Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist detractor of Islam and a former member of the Dutch Parliament, is lauded in some quarters and lambasted in others for rejecting her Muslim heritage and condemning the religion’s treatment of women.
She escaped childhood beatings, an arranged marriage to a stranger and extremists who killed her documentary-film collaborator, Theo van Gogh, in Amsterdam in 2004.
When poet Rita Dove made the introduction at the Anisfield-Wolf ceremony, she compared the 38-year-old Hirsi Ali to the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. Ronn Richard, executive director of the Cleveland Foundation, which administers the awards, said Hirsi Ali’s prize was kept secret to protect both her and members of the audience.
Some of the 600 celebrants gasped, then the audience rose to encircle Hirsi Ali with applause.
The soft-spoken Somali-born author came from behind the curtain in the Bolton Theatre of the Cleveland Play House. She smiled and nodded, named the winner for best nonfiction book for her memoir, “Infidel.”
“I’m honored, humbled, feel encouraged and acknowledged,” she said. “I am very, very grateful for this award.
“Bigotry is not only a white man’s disease,” she said. “It’s a universal disease, and the only way to get rid of it is through self-examination. And there is not self-examination if there is no self,” a reference to what Hirsi Ali sees as the subjugation of women in the Muslim world.
In “Infidel,” an international best seller, Hirsi Ali tells her life story, how she came to work for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and lives in a secret location today.
She began as the daughter of a Somali political dissident, bolted from a forced marriage at age 22 and sought political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992.
Hirsi Ali writes that she wondered how the Dutch built a peaceful prosperity unheard of in Islamic countries and why their police require no bribes and the bureaucrats are competent, unlike those she knew and worked among in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia. She wanted the answers so intently that she learned the Dutch language, cleaning buildings to pay for university courses to earn a political science degree.
Apologizing for her stumbling voice in the dim light, Hirsi Ali read several “Infidel” passages addressing these questions. On the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, she explained how those attacks caused her to abandon Islam.
After a militant murdered van Gogh, the director of the documentary she wrote called “Submission,” he stabbed a death threat targeting Hirsi Ali onto her friend’s body.
“Yes, it is a lonely journey,” she said. “But you overcome it. If you get to the plateau where you no longer have to survive and can start living again — meet people, exchange stories — a bit of that loneliness is relieved. And you appreciate life even more.”
She looked pleased to sit beside the fiction winners, Junot Diaz for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and Mohsin Hamid for “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” as well as lifetime achievement winner William Melvin Kelley, a black arts movement novelist.
