Nomad

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, was raised as a Muslim, and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. In 1992 Hirsi Ali went to the Netherlands as a refugee, escaping a forced marriage to a distant cousin she had never met. She denounced Islam after 9/11 and now works as a Dutch parliamentarian, fighting for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam, and for security in the West.

'Here is the story of a young African woman, born into Islam, who was given every possible occasion to feel grievance, resentment and humiliation yet who has employed her own life as an example of internationalism, tolerance, multiculturalism and the redemption of others. Her humor and irony and fortitude constitute the finest counterpoint to the surly cult of death that presses itself against us. For me, the three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali.' -Christopher Hitchens 'There is more wisdom and compassion in this book than can be found in most university libraries--and surely more than has been published in the Muslim world since the time of the Prophet. I can think of no one who better exemplifies the hard-won gains of the Enlightenment or who can speak more effectively in their defense, than Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Nomad is both a moving account of her personal journey out of bondage, and trumpet blast to awaken westerners at all points along the political spectrum: there is a war of ideas that must be waged and won in the Muslim world, and we misunderstand the true tenets of Islam at our peril. Hirsi Ali's voice and example are simply indispensable. There is no one like her-and we need thousands like her.' -Sam Harris, Author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation 'This moving account by a remarkably brave woman of her personal journey from the pre modern mind set of nomadic Somali society to a modern Westeern one provides a searing indictment of the cult of 'muliticulturalism' and ' diversity' which are disabling other Muslims in the West from making a similar transition, and making their youth turn to radical Islam and becoming 'jihadis'. More than many academic tomes this personal memoir provides a cogent account of how and why Islam poses the gravest threat to Western liberal societies.' -Deepak Lal, Author of In Praise of Empires NOMAD by Ayaan Hirsi Ali 'Why are Muslims so hypersensitive? She says Islam is backward and the Qur'an is terrible. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali - whose provocative new book is extracted on the following pages - is not about to let a fatwa intimidate her...' Front Cover, Guardian Weekend Magazine interview and extract 8/10 '...Nomad returns to the inflammatory themes that have sparked so much Muslim rage. From every page springs her contempt for the "indoctrination" of the Koran, for the bogus infallibility of the prophet Muhammad and for the poisons spread by fundamentalist Islam...I can't help wondering if she is prone to the same seductive lure of martyrdom that appeals to so many Islamic young men. In short, does she have a death wish? Far from it, she says. She compares her own experience of terrorism to the failed Times Square bomb attack. "The next morning New York was just New York," she says. "Someone told me that the way California is used to earthquakes, New York is used to terrorism. They just carry on. And that is me. "Tomorrow I'll just carry on with my life and that's the best antidote to terrorism. We love life and we live it."' Interview, Sunday Times 9/10 'Zoe Strimpel is hooked by this dense, powerful meditation on religion, family and society...Nomad - like Ali's other books - is an indispensable read, and the combination of Ali's life story with her sharp socio-political thought proves potent in the extreme' City AM 'Ali is especially incensed about the ways in which Western societies turn a blind-eye to such horrors as female circumcision or honour killings, the most blind of them all being Western critics of 'colonial feminism' who think it is imperialist to criticise barbarities in Third World societies, especially if the perpetrators are non-white males. In a move that seems almost designed to compound Ali's problems, this self-proclaimed atheist argues that the Christian churches should aggressively proselytise among Muslim immigrant communities, so as to counter the Saudi-funded Wahhabism that has infiltrated itself, termite fashion, into so many European mosques...This is a bold and passionately written book which should be essential reading for any politician who has to deal with the closely related problems of Islamism and immigration' Evening Standard 13/5 'She is often portrayed as a heroine and I cannot think of a better description of her, as much for her intellectual honesty as her more obvious bravery. But I have to say that I think the bodyguards will still be needed after this latest memory, especially if she's planning on doing any signings in Mogadishu. It is, in parts - especially early on - a brilliant book. But it may not go down terribly well with the jihadis. Nor, indeed, with the politically correct white left, who irritate Ali perhaps more even than the bigoted imams...People often ask her: What's it like living with bodyguards all the time? It's better than being dead, she replies...This may not be the Muslim