From Islam to America

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  So Rita and I had a warm working relationship. We had occasional chats on the phone; we exchanged information before a debate; we shared meals; and sometimes we met for drinks.

  When our party leader, Gerrit Zalm, stepped down in 2006, Rita decided to campaign for the post. She was running against Mark Rutte, a boyishly attractive, much younger man who was considered a rising star in the party. Just before Parliament broke up for spring break, I was with her in her office, talking about policy. The conversation veered to politics, a very different thing, and she asked me to support her publicly, a request that made me uncomfortable. Gerrit Zalm and Jozias van Aartsen, another leading Liberal, had asked all the members of our party to refrain from openly endorsing either of the candidates in order to avoid making public the splits that had begun spreading through the ranks. Consensus is a sacred article of faith in Holland, and although the media love any sign of dissension and will seize on it and amplify it with glee, any kind of public disagreement within a political party is frowned upon by party leaders, who consider it unprofessional and damaging to the party’s goals.

  I told Rita, “I am not doing any public endorsements. You know what Gerrit and Jozias will say.”

  Rita’s smile seemed forced. “Come on, Ayaan, don’t give me that! Since when have you respected what Gerrit and Jozias have to say?”

  Shifting my weight, I reached for my drink. “You know, there’s enough tension between me and Jozias. Gerrit has been very patient with me. I’m not looking for trouble.”

  Rita countered, “Ayaan, you know it’s not about me. It’s about the people. They’re angry. When I go around the country, they take me into their homes, they tell me about their problems. It’s not just the welfare state and globalization, all these lofty themes. It’s about trash on the street. It’s about your daughter being raped. It’s about seeing your earnings disappear. They’re suffering. These are the men and women who voted for Pim Fortuyn, and now that he’s dead they’re politically homeless. Jozias and Gerrit won’t say so in public, but they’re endorsing Rutte. Do you think Rutte is capable of getting that vote for our party?”

  I wanted to tell her what I really thought, which was that she and Rutte were both unqualified for the job. They were both beginners in politics (as I was), and neither seemed to have any real clue about how they wanted to change the country; they seemed driven by personal ambition and nothing more. The man I favored as candidate, Henk Kamp, had decades of political experience and had run two ministries. He was a far more skillful political operator than Rita, and yet there was humility about him, and a quiet intelligence. I felt that it was very unfortunate that he refused to run. But I did not want to offend Rita by saying so. I began rambling through a rather uncomfortable soliloquy about the nature of Dutch politics when Rita interrupted me, her gaze now steady. “I’ve lived here all my life. I know this country better than you do.”

  I nodded and managed to conceal the instant pain of exclusion this remark triggered. Rita was not the only one who said this sort of thing. People who disagreed with me often invoked their native Dutchness, their instinctively greater understanding of all Dutch problems. It’s an easy way out: you are the outsider, I am the insider, therefore I win.

  Her attitude shifted from charming seduction to indignant impatience that I would not give in and give her my support. This job needed to be done—she repeated the phrase more than once—and I was preventing her from doing it.

  She grew more abrasive. She confided to me her tension with our colleague Piet Donner, the minister of justice, and the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, representatives of what she saw as a small clique, mainly men, who had attended the same universities, belonged to the same fraternities, spoke with the same accent, and who ultimately, though they might identify with different political ideologies, served only the interests of their common class. Rita often attributed any hostility to her as the snooty, entitled disdain of the upper classes for a woman who did not hesitate to put her hands in the muck of real life, so I had heard this line before. It had some truth to it.

  Pim Fortuyn had called the political leadership class of Holland the regenten, the regents, who control real power behind the scenes. The regenten form an elite triangle: the upper class and royalty (although Dutch people are fond of calling Holland a classless society, that is far from reality), leaders of the unions, and directors of corporations. These three groups have divergent interests, but their prominent leaders gather in five-star hotels, elite clubs, and government institutions, and once in a while the queen opens her palace to them. These men and women—mostly men—are immersed in the culture of Holland’s celebrated consensus politics. Whenever there is divergence among them, their positions are staked out at a safe distance, in the media; journalists will report excitedly that there is an impasse. Then, after this ritual saber rattling by proxy, the parties at dispute will withdraw into whatever chamber is available and emerge days later waving an agreement: the breach is healed. Powerful members in all corners of this triangle are trained in academia and the media; it is not at all unusual to see the head of a faculty become a minister, the editor in chief of a newspaper become the head of a faculty and then be appointed mayor.

  Pim Fortuyn was a member of the regenten class, a professor in Rotterdam who made a career out of writing books and articles. Rita did not belong to the political class and they disdained her for it. I did not belong either, but I had a degree of friendly support from high-ranking party members and our party’s sage, Frits Bolkestein. This probably made Rita suspicious.

