i watched the hour long video you’ve also posted here of a brit, i guess, interviewing ayaan, interspersed with questions from the audience. i was spellbound, immediately got ahold of ‘infidel’, and have just finished reading it: truly a remarkable woman and a remarkable book.

i don’t think it’s a good idea to call her an atheist, although that’s evidently how she is going to be labeled. she may have rebelled, with good reason, against the ‘second face of God’, which in Islam goes too far, demanding submission to Allah in contrast to Christianity, for example, which encourages surrender to God (fundamentalists, of course, go farther than that). but isn’t she a living example of the ‘first face of God’ as interpreted by orange? in the defining moment of her life the words ‘the soul cannot be coerced’ came to her aid (from within? from without? she herself could not say).

to call this ‘ballsy’, i think, risks confusing orange with red. thomas paine, one of her forerunners, took a similar orange stand against amber in his famous declaration: ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. both she and her sister hiaweha rebelled against amber, but her sister was unquestionably and unfortunately the ‘ballsy’ one, and did it the red way, to her demise.

her seven pieces of advice for ireland are, i think, a much needed, cogent statement of healthy orange values. the only one that troubles me is the sixth, with its apparent dismissal of multiculturalism. my own impression is that she is given to speaking with the utmost clarity so that there is as little chance for misunderstanding as possible. she does not attempt ‘to have it both ways’, to please both sides of an argument she does not want to get into. she is incredibly honest.

the only way i can explain this to myself is that she has achieved an incredibly healthy orange and is instinctively opposed to green, which she construes as amber and red. i’m afraid, especially since she now works for the American Enterprise Institute, that she will get caught up in the culture wars and not go beyond orange, however capable she has already proven to be. too bad Integral Institute couldn’t have hired her!