Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Read Free Book Online Page B

2001, I would have told you I was living as a Muslim. Yet even though I still thought of myself as a Muslim, I developed a lifestyle not much different from that of an ordinary Dutch woman in her twenties. I prioritized study and work over worship; when I made future plans I dropped the inshallah (God willing) from my speech. In my free time I pursued fun and recreation.
    In addition to neglecting prayer, fasting, and the prescribed Muslim attire for women (the hijab), I proceeded to violate at least two of the six major Qur’anic hudood restrictions. The hudood prescribe fixed punishments for the consumption of alcohol, illegal sexual intercourse (fornication and adultery), apostasy, theft, highway robbery, and falsely accusing someone of illicit sexual relations. For five years I lived together with my boyfriend, an infidel, out of wedlock, and even talked of having children under that arrangement. And I consumed wine seemingly with the same nonchalance as my Dutch friends.
    In reality, though, I was leading a double life. I suffered frequent bouts of guilt and self-condemnation, feeling sure that I was doomed. These feelings were always set off by contact with fellow Muslims—in particular, individuals who took it upon themselves vocally to “command right and forbid wrong,” one of the central tenets of Islam (about which more later). My solution was to avoid such people as much as possible, even the Muslims who quietly disapproved. Avoidance was my main strategy to deal with the terrible dissonance between the faith that I purported to believe in and the way I actually lived. It was not easy, but I got better at evasion and, in the years before 9/11, I achieved a kind of peace of mind.
    In the months following 9/11, however, it became impossible for me to maintain that fragile balance. I could not overlook the central role the terrorists had attached to the Prophet Muhammad as their source of inspiration, and I was soon openly participating in the debate over Islam’s role in the terror acts. When Dutch interviewers directly asked me on live radio and television if I was a Muslim, I minced my words of reply.
    Finally, after much agonizing, I resolved my inner conflict by rejecting the claim that God is the author of the Qur’an; by rejecting Muhammad as a moral guide; and by accepting the view that there is no life after death and that God is created by mankind and not the other way around. In doing so I violated the most serious of all the hudood restrictions. But there seemed no other option open to me. If I could not submit to Islam, I had to become an apostate.
    Yet it would be misleading to suggest that it was 9/11 that led me to question my faith as a Muslim. That was just the catalyst. The more profound cause of my crisis of faith was my exposure prior to 2001 to the foundation of Western thought that values and cultivates critical thinking.
    When I was admitted to the University of Leiden, I expected to be presented with a single narrative of events and their significance and one explanation for why everything had happened as it did. Instead, the professors began every course with a central question; spent a lot of time on definitions and their importance; then presented key thinkers and their critics over time. My job as a student was to grasp the central question; to learn about the thinkers, their theories of power, political elites, mass psychology and sociology, and public policy; the methods by which they got to their conclusions; their critics and their methods of criticism. The point of all these exercises was to learn to improve on old ways of doing things through critical thinking. We were graded not just on our factual knowledge, but on our ability to scrutinize any given idea. In this context religion was just another idea, another belief system, another hypothesis, another theory. A critical approach to the words of Jesus was to be no different from a critical approach to the words of Plato or