  It was time for me to leave. “Rita,” I said, “let me think about it.” My discomfort was acute, for we both knew that, in Dutch politics, this was a clear message, meaning I’ve already made up my mind, and I’m not going to endorse you.

  It crossed my mind that I might lose her political support, but that didn’t matter very much. I had already decided to leave politics; in fact I had even confided to Rita that I didn’t plan to run again for Parliament in the next general election.

  When I left the room we kissed each other three times on the cheek, as is usual in Holland, and wished each other a happy spring break.

  I am certain that Rita knew, and had known for a long time, that I had lied on my application for refugee status when I was twenty-two. Even if she hadn’t read the many interviews and statements I’d given in various local, national, and international newspapers and magazines, in which I had freely admitted the fact, we had spoken of it several times. The last time was just a few days after that uncomfortable conversation in her office. I had phoned to ask her to reverse her decision to deport an eighteen-year-old girl from Kosovo, Taida Pasic, who was due to take her final high school exams.

  “She lied,” Rita told me. “My hands are tied.”

  “But Rita, you don’t understand,” I pleaded. “Almost all asylum seekers lie. That’s how the system is. I lied too.”

  Rita was adamant. She said—and I suppose it should have been a warning to me—“If I had been the minister when you applied for asylum, then I would have deported you as well.”

  A couple of weeks later, during the parliamentary spring break, the television program Zembla aired a documentary that prominently featured the fact that I had lied on my refugee application. Just a fortnight away from the election for our party leadership, Rita let it be known that she was now investigating my immigration file and that my status in Holland—not only as a member of Parliament but as a citizen—was in doubt. A few days later she announced that she was stripping me of my Dutch citizenship. To be precise, she claimed I had never had Dutch citizenship in the first place because I had applied for it under false pretences.

  Iron Rita’s decision to render me stateless was perceived by many of my colleagues in Parliament (even many who rarely agreed with my policy decisions) as arbitrary, vengeful, and even downright strange. There was certainly something of the action of a banana republic about it. After weeks of very un-Dutc
h furor in Parliament, the press, and the wider public, the prime minister, along with the cabinet ministers and an overwhelming majority of the members of Parliament, forced Rita to reinstate my citizenship. She finally did so, but only on the condition that I sign a letter stating that I had lied to her about lying about my asylum application. Signing that letter made me lie for a second time, but I had to sign; otherwise, Rita could not save face.

  But consensus could not so easily be restored. The D66 party, a small pseudo-libertarian party that was also a member of the governing coalition, deemed this procedure outrageous and demanded that Rita resign or D66 would leave the coalition and the government would fall. She would not resign. She was forced into this situation by a trait of character that was also, at other times, her strength: her inflexibility, which was also an inability to adapt to circumstances or admit a mistake.

  The government fell. New nationwide elections were scheduled. Rita lost the race for party leader. A few months later the VVD lost ground in the new elections; it could no longer claim any seats in the cabinet. In September 2007, after she had criticized the party’s “invisible position” on immigration, she was expelled from the Liberal Party by her old rival, Mark Rutte, who was now the party leader, and from that charmed, smooth-sided triangle that is the Dutch political establishment. She founded her own party, which she named “Proud of the Netherlands.” Its public support has slowly dwindled. Rita has become a political outcast.

  I learned an important lesson in this about the nature of Dutch politics. Rita, I realized, had violated the most sacred taboo of the political elite, the regenten, not so much by what she said as by the way she said it. A consensus society like Holland’s requires a great deal of conformity: the tone, flavor, timing, and context that you choose to articulate your message will make or break you. When individuals from groups that historically have had no power are invited into the ranks of the regentem, they are taught to express their wishes and grievances in the same way that the regenten do. In Holland you must negotiate and compromise; your freedom of speech is limited by the boundaries of what is viewed by the regenten as acceptable. This was always going to be hard for someone from Rita’s class and temperament, for she could not bear to compromise, and she did not even recognize those subtle perimeters of conformity. Her criticism of immigrants, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the issue, seemed unacceptably rude, parochial, or simply racist.

  * * *

  Another lesson I learned was that it was time, once again, to pack my bags and move on. So I left Holland soon after the crisis about my citizenship erupted. As if to compound the insult of losing my citizenship, my neighbors in the condominium in which I lived had recently managed to win a court case to have me evicted because, they said, my security detail was invasive and the death threats against me were a danger to them too. Now I was not just stateless; I was also homeless. Instead of being perceived as contributing to solving the problems posed by massive waves of foreign immigrants into Dutch society—which I had sought to do—I was now seen as part of the problem.

  In fact I had been exploring the possibility of leaving Holland for my own self-preservation even before Rita struck. In Holland I had become too recognizable for my own sanity. Earlier that year I had made up my mind to try to move to the United States, where I thought I would have more freedom, and I had asked a friend of mine, a former U.S. diplomat who is now a university professor, to help me find a job. I had already scheduled a visit to the United States during the parliamentary spring break in order to promote a book of essays I had just published, The Caged Virgin, and my friend had proposed to introduce me to people at think tanks of various persuasions on the East Coast, including the Brookings Institution and RAND, and Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and George Washington universities.

