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 "A woman alone is like a piece of sheep fat in the sun," my grandmother told us. "Everything will come and feed on that fat. Before you know it, the ants and insects are crawling all over it, until there is nothing left but a smear of grease."- Ayaan Hirsi Ali ABOUT THE BOOK: Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most controversial women on earth. For years, she has been forced to live in hiding; her life has been threatened numerous times; an anti-Koran script that she wrote provoked the assassination of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh; and a dispute over her citizenship indirectly brought down the Dutch government. This memoir about her family's travails living under strict fundamentalist Islamic precepts tracks the evolution of a world-changing radical feminist.[via Goodreads ] If you are a Somali woman you must learn to tell yourself that God is just and all-knowing and will reward you in the Hereafter. Meanwhile, everyone who knows about your patience and endurance will applaud your father and mother on the excellence of your upbringing. Your brothers will be grateful to you for preserving their honor. They will boast to other families about your heroic submission. And perhaps, eventually, your husband's family will appreciate your obedience, and your husband may one day treat you as a fellow human being.If in the process of being baarri you feel grief, humiliation, fatigue, or a sense of everlasting exploitation, you hide it. If you long for love and comfort, you pray in silence to Allah to make your husband more bearable. Prayer is your strength. Nomadic mothers must try to give their daughters this skill and strength called baarri. A woman who is baarri is like a pious slave. She honors her husband's family and feeds them without question or complaint. She never whines or makes demands of any kind. She is strong in service, but her head is bowed. If her husband is cruel, if he rapes her and then taunts her about it, if he decides to take another wife, or beats her, she lowers her gaze and hides her tears. And she works hard, faultlessly. She is a devoted, welcoming, well-trained work animal. This is baarri. - Ayaan Hirsi Ali
A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you. In Islam, becoming an individual is not a necessary development; many people, especially women, never develop a clear individual will. You submit: that is the literal meaning of the word islam: submission. The goal is to become quiet inside, so that you never raise your eyes, not even inside your mind. - [ Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali ] ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ayaan Hirsi Ali born Ayaan Hirsi Magan; is a Somali-Dutch feminist activist, writer, politician and founder of the women's rights organisation the AHA Foundation. She is the daughter of the Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo van Gogh's movie S ubmission led to death threats, as well as to the assassination of Theo van Gogh.When she was eight, Hirsi Ali's family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet in 2006. As of 2011 Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and has been living in the United States. In 2005, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards including a free speech award from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Swedish Liberal Party's Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship. [via Wikipedia ] It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just ayoung girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown. ★ Recommendation Level: The Highest |
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