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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 HIRSI ALI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 305.89354 HIR | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Hirsi Ali tells the stirring story of her search for a new life in America in this vivid philosophical memoir, picking up where INFIDEL left off.
Author Notes
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and raised a Muslim. She grew up in Africa and Saudi Arabia before seeking asylum in 1992 in the Netherlands, where she went from cleaning factories to winning a seat in the Dutch Parliament. She is a speaker, journalist, and founder of the AHA Foundation. She has written several books including Infidel, Nomad, The Caged Virgin, and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After a harrowing childhood lived according to a particularly strict interpretation of Muslim law, Somali-born Ali (Infidel) escaped to Europe rather than move to Canada to marry a man she'd never met. Arriving in Holland, she soon became an international cause celebre for her willingness to publicly denounce the uglier sides of Islamic culture, particularly as in certain regions it oppresses women and girls. Many personal stories are repeated from her earlier accounts, but here Ali adds the story of her immigration to the U.S., and as always, her writing can be moving, as she bares heartrending moments such as her father's death. But with this third memoir, she has become tiresomely repetitive, and her wholesale condemnation of an entire religion and the multiple cultures it has engendered is so sweeping and comprehensive, and her faith in Western values (particularly her romantic view of Christianity) is so wide-eyed, that the book ultimately reads like a callow exercise in expressing the author's own sense of aggrievement. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Hirsi Ali follows up her highly acclaimed book Infidel (2007), which described her transition from obedient Muslim woman to international feminist, with a closer look at her nomadic journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia to Kenya to Holland, where she was a member of parliament, and now the U.S. But she offers a broader picture of the lives of other Muslim immigrants to put her own life in perspective. Hirsi Ali details the high cost to her family of the clash of cultures in the Islamic diaspora: estrangement from her parents, her sister's depressions and early death, her brother's crumbled prospects beneath the weight of outsize expectations. She offers an intimate look at the dynamics of Muslim families their tendency to isolate themselves out of fear of persecution and how and why so many young men turn to radical Islam. Exploring Muslim attitudes on money, sex, and violence, Hirsi Ali identifies the public schools, feminist movement, and Christian church as the institutions that can most effectively help Muslim families transition to Western nations. A thought-provoking book sure to stir as much debate and controversy as Infidel.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's second memoir is as provocative as her first. IF there were a "Ms. Globalization" title, it might well go to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who wrote the bestselling 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 Alt 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. That's partly because she is by nature a provocateur, the type of person who rolls out verbal hand grenades by reflex. After her father's death, Hirsi Ali connects by telephone with her aging and long-estranged mother living in a dirt-floor hut in Somalia. Hirsi Ali asks forgiveness, but the conversation goes downhill when her mother pleads with her to return to Islam. Near tears, her mother asks: "Why are you so feeble in faith? . . . You are my child and I can't bear the thought of you in hell." "I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny," Hirsi Ali thinks to herself. "I am feeble in faith because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman - because I don't want to be like you." What she says aloud is: "When I die I will rot." (For my part, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali's family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: "I love you.") Since Hirsi Ali denounces Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry, I expected to dislike this book. It did leave me uncomfortable and exasperated in places. But I also enjoyed it. Hirsi Ali comes across as so sympathetic when she shares her grief at her family's troubles that she is difficult to dislike. Her memoir suggests that she never quite outgrew her rebellious teenager phase, but also that she would be a terrific conversationalist at a dinner party. She is at her best when she is telling her powerful story. And she is at her worst when she is using her experience to excoriate a variegated faith that has more than one billion adherents. Her analysis seems accurate in its descriptions of Somalis, Saudis, Yemenis and Afghans, but not in her discussion, say, of Indonesian Muslims - who are more numerous than those other four nationalities put together. To those of us who have lived and traveled widely in Africa and Asia, descriptions of Islam often seem true but incomplete. The repression of women, the persecution complexes, the lack of democracy, the volatility, the anti-Semitism, the difficulties modernizing, the disproportionate role in terrorism - those are all real. But if those were the only faces of Islam, it wouldn't be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world today. There is also the warm hospitality toward guests, including Christians and Jews; charity for the poor; the aesthetic beauty of Koranic Arabic; the sense of democratic unity as rich and poor pray shoulder to shoulder in the mosque. Glib summaries don't work any