The Gadfly

Book Review
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

NOMAD: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
277 pp. Free Press. $27

If there were a “Ms. Globalization” title, it might well go to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who wrote the best-­selling memoir “Infidel.” She has managed to outrage more people — in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her — in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today.

Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir. “Nomad” argues that Islam creates dysfunctional families — like her own — and adds that these distorted families constitute “a real threat to the very fabric of Western life.” Western countries, she says, should be less tolerant of immigrants who try to preserve their lifestyles in their new homelands. It might seem presumptuous to write another memoir so soon, but Hirsi Ali is a remarkable figure who has plenty of memories to record.

She was born in Somalia in 1969. Her family fled to avoid political repression, and she grew up in Kenya, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, collecting languages the way some kids collect postage stamps. For a time, she was a fervent Muslim, but when her father ordered her to marry a stranger, she struck out on her own, disgracing the family and shocking herself, and settled in the Netherlands.

Hirsi Ali studied political science — she is clearly intellectually brilliant — and ended up as a member of the Dutch Parliament. If the rapid transformation of a Somali girl into an outspoken black, female, immigrant member of Parliament seems extraordinary, it was just the beginning. Soon her critique of Islam was leading to death threats, her citizenship was threatened by Dutch officials and she moved to a new refuge in the United States. Even now, she needs bodyguards.

(More here.)