Nomad
A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the international bestseller INFIDEL, a new and provocative book about women and Islam.
'this woman is a major hero of our times' RICHARD DAWKINS'For me, the three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali' - Christopher HitchensAyaan Hirsi Ali caused a worldwide sensation with her gutsy memoir INFIDEL. Now, in NOMAD, she tells of coming to America to build a new life, an ocean away from the death threats made against her by European Islamists, the strife she witnessed and the inner conflict she suffered. It is the story of her physical and emotional journey to freedom - her transition from a tribal mindset that restricts women's every thought and action to 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. Hirsi Ali recounts the many turns her life took after breaking 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. this is Hirsi Ali's intellectual coming of age, a memoir that conveys her philosophy as well as her experiences, and delivers an urgent message and mission - to inform the West of the extent of the threat from radical Islam, both from outside and from within our open societies. 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 experienced and to resist the fatal allure of fundamentalism and terrorism.
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 c l bre 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.
Customer Reviews
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Powerful stuff, the author ranks a leading philosopher on life.