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From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
Free Press
May 2010
On Sale: May 18, 2010
304 pages
ISBN: 1439157316
EAN: 9781439157312
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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