Review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book “Booty” – Culture

Annalena Baerbock insists that she “didn’t write a non-fiction book” and she means it defensively. In a non-fiction book, it is called, certain standards are set in terms of care and verifiability. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has also not written a non-fiction book. The only question is: what did she write then?

In any case, it is not due to the footnotes for Ali. The annotation apparatus in her book “Beute” has 50 pages and contains references to Samuel Huntington, Alice Schwarzer, Necla Kelek and Kamel Daoud. Ali quotes many from personal conversations. She made an effort, the subject is important to her.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, who fled a forced marriage to the Netherlands, had to experience how the Dutch director Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Salafist in 2004 after the joint film “Submission”. She now lives in the USA. She is still under police protection, and she’s still preoccupied with one single topic: the danger of Islam to the West, more precisely of Muslim men to Western women. “Booty” is the update after the influx of refugees in 2015. Ali’s thesis, to put it mildly: Everything that was bad before became worse after 2015.

Unfortunately, numbers are of little use if you mess around with them

Much of what is known from similar titles can also be found in her book: the complaint about the dangerous naivety of the West, the gesture of worried warnings, the knowledge advantage as a Muslim insider and of course statistics. But just as few pages of notes guarantee scientific validity, numbers are of no use if you mess around with them.

The AfD politician Beatrix von Storch alleged that illegally entered migrants committed 447 homicides and murders in 2017, says Ali. The Federal Ministry of the Interior only speaks of 27 murders or attempted murders by illegals, “but if you count all asylum seekers and refugees”, you actually get the number 447. If you count all the crimes committed by all immigrants since the currency reform, you are sure to come to that much alarming result.

A 2004 study by the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs examined violence against women, in which Turkish and Eastern European women were particularly frequently victims of physical violence. Ali’s conclusion: “Even before the great ‘mass migration’ from 2009 to 2018, the violence against women among the Muslim population in Germany was cause for concern.” And what about the Eastern Europeans?

Different country, different study, same effect: the probability that an immigrant was suspected of a sexual offense in Sweden was five times as high in 2005 as a “native of Sweden”. But Ali does not even touch the question of what indicates an act, what is pure resentment.

One could go on like this, could straighten out all the crooked curves, the selective evidence of the statistics piece by piece, if the methodological deficiencies were not similarly alarming elsewhere. The fact that Tübingen’s Lord Mayor Boris Palmer appears as a key witness for “problem cases” among asylum seekers (“They feel no respect and no gratitude for German society”) may have a certain logic qua office.

But what does the observation of a pensioner who went to court in Munich as a hobby and found that “many asylum seekers and refugees (…) are on trial for violent assaults” prove? How resilient it is when an Afghan ex-police officer quotes a Syrian who is said to have said: “Someone has to take care of us (immigrants) (…). We cannot handle so much free time.”

Injustice to women only becomes relevant to them when Muslims are involved

That said everything for Ali. The influx of unsupervised Muslim immigrants, “uninhibited young men”, endangers achievements that only the West offers women: equality, mobility and visibility in public spaces. As devastating as their judgment of the Islamic world is, as sweeping is its essentialism, which treats the centuries-old schools of Islam as if there had been no development since then, in no country, nowhere, as misleading as it is that they are countries like Saudi Arabia and portrays Iran not as extremes, but as future scenarios for Europe, that is how much it transfigures Western society.

This enthusiasm is weird at times. A 39-year-old Oldenburg woman, Nicola, describes herself as a person who used to be open and trusting, but after unpleasant encounters with Muslims, she now has a pepper spray in her pocket and avoids certain paths. Ali meets Nicola “in her beautiful living room”, dressed in a blouse with a floral pattern, her reddish-brown hair “pinned up into a chignon”, the little son plays on the floor: You “looked like the epitome of modern Europeans to me: the husband took part in bringing up children and supporting the professional activity of women “. You can stand by the so-called white majority society however you want – it doesn’t deserve this kitsch.

The worst thing about Ali’s book, however, is not passages like this, not her adventurous excursions into Islamic theology and also not her supposed exposure of a “conspiracy of silence” about the danger posed by Muslim men – as if there were indeed a taboo, as if there were diffuse fears In Germany, most liberal women have not long since been taken hold of. The worst thing about “booty” is that it’s so misogynistic.

The “Me Too” movement? Too much ado about the “misdeeds of a few hundred celebrities”. The efforts of feminists to “end patriarchy” or to achieve equality in the labor market? Only “elitist concerns”. Only she, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knows the “everyday life of the average woman”, but does not want to mock today’s feminists but rather “wake up”, which then reminds one of the sense of mission of conspiracy theorists.

First and foremost must be the right of all women to live free from violence, Ali writes, and she would be wholeheartedly endorsed if she were not disregarded in such an outrageous way where women face the greatest danger: Trying in every day Germany to kill a man, his wife, girlfriend or ex-partner, across all social classes, classes, religions and ethnicities.

Experts agree that attention is greater when the perpetrator is a Muslim, refugee or migrant and the crime can be seen as an expression of a “backward, patriarchal culture”. But if the perpetrator or victim is of German origin, femicides are romanticized, and authorities, the judiciary and the media speak of a “family tragedy”, a “act of relationship”, a “jealousy drama” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. “Culture is mostly only the culture of others, “said the political scientist Monika Schröttle.

In Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this interpretation has traits of an obsession. Injustice to women only becomes relevant to them when Muslims are involved. Otherwise, all acts of violence and discrimination are out of the question, measured against the brilliant achievements of the West. In this way, power relations can also be concreted. It is not nice, but it is also not uncommon for women to engage in misogynistic politics.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not want to be reduced to her biography, her claim is not a personal one, but a universal one. This eliminates the mitigating circumstances. “Loot” is a nuisance, albeit potentially a lucrative one. The market for books with a furore critical of Islam is huge. For the sake of testing, two more, probably popular, titles are suggested: “Why Muslims are to blame for climate change.” And: “Islam makes you fat”.