Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, was raised Muslim, and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. In 1992, Hirsi Ali came to the Netherlands as a refugee. She earned her college degree in political science and worked for the Dutch Labor party. She denounced Islam after the September 11 terrorist attacks and now serves as a Dutch parliamentarian, fighting for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam, and security in the West.
Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
Paperback
$16.00
- ISBN-13: 9781439157329
- Publisher: Atria Books
- Publication date: 02/08/2011
- Pages: 277
- Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Eligible for FREE SHIPPING details
.
16.0
Out Of Stock
"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.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
-
- Infidel
- by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
-
- Mao's Last Dancer
- by Li Cunxin
-
- Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman&…
- by Marina Nemat
-
- Georgiana: Duchess of…
- by Amanda Foreman
-
- Lucky Child: A Daughter of…
- by Loung Ung
-
- We Two: Victoria And Albert:…
- by Gillian Gill
-
- The Proud Tower: A Portrait of…
- by Barbara W. Tuchman
-
- The Outline of History: Volume…
- by H. G. WellsWilliam RossJ. F. Horrabin
-
- Do They Hear You When You Cry
- by Fauziya KassindjaLayli Miller Bashir
-
- The Life of Elizabeth I
- by Alison Weir
-
- Bangkok 8 (Sonchai…
- by John Burdett
-
- The Road of Lost Innocence:…
- by Somaly Mam
-
- Destiny Disrupted: A History…
- by Tamim Ansary
Recently Viewed
From the Publisher
Illuminating analysis… [NOMAD’s] special strength…lies in the way that her arguments and perceptions are rooted in personal experience…. She rages eloquently…writes revealingly. NOMAD is an excellent read.”—New York Review of Books
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new memoir is the most powerful book you will have read in a long time.” —Christian Science Monitor
"Brilliant” —Tunku Varadarajan, The Daily Beast
Publishers Weekly
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 célèbre 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)Library Journal
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