This woman is a major hero of our time. --Richard Dawkins
Ayaan Hirsi Ali captured the world's attention with Infidel, her
compelling coming-of-age memoir, which spent thirty-one weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list. Now, in Nomad, Hirsi Ali tells of
coming to America to build a new life, an ocean away from the death
threats made to her by European Islamists, the strife she witnessed, and
the inner conflict she suffered. It is the story of her physical journey
to freedom and, more crucially, her emotional journey to freedom--her
transition from a tribal mind-set that restricts women's every thought
and action to a life as a free and equal citizen in an open society.
Through stories of the challenges she has faced, she shows the
difficulty of reconciling the contradictions of Islam with Western
values.
In these pages Hirsi Ali recounts the many turns her life took after she
broke with her family, and how she struggled to throw off restrictive
superstitions and misconceptions that initially hobbled her ability to
assimilate into Western society. She writes movingly of her
reconciliation, on his deathbed, with her devout father, who had
disowned her when she renounced Islam after 9/11, as well as with her
mother and cousins in Somalia and in Europe.
Nomad is a portrait of a family torn apart by the clash of
civilizations. But it is also a touching, uplifting, and often funny
account of one woman's discovery of today's America. While Hirsi Ali
loves much of what she encounters, she fears we are repeating the
European mistake of underestimating radical Islam. She calls on key
institutions of the West--including universities, the feminist movement,
and the Christian churches--to enact specific, innovative remedies that
would help other Muslim immigrants to overcome the challenges she has
experienced and to resist the fatal allure of fundamentalism and
terrorism.
This is Hirsi Ali's intellectual coming-of-age, a memoir that conveys
her philosophy as well as her experiences, and that also conveys an
urgent message and mission--to inform the West of the extent of the
threat from Islam, both from outside and from within our open societies.
A celebration of free speech and democracy, Nomad is an important
contribution to the history of ideas, but above all a rousing call to
action.
