The Many Faces Of Islam

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It wasn't the first time Hirsi Ali fled persecution. The daughter of a leading Somali opposition leader, she was born just a few weeks after the coup by Mohammed Siad Barre in 1969 and was forced into exile with her family when she was 10. She was brought up as a traditional Muslim girl in Kenya, although her father was progressive enough to insist that his daughter receive an education. At 22, confronted with an arranged marriage to a distant cousin in Canada ("I was repelled by his comment that I would bear him six sons," she says), she decided to escape to the Netherlands.

Right from the start she felt pressure to conform from the Somali community in the Netherlands. But she resisted. "I wanted to be part of Dutch society, to be financially independent, take off my headscarf and drink alcohol," she says. In the spring of this year she finally admitted to herself that she was no longer a Muslim, and she started speaking out. But she quickly found herself caught in a cultural divide. "As a liberal society, the Dutch are against the oppression of the individual," she says. "But when it comes to ethnic minorities, multiculturalism dictates that we have to respect practices in other cultures that oppress the individual." Last week her book, De Zoontjesfabriek (The Son Factory), which presents her views on women, Islam and integration, was published.

Hirsi Ali's adoption of the VVD marks a very public defection from the Labor Party, for whom she worked as a political scientist. Her departure was prompted by the "politically correct" taboos that dominate progressive left-wing circles when it comes to tackling the oppression of Muslim women. But her critics see Hirsi Ali as a political opportunist who's using her newfound fame to ease her way into politics. Hirsi Ali denies it. "I was not looking for a cause, but all of a sudden I am in the middle of one," she says. "I was asked to take part in a TV discussion to mark international women's day and was shocked that the Moroccan woman on the show would not accept that Islam oppresses women. I couldn't believe it. After all, Roman Catholics criticize the Pope. Why can't Muslims be critical about their faith?

"It's possible for a woman to be emancipated and be a Muslim if she sticks to Islam as a spiritual belief," she continues. "But I reject the Koran when it says girls must stay home and that it is right to beat women if they disobey their husbands. We have been led to believe that we have to preserve cultural practices that clash with Western norms." To change that, Hirsi Ali would scrap the subsidies given to Muslim organizations in the Netherlands, ban Islamic schools and include empowerment classes in the compulsory integration courses that all immigrants must follow.

"Living in the Netherlands has made it possible for me to realize that men and women are equal," Hirsi Ali says, "and given me the opportunity to take advantage of higher education. But it also made me ask why more Muslim women here are not doing the same." — By ABI DARUVALLA/The Hague

Anne Sofie Roald,
48, Sweden
Most angry young students join marches or sign petitions. Anne Sofie Roald took the veil. When she discovered Islam at the University of Oslo in the early '80s, the faith seemed to offer all that she sought — fellowship, moral grounding, even ideological compatibility. "I was thinking about how the First World was exploiting the Third World," she says. As she read the works of such anti-Western thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, "I saw my ideas," though she now admits the writings are "apologetic literature" for a brand of Islam more radical than her own. She ventured into Oslo's Muslim community, and the believers, most of them Pakistani, embraced her. "I asked questions, they gave answers," she says. "They even gave me keys to their flats. It was strange. Norwegians are more distant."

Now an associate professor of migration and ethnic relations at Sweden's Malmö University, Roald has seen attitudes toward her faith shift from indifference to begrudging tolerance mixed with mostly quiet disdain. "Scandinavians want to be inclusive, but it's difficult," she says, especially after Sept. 11. Thanks in part to Osama bin Laden, Roald and other Muslims unfairly bear what she calls "guilt by association."

She often feels the judgment of others the instant they see her headscarf. "When I became a Muslim, I didn't know you were supposed to wear the hijab. Most Muslims in Norway didn't," Roald recalls. "I thought people just wore it when it was windy." After a friend prodded her to study the subject more closely, she concluded that she ought to veil. This external sign of faith seemed harder for her nominally Lutheran family to accept than her new beliefs. Even today, "my mother feels I am singling myself out," she says. "She's embarrassed."

But Roald is not. As a convert, she says, she is so self-conscious about other issues, such as doubts about her objectivity as a researcher on religion, that she doesn't worry about people's views on sartorial matters. Though she deems Norway and Sweden "maybe the best places for Muslims to live" in the West, the mood has changed. Islam has become more politicized. As Palestinian militant groups, for example, have added religious overtones to battle cries that were once mostly secular and nationalistic, "people have started holding all Muslims responsible for what those fighters did — and what Sudan did and what bin Laden did," Roald says. Some Muslims have reacted by retreating into the safety of "the idea of us vs. them."

At the office, where she's studying the role of religious minorities in the modern nation-state, she feels as if she has to "work four times as hard to show my credibility because people are only perceived as objective if they think like the majority." Since Sept. 11, she has also seen more public criticism of Islam. Following a talk Roald gave recently at Gothenburg University, she recalls an audience member saying: "'Islam is the root of all the evil in the world.' He wasn't rational, but nobody in the audience responded. They just sat there."

How do you make sure that people don't just sit there any more? She points to the media — "The more they are critical, the more the people will be too" — and to government. She believes programs like language lessons should be bolstered to help "people to feel a part of society." But Muslims have to do their bit too. Roald broke off ties with non-Muslim friends after her conversion. "I regret it," she says. "The only way for Muslims to succeed in this society is to be part of it" — her Palestinian-born husband is a local councilor in Malmö.

Hopes also rest on the next generation. Roald's three teenage children mix comfortably with both Muslims and non-Muslims. "They have the religious way of Islam and the Norwegian view of society, which means I give them space and freedom." It surprises some non-Muslims that these home truths transcend sectarian lines, she says. "None of us want our children to be druggies. Most don't want our girls sleeping with boys when they are 15." We just have to lift our own veils — of stereotype and preconception — to see. — By JEFF CHU