better for Islam than they do for Christianity or Judaism. WHERE Hirsi Ali is exactly right, I think, is in her focus on education as a remedy. It's the best way to open minds, promote economic development and suppress violence. In the long run education is a more effective weapon against terrorists than bombs are. Because she is an immigrant, Hirsi Ali emphasizes the difficulties that immigrants, particularly Muslims, have in adjusting to life in Western societies. In the course of telling her own story, she identifies three central problems. First is Islam's treatment of women. "The will of little girls is stifled by Islam. . . . They are reared to become submissive robots who serve in the house as cleaners and cooks." Second is the lack of experience that many Muslim immigrants have had with money and credit. Hirsi Ali recounts how, after her arrival in the Netherlands, she received an apartment through the government with the option of a loan of up to $4,000 to furnish it and pay utilities. A Dutch friend offered to take her to a discount furniture store, but Hirsi Ali had dreamed of something upscale. So she and her Somali roommate, Yasmin, went to a high-end store and bought wall-to-wall carpeting and wallpaper - and that used up almost the entire loan. "The money was worth nothing here. Was the whole loan about just a carpet? We quickly decided it was God's will. There was no need to quarrel: Allah had willed it thus." Soon Hirsi Ali was thousands of dollars in debt, and she argues that many foreigners have similar troubles with Western credit and finance. The third problem is a propensity to violence in the family, as well as in religious vocabulary and tradition. "I don't want to create the impression that all people from Muslim countries or tribal societies are aggressive," she writes - and then she proceeds to do just that. She declares: "Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence. Muslim children all over the world are taught the way I was: taught with violence, taught to perpetuate violence, taught to wish for violence against the infidel, the Jew, the American Satan." This is the kind of exaggeration that undermines the book. If the points about women and money are largely true, the point about violence seems to me vastly overstated. Yes, corporal punishment is common in madrassas, as it was in the rural Oregon schools where I grew up, and as it continues to be in Texas. Beatings may be regrettable, but they don't typically turn children into terrorists. During a recent trip to Sudan, I was speaking to a Muslim Arab in Khartoum. When I said I was from the United States, he looked quite shocked and said worriedly: "Oh! It is very violent there." I've had similar experiences in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with people in those countries expressing concern about my safety in violent New York. They generalize too much from American movies. It's true that public discussion in some Muslim countries has taken on a strident tone, full of over-the-top exaggerations about the West. Educated Muslims should speak out more against such rhetoric. In the same way, here in the West, we should try to have a conversation about Islam and its genuine problems - while speaking out against over-the-top exaggerations about the East. This memoir, while engaging and insightful in many places, exemplifies precisely the kind of rhetoric that is overheated and overstated. Hirsi Ali is at her best when telling her powerful story. She is at her worst when excoriating a variegated faith. Nicholas D. Kristof is an Op-Ed columnist at The Times and the author, with Sheryl WuDunn, of "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide."
Library Journal Review
A charismatic public figure and the author of a previous memoir-the best-selling Infidel about her Muslim Somali upbringing and her second life as a refugee in the Netherlands-Ali is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. She presents her second memoir with the explicit ideological motive to counter what she sees as naive liberal responses to Islam, but she dedicates a large portion to her struggles with culture shock as she seeks to find her footing first in Europe then the United States. The book's emotional power lies in her efforts toward a personal reckoning with her family. Those who accept Samuel P. Huntington's theory of the "clash of civilizations" will welcome this smoothly written, emotionally vivid memoir. Readers willing to accept that there is such a thing as "the Muslim mind" will take Ali's arguments at face value. Many readers, however, will reject her assertion that all Muslims think and behave as her tribal community does. Others will question her view that Islam is to be blamed for the social and political problems in predominantly Muslim third world regions and will ask how she would explain similar problems in non-Muslim countries. VERDICT A controversial book accessible to the general public, unlikely to change any minds.-Lisa Klopfer, Eastern Michigan Univ. Lib., Ypsilanti (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Part I A Problem Family | |
| 1 My Father | p. 3 |
| 2 My Half Sister | p. 13 |
| 3 My Mother | p. 23 |
| 4 My Brother's Story | p. 41 |
| 5 My Brother's Son | p. 61 |
| 6 My Cousins | p. 73 |
| 7 Letter to My Grandmother | p. 85 |
| Part II Nomad Again | |
| 8 Nomad Again | p. 95 |
| 9 America | p. 109 |
| 10 Islam in America | p. 127 |
| Part III Sex, Money, Violence | |
| 11 School and Sexuality | p. 149 |
| 12 Money and Responsibility | p. 165 |
| 13 Violence and the Closing of the Muslim Mind | p. 185 |
| Part IV Remedies | |
| 14 Opening the Muslim Mind: An Enlightenment Project | p. 205 |
| 15 Dishonor, Death, and Feminists | p. 219 |
| 16 Seeking God but Finding Allah | p. 237 |
| Conclusion: The Miyé and the Magaalo | p. 255 |
| Epilogue: Letter to My Unborn Daughter | p. 263 |
| The AHA Foundation | p. 275 |
