Ayaan Hirsi Ali

[tammyswofford]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17204802/site/newsweek/from/ET/

This link was sent to my e mail. This regards Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her recycled book, retitled "Infidel" for an American audience. It is now number six on the N.Y. Times best seller list.

What are the concerns of American Muslims regarding this book and how is Ms. Ali viewed among Muslim women in America? She has renounced Islam for herself, yet is not at peace with her life, it seems.

Although I have not read her book, and find it a waste of my time, I have followed her story when she resided in The Netherlands. But for my part I have some concerns. Her style of presentation is evocative and Balkanizing. It is deconstructive rather than constructive. I also wonder how much of her story is not really about Islam, rather her own family and possibly cultural dsyfunction?

The Somali Muslim population in the U.S. has engaged two very public displays in the name of Islam, which have received public notice. It was a group of Somali employees, coming through a hiring agency for contract labor who sued Dell Computers in Round Rock, Tx. for freedom to leave an assembly production line to pray. They lost their suit. The Minneapolis airport is going into hearings to try to resolve the conflict of a bloc of Somali cab drivers who will not transport passengers with alcohol, a legally acquired purchase in our airports in America. So is the status of the practice of Islam in Somalia much more tribally-based, with traditions not in line with the majority practice of Islam? I do know that one of your schools of jurisprudence does allow for alcohol. Other traditions based on Ahadith forbid it, using laws derived from qiyaas. (ex. Abu Dawud,English translation vol.3, pp1043-4, no 3673

So what of Ayaan Hirsi Ali? It appears she has made her story an industry, and it is a means of support for her. How will she effect your community and our perceptions in America?

R/ Tammy Swofford

[Arnold Yasin Mol]

I agree with you Tammy,

Ayaan Hirschi Ali has been caught on so many lies in The Netherlands, she fled to America. Nobody really took her serious anymore.

She tried to represent Somali Islam as being the same as mainstream Islam. She was invited many times to conferences with Muslims in Holland but denied. She doesn't want to solve things, she wants to provoke and let people think she is a 'victim' of Islam.

She has lied about her youth, as a tv-show showed how her brother explains she never experienced war or hardship, that she wasn't forced into marriage but accepted it herself so she could flee her family.