  Everyone I met there was effusively polite, but I felt their support for me and my ideas was tentative. The man who interviewed me at the Brookings Institution seemed overly concerned with the possibility that I might offend Arab Muslims and therefore frustrate a series of programs they had just initiated in Doha, Qatar. Then my friend took me to visit the American Enterprise Institute.

  The role of American think tanks like the AEI is widely misunderstood. Like their counterparts at liberal and libertarian institutions, such as Brookings and the CATO Institute, AEI scholars do not write policy, they publish their views on policy. These views are often quite diverse. But over the years I had met many people in the media who see the AEI as an arch-conservative club, and I do not consider myself a conservative. (My reasons for not being one are the same as those convincingly put forward by Friederich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty: most essentially, I do not wish to conserve the status quo but to alter it, radically.) So I went to see the AEI with some qualms.

  To my surprise, they instantly offered me full support. There was no discussion about what I could and could not say. I was pressed on the need to have empirical data and consistent arguments and to think through the benefits and disadvantages of my proposals. I asked whether my pro-choice views on abortion and gay rights would present a problem, and Christopher DeMuth, the president of the AEI, answered that I was free to have whatever opinions I wanted. There were no restrictions on what I could think, say, or write.

  Here was another political lesson, one of the first I was to learn in the United States. American liberals appear to be more uncomfortable with my condemning the ill treatment of women under Islam than most conservatives are. Rather than standing up for Western freedoms and against the totalitarian Islamic belief system, many liberals prefer to shuffle their feet and look down at their shoes when faced with questions about cultural differences. I began to understand that liberal means different things, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on. What Europeans would call Leftists are confusingly termed “liberal,” with a small l, in America, while in Europe liberals are what Americans now call Classical Liberals: they stand for the free market, respect for property rights, the rule of law, limited government, and personal responsibility. European Conservatives support all of these things too. But American Conservatives are more likely to add a list of social and cultural values associated with their Christian faith. Even though their predecessors had once agitated for the rights of workers, the rights of women, and the rights of blacks, American liberals today are hesitant to speak out against the denial of rights that is perpetrated in the name of Islam. So Brookings said no to me and the AEI said yes.

  Following our first meeting in 2006, Chris DeMuth formally invited me to become a resident scholar at the AEI in September. When Rita suddenly took away my Dutch passport, this offer had not yet been formalized; he hadn’t had the opportunity to consult the AEI’s board of trustees. But clearly I could no longer be a member of the Dutch Parliament, for I was no longer Dutch. On the morning of the press conference at which I had decided to announce that I was resigning my seat in Parliament, I received a call from the daily Volkskrant: Was it true I was going to take a job at, of all places, the AEI?

  I couldn’t answer. I had no idea whether the AEI would now take its job offer off the table. I called Chris to tell him I was being badgered by reporters and had to answer them; he told me he would have to consult with his trustees before I could formally announce my new job. My heart sank because I thought that the trustees would be bound to say Why import scandal? But only thirty minutes later Chris called back and said I would be welcome at the AEI on September 1.

  When the Dutch newspapers wrote that I was headed there, many people warned me that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. They had Googled the AEI, they told me, and it was an evil place, a nest of neoconservatives who had conspired to create the Bush presidency and invented the Iraq war. Why on earth would I choose to consort with this nefarious mob? Well, having just lost my home, my livelihood, and almost my citizenship, I replied that I would take my chances and once again trust in the kindness of strangers.

  I was a public figure
. Before I left Holland I was given three farewell parties, for at least 150 people claimed to consider themselves my best friends. Some of the speeches my friends made almost compensated for the pain I was feeling. They helped me remember that there were still at least some people in Holland who not only agreed with me but saw past my nonconformist tone and style. I was deeply touched and understood once more why I love this country that I was leaving.

  I was born into a political family, and I’ve always understood that, in politics, things are not always as they seem. Compared to my experiences in Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, my collision with power was very benign in Holland. I was neither tortured nor thrown into jail. In fact one of the farewell parties was in the parliamentary building and attended by some of my most passionate critics. In the Dutch way, I received a small gift and three big smacking kisses on the cheek from every single one of them. It was a very consensual leave-taking.

  I was a nomad once more.

  CHAPTER 9

  America

  A few days later I woke up in a Washington hotel and got dressed for my first day of work at the American Enterprise Institute. But I discovered that the office was closed: it was Labor Day. The first pang of my homesickness for Holland came with the realization that Labor Day was not on the first of May, as it is everywhere in Europe, but on the first Monday of September. I had a lot to learn.