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A Dutch story for our times

Hasan Suroor

THE NAME Ayaan Hirsi Ali may not ring a bell in India, but in Britain and indeed across Europe she became a bit of a celebrity for her relentless attacks on Islam and Muslim immigrants whom she blamed for social tensions in the Netherlands, her country of adoption.

Ms. Ali's celebrity status increased after a film she wrote on abuse of Muslim women, Submission, in which verses from the Quran were painted on naked bodies, led to the murder of its director Theo Van Gogh by a fanatic Muslim in 2004. More "stardom" followed when, earlier this year, she stood up for the right of a Dutch newspaper to publish Prophet Muhammed's cartoons and criticised European governments for — to quote The Times — not "standing up for Western values against Islam."

To cut the story short, until last week Ms. Ali, a Somalian-born Dutch MP, was hailed for her supposedly brave struggle against repression of women in Islam of which she claimed she herself had been a victim. The Dutch government promptly granted her asylum when she landed in the Netherlands in 1992 claiming that she had fled Somalia to escape from a forced marriage.

Five years later, she even got a Dutch passport and the ultra-right VVD party (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy) was so impressed by her anti-Muslim- immigrant rhetoric that it embraced her in its own campaign against immigration, and in 2003 she was elected to Parliament on its ticket.

But last week things started to unravel for the 36-year-old charismatic demagogue after a Dutch television documentary revealed that she had concocted her life story in order to gain asylum in the Netherlands. And as a media storm broke after the documentary was screened and her party prepared to abandon her, Ms. Ali sought to pre-empt her expulsion from the country by announcing that she was moving to America to take up an assignment with a neo-con think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

According to the documentary, which features interviews with her relatives, Ms. Ali's entire story was based on a series of "lies." This included her name, which she changed from Ayaan Hirsi Magan to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her date and year of birth. The most damaging revelation relates to her claim that she fled Somalia because she was trapped in a forced marriage and faced persecution.

The documentary quotes her family members, including a brother, as saying that she had been actually living in Kenya at the time she decided to leave for the Netherlands; and that her marriage to a Somalian, who now reportedly lives in Canada, was not forced. They said the couple separated amicably. The documentary showed what reports described as a "large and comfortable middle class home" in Kenya where she lived in an affluent style — a far cry from her own fictional account of her circumstances.

Interviewed on Zembla TV programme, which screened the documentary, Ms. Ali admitted that she had "lied" but dismissed the row as a "smear campaign." "Have they all gone mad? Yes, I lied to get asylum in Holland. This is public knowledge since at least September 2002," she said.

But clearly her own party, which is in government, did not. Or that is what it claims. The Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, who belongs to VVD, said she would order an inquiry into Ms. Ali's conduct declaring that "laws and rules are valid for everyone."

Media reports say that the disclosure has sent shockwaves through the Dutch political establishment because, as The Guardian noted, Ms. Ali had become one of the country's "most prominent politicians after denouncing radical Islam."

"With her Muslim background, which she has renounced, Ms. Hirsi Ali was an influential figure as the Netherlands debated the integration of Muslim immigrants," it said.

The row is particularly embarrassing for VVD, which regards its tough anti-immigration stance as its USP. It supports deportation of failed asylum-seekers and has proposed that any foreigner who may have lied about his or her background should be banned from being given a Dutch passport. Having "used" Ms. Ali's opportunistic position on immigration for its own purposes, VVD now finds her a political liability.

There have been calls for Ms. Ali to be stripped of her citizenship and deported back to wherever she came from (was it Somalia or Kenya?).

But whatever might be in store for her, the episode says something about the prevailing climate in Europe where all that someone from the Third World needs in order to find political acceptability is to be sufficiently xenophobic. And if they are Muslim, a healthy dose of Islamophobia might just add a dash of glamour at a time when a liberal, free-thinking Muslim is seen to be an endangered species. Tough luck if they turn out to be fake.

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