left that behind us when we left Saudi Arabia and went into Ethiopia.  My life in Ethiopia and Kenya until my 16th year was, I would just say, praying five times a day.  It was very . . . Islam was there socially and culturally.  It wasn’t a political issue.  When I met in 1985 Sister Aziza, a different kind of Islam is introduced, and a different meaning also from the one I knew from my family.  It was a political Islam.  It was very clear.  It was an individual choice.  It was about what she referred to as an inner jihad struggling to . . . simply to meet the obligations – to make sure that you prayed five times instead of three times or two times, and fast all of the Ramadan days, all 30 of them, not half a day as I used to do, or a week, something like that.  It’s just adhering to the rules every day; the rules that the halal had permitted, and trying to abstain from what’s haram, or what is forbidden.  This is reinforced within the Somali community.  Kenya is a very multicultural place.  And Sister Aziza was not a Somali, but in the Somali space there were figures like this man we call ________.  He would fast for 100 days, and he introduced the same kind of radical, political, all-consuming Islam that divides the world into “we” and “they”.  And the divisions started within the Islamic community, so we were  . . . those of us who followed the rules _________, those other Muslims who were neglectful of the rules were considered to be non-Muslims, hypocrites.  We had all sort of negative attributes for them, and they extended to the non-Muslims.

Question: Who was your greatest influence when you were young?

Transcript: My grandmother represented what we generally would call traditional, nomadic Somali life and the values of that tradition – mainly tribal; very much “we” oriented, clan oriented.  She taught me bloodline, because that is your . . .  You cannot survive without your bloodline.  And she taught us all these anecdotes about how to survive in the desert; which animals to fear and which animals not to fear; which animals to hunt and eat.  And she was very superstitious.  When I got ill or my sister got ill, she had no access or knowledge of modern medicine.  So she dealt with the challenges in life with diseases, with drugs, she had superstitious explanations for it.  She was a Muslim, but a very different Muslim than, for instance, Sister Aziza.  Her Islam was very much diluted with her own cultural, traditional superstitions.  For instance, she thought it was a good thing to celebrate the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, which later Sister Aziza and ________ would say that was a bad thing to do.  She could not read the Koran.  She had learned a few verses by heart, just enough to pray.  But she didn’t allow us to put the Koran on the ground.  She would make us kiss the Koran and put it on the highest edifice, and clean our hands before we touched it and anything like that.  So she was just more of a traditional, Somali, nomadic value system.

Recorded on: 8/15/07