Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Womens Rights

To Niall

This is a trigger warning for the entire book.

Reading it, you should be triggered.

This book is about mass migration, sexual violence, and the rights of women in Europe. It is about a colossal failure of the European political establishment. And it is about solutions to the problem, fake and real.

In recent years the debate on immigration, integration, and Islam in Europe has intensified. This has been in response to terrorist attacks, big and small; the preaching of radical Islam in some mosques and Islamic centers; the reemergence of extreme-right-wing and populist parties; and the recent arrival of large numbers of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, especially (but not only) in 2015 and 2016. Even though the flow of migrants has abated in the past few years, there are still large numbers attempting to cross the Mediterranean or to reach Europe by other routes. One consequence of all this has been a change in the position of women in Europe. That change is the subject of this book.

The increase in the numbers of men from Muslim-majority countries has brought to the surface a problem: their attitude to women. Though not all Muslim men feel and express contempt for women, some do. In countries such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and others with considerable numbers of Muslim immigrants, we have seen a rejection of womens freedoms by some of these men and sometimes by their children, too. For a few decades, discussion has focused on how some men treated their own relatives: wives, sisters, cousins, nieces, and others. The forms of violence justified in the name of honorincluding murders, beatings, and incarcerationsare by now familiar or should be. In Europe, as in the rest of the West, it has taken a lot of activism and some high-profile cases to bring these issues into the open and to expose the numerous cases when sharia tribunals have endorsed child marriages, forced marriages, polygamous marriages, wife beating, and unjust divorce settlements. Survivors have been accused of lying; those who sided with the victims have been accused of various forms of bigotry. Even to acknowledge that Muslim women were being denied their rights in the name of culture and religion, often by their own families, has been difficult. Often the victims have simply been ignored.

However, men who feel contempt for women do not confine it to those women with whom they share a background. Some Muslim men feel contempt for all womenincluding European women, who had taken it for granted that they had achieved a level of emancipation that set them apart from Muslim women. And this problem concerns not only the new arrivals seeking asylum in Europe; the men discussed in this book include some who were born and raised in Europe, the sons and even grandsons of immigrants.

This raises a fundamental question: Why does this book focus only on Muslim men and not on all men, when sexual violence and contempt for women are universal phenomena? After all, when the Red Army invaded Germany between 1944 and 1945, Soviet soldiers committed many more crimes than those described in this book, raping countless German women in a semiorganized campaign of retaliation. In the Bosnian war of the 1990s, it was Muslim women who suffered at the hands of Serbian paramilitary rapists. Men who have recently arrived in Europe, North America, and Australia from Cuba, Argentina, Serbia, and South Sudanto name just four countries with very small Muslim populationshave been guilty of sexual misconduct of all kinds. The leading sex-trafficking rings in the world today are led by non-Muslim criminal gangs in various parts of Asia, Russia, and Central and South America. Moreover, it would seem that the consumers of the most sordid products of the sex industrynotably child pornographyare mainly from the West. If several million mostly young men had arrived in Europe from any part of the world, there would almost certainly have been an increase in sexual crimes against women.

In this book, nevertheless, I focus on Muslim mens attitudes and behavior for three reasons:

1. The scale of the migration from Muslim-majority countries to Europe, as well as its likely continuation and the associated growth of Europes Muslim population.
2. Its political salience. Put simply, evidence of sexual misconduct by some Muslim immigrants provides populists and other right-wing groups and parties with a powerful tool to demonize all Muslim immigrants. If we bring this issue out of the taboo zone, discussion will cease to be monopolized by those elements.
3. Frank discussion also challenges the Islamists, who recognize the problem but propose a remedy that would set back all women.

I am well aware of the difficulties of this undertaking. Talking about violence by Muslim men against European women is unfashionable in an age of identity politics, when we are supposed to operate within a partly historical matrix of victimhood. It is even harder when the topic is a favorite of Russian agents of disinformation as well as alt-right trolls. Russian president Vladimir Putins government is engaged in a campaign intended to destabilize liberal democracy in Europe as well as the United States. Directly or indirectly through credulous or malicious Western websites, the Russians spread fake newsfor example, the claim that the perpetrators in the case of a gang rape in Spain were Arabs, when in fact they were Cuban, Argentinian, and Spanish. Even without the Russians, extreme-right-wing groups are highly effective in exaggerating or wholly fabricating anti-immigrant stories. Anyone who seeks to write in a serious fashion about negative aspects of immigration is almost certain to be accused of legitimizing the alt-right and its accomplices. Yet I am convinced that a book such as this can provide far more effective arguments against those people than a strategy of denial, which would seem to be the alternative preferred by many liberals and progressives. Only by clarifying what has gone wrong in Europe in recent years can one make a truly credible case for effective integration of immigrants. For thatnot the exclusion and repatriation favored by the populists of the Rightis the only feasible way forward.

You may ask why, if the problem is as serious as I claim, it has taken so long to bring it into the open. Part of the answer is that in the West, all things related to immigration and Islam are talked about with great difficulty, if they are talked about at all. Another part of the answer is that this is also an issue of class as well as religion or race. Most of the crime and misconduct against women takes place in low-income neighborhoods. The women who could afford to move to safer neighborhoods have done so, along with their families. Those stuck in the poor zones are the less well off. And somehow, in the era of #MeToo, their predicament arouses much less sympathy than that of Hollywood actresses subjected to sexual harassment by predatory producers.

In my life, I have experienced, in mild forms, the sexual discrimination, harassment, and violence that are commonplace in Muslim-majority countries such as Somalia and Saudi Arabia, as well as in some Muslim communities in the West. I have also, on more than one occasion, had to fend off the unwanted attentions of sexually overbearing Western men. I can tell you which problem is the worse one. Indeed, telling you that is a large part of the purpose of this book.

Another reason this book needs an introduction is that its publication was postponed from June 2, 2020 to February 9, 2021, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The postponement has had six consequences.

First, the delay of publication means that some of the numbers used in the book are now more dated than would be usual in a new work. Updating the data after the book had been typeset has been challenging. Moreover, I noticed that even while I was writing, statistics were constantly being updated and retroactively adjusted; no doubt this process will continue after the book goes to press.