Infidel (2007) (edit title/settings)

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• Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The main character; a brave and intelligent woman who struggles through the hardships she faces and breaks away from her religion and family.
• Asha Artan: Ayaan's mother. A devout Muslim, a strong woman who raises her children, especially her daughters, with a strong hand.
• Hirsi Magan: Ayaan's father. He attended Columbia University in the US and returned to Somalia to fight Siad Barré regime. His political activities took his family to Saudia Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. He was a enlightened man who did not want his daughters circumcised.
• Grandma: Ayana maternal grandmother, belonging to a nomadic clan, raised in the desert of Somalia. A staunch traditionalist and Muslim, she advocated many practices that the reader would find misogynist, outdated, racist and barbaric.
• Haweya: Ayaan's sister. Very smart, stubborn and willful person.
• Mahad: Ayaan's older brother. Mostly a bully in their youth, their mother's favorite and raised without the heavy hand their Mother showed towards her daughters.
• Aziza: One of Ayaan's teacher at the Muslim Girls Secondary School in Nairobi. Young, beautiful and very devout. She was very influential in Ayaan's development of faith in her teen years.
• Theo Van Gogh: A descendant of Vincent van Gogh, a Dutch man with strong political views and proponent of free expression. He helped Ayann make the short film "Submission", which criticized Islam's treatment of women.

Quotes edit see section history

• “This book is dedicated to my family and also to the millions and millions of Muslim women who have had to submit.”

• “The message of this book, it if must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.”

  Ayann Hirsi Ali

• “Get it right," my grandmother warns, shaking a switch at me. "The names will make you strong. They are your bloodline. if you honor them, they will keep you alive. If you dishonor them, you will be forsaken. You will be nothing. You will lead a wretched life and die alone.”

• “People accuse me to having internalized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people?”

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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• The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

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• Most Muslims never delve into theology, and we rarely read the Quran; we are taught it in Arabic, which most Muslims can’t speak. As a result, most people think that Islam is about peace. It is from these people, honest and kind, that the fallacy has arisen that Islam is peaceful and tolerant.

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• Every society that is still in the rigid grip of Islam oppresses women and also lags behind in development. Most of these societies are poor; many are full of conflict and war. Societies that respect the rights of women and their freedom are wealthy and peaceful.

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• By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.

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• When people say that the values of Islam are compassion, tolerance, and freedom, I look at reality, at real cultures and governments, and I see that it simply isn’t so. People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist. It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so.

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• I found myself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document. It is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the men who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad died. And it is a very tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.

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• I think now that this obsession with identifying racism, which I saw so often among Somalis too, was really a comfort mechanism, to keep people from feeling personally inadequate and to externalize the causes of their unhappiness.

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• The kind of thinking I saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hypocrisy, and double standards. It relies on the technological advances of the West while pretending to ignore their origin in Western thinking. This mind-set makes the transition to modernity very painful for all who practice Islam.

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• Life is better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state. To accept subordination and abuse because Allah willed it — that, for me, would be self-hatred.

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• However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Mogadishu
• Nairobi
• Kenya
• Leiden
• Saudi Arabia
• Ethiopia
• Netherlands

Organizations edit see section history

• Muslim Brotherhood: The Society of the Muslim Brothers (often simply الإخوان Al-Ikhwān, The Brotherhood or MB) is the largest political opposition organization in many Arab states. The group is the world's oldest and largest Islamic political group,and the "world's most influential Islamist movement".The Brotherhood has as its slogan "Islam is the solution". It was founded in 1928 in Egypt by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood).
• Somali Salvation Democratic Front: a group opposition the authoritarian regime of Mohamed Siad Barre

First Sentence edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• women's rights: Describe this theme.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2008)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: DJ292.H57 A3 2007
• Dewey: 949.2073092

Notes for Parents edit see section history

This book is a MUST for high school age students who are developing their own ideas about any Faith, Politics, their World View and personal responsibility. Too stark for Middle schoolers (even those able to handle the topics intelllectuallly) but an inspiration to thoughtful young people who have no trouble questioning authority and the staus quo.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Leaders & Notable People › Political
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Specific Groups › Women
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Islam

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Wikipedia: Learn more about this book at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

More Books Like This edit see section history