Council of Britain's book of the year.' The Sunday Times 23/5 'Few lives appear as contradictory and complex as that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose principal activity in America, where she has lived since she was targeted for death after the murder of the right-wing political activist Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004, has been to urge the West to "compete with the jihadis - the proponents of "holy war"- for the hearts and minds of its own Muslim immigrant populations". Yet she has not retreated from her resistance to multiculturalism, and in this memoir she reiterates her strong preference for Western democracy and the urgent need for Enlightenment values' The Times 22/5 'There are plenty of Islamic fundamentalists who would love to be sitting where I am...Not because of the drinks or the snazzy-looking downtown folk or the whole Andre Balzs boutique-hotel experience, alluring though it is. No, they'd like to be here, at a table up against a rear wall of the restaurant because that would put them within murdering distance of the woman I'm talking to. Many of them have said as much, which accounts for the bodyguards lurking upstairs' Interview, Tatler July issue 'When filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist extremist, a note was left on his body saying Ali, an outspoken critic of Islam, would be next. This book, part memoir and part call to arms, details the new life she's found in the US, and reminisces about her upbringing in Somalia. Fearlessly uncompromising, it's no wonder she's won plaudits from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens' Shortlist 27/5 'Hirsi Ali is right to criticise the injustice and oppression that are labelled Islamic by their defenders; she is also right to talk of the radicalisation of those Muslim immigrants who are attracted to a more violent form of Islam for a variety of psychological and religious reasons. In fact, it is easy to identify with many of her criticisms of immigrant Islam in Europe: an Islam which, for many, resists individual freedom and women's social and legal equality' Mona Siddiqui, Telegraph 5/6 'She argues that in our freedom and our more responsible and restrained attitude to sex, money and violence, we are superior to the Islamic world. In her view, the Muslim obsession with a woman's virginity is not a mark of modesty and decency, but of ownership and the abuse of power...She recommends that the churches should come together to counter radical Muslim dawa (mission) with a great push of their own to bring Christianity to immigrants. She makes short work of our own dear Archbishop of Canterbury, and his idea that a little bit of Sharia might be quite nice really' Charles Moore, Telegraph 31/5 'This is a bold and passionately written book, essential for any politician dealing with the closely related problems of Islamism and immigration' Syndicated review, Scotsman 22/5 'Second volume of memoir' Our choice of the best recent books, Sunday Times 30/5 'Confrontational, stinging, unsparing: Hirsi Ali has positioned herself at a pole that courts odium and danger. But those who see her as, herself, a danger - to good community relations or to mutual understanding bet-ween cultures - mistake trenchant criticism for insult. The greater insult to Muslims is to treat them as incapable of rational, robust engagement' John Lloyd Column, Financial Times 13/6 'For anyone who has ever felt a tinge of rose-tinted nostalgia for the traditional, Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides a bracing, and on the whole healthy, cold shower. Having experienced traditional society from the inside - in the form of a Muslim Somali family headed by a well-known politician who practised polygamy and left a deeply troubled and dysfunctional progeny- she has no time for sentimentality. As the world's most famous ex-Muslim (who became a politician in the Netherlands, then a public intellectual in America), she tells people who have grown up in countries shaped by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that they don't know how lucky they are' The Economist 5/6 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali is as vehement a defender of personal liberty as Hitchens. Her account of her escape from the prisons of tribe and religion to the freedom of the West got every single one of my feminist nerve ends bristling with renewed anger at what religion does to woman across so much of the globe. To all those who argue that feminism is a dead cause, I recommend a few hours in this woman's company' Summer reading choice, The Times 3/7 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali shows no sign of softening in her criticism of Islam...In Nomad she combines a withering blast against liberals and multiculturalism - which she says has allowed Islamic extremism to thrive in the West - alongside pen portraits of her own Muslim family; the women brutalised and downtrodden...I ask if she ever hankers for the quiet life. "If you succumb to the intimidation and threat, things only get darker and darker. Look, even if they did get to me, even if the bad guys - the jihadis - got what they wanted and they kill me, I win the argument anyway. They can't kill my books" Interview in the Daily Telegraph 8/7 'I think Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right to go further and challenge