Infidel

'It's been a week since I finished reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's remarkable autobiography, and I haven't stopped thinking about it or talking about it for long. I'd recommend her story to anyone' -- Mary Wakefield * Daily Telegraph * 'Comes at you with an almost raging power, like a river bursting its banks . . . [Hirsi Ali] proves herself here a true writer, able to sum up a scene that may be completely foreign to the reader in a way that makes it a living, breathing experience, unforgettably raw and immediate' -- Natasha Walter * Guardian * 'A brave and elegant figure . . . an honest woman . . . No one who reads her [memoirs] will doubt the self-questioning and the rigorous honesty of her mind. Perhaps, as in Voltaire's short story 'L'Ingnu,' it is that too much honesty is sometimes unpalatable, even if it is couched in civil terms . . . She has an open mind that has released itself from the old straitjacketed frame of reference of Right and Left, she is instinctively, deeply antiauthoritarian and she is unlikely to stick to straight ideological lines. She will go on asking difficult questions' -- Isabella Thomas * The Observer * 'Too potent a social critic to be tolerated any longer [in her home country] . . . an unflinching advocate of women's rights and an unflinching critic of Islamic extremism' * The New York Times * 'A charismatic figure. . . of arresting and hypnotizing beauty . . . [who writes] with quite astonishing humor and restraint' -- Christopher Hitchens

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.