Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Review
Ayaan Hirsi is quite the famous lady, now in exile in the USA, after being born in Somalia, moving to Saudi Arabia, then the Sudan, Ethiopia, and finally Holland. AND, that's why she has given her newest biography the title NOMAD. After moving to Holland and claming falsely she required asylum for being a wanted woman in Somalia for her political views, she gained money, an education, Dutch citizenship, then was elected to the Dutch parliment. She helped Theo Van Gogh write his last film "Submission", which ended up getting him killed, and making Ayaan an overnight world celebrity. After the Dutch government found out she lied for asylum, her citizenship was renounced. Somewhere in there she wrote her famous book INFIDEL, which i have not read. I cant address the comments made elsewhere about this book, that it reads like INFIDEL revisited. In NOMAD, she spends a lot of time explaining her family, and why and how ISLAM and Somalian Culture has destroyed their lives. Ayaan Hirsi herself renounced ISLAM and all religion, in favor of the "western" Enlightenment philosophy. For her, being an atheist is the only modern, educated way to live. In her Weltanshauung, all cultures fall short of western culture, if they dont adopt this ideology. Much of the opening of the book she spends either vilifying her family, or painting them as martyrs to the Islamic culture, and Somali clan culture, they belong to.
In that first part, she explains about her father's warlord lifestyle, her family's constant moving, and her lack of roots. Her life is sad, as her brother became a street thug and drunk, her sister committed suicide, and her parents disowned her for her anti-Islamic stance. She got back together with her father as he laid dying, and kept in contact with her clan thru a cousin in Europe. She's a strong advocate for women's rights, especially in Islamic culture. (and personally, I cant fault her there.) However, when she talks about faith and religion in general, her renunciation of ISLAM has a lot of anger behind it. This is typical of victums of spiritual abuse. She equates faith with superstition, and lack of education, even if she mostly lets this fall into the lap of Islam. Global condemnation of all religions is typical of spiritual abuse victums. In the other parts of the book, she writes at great length about the situation for new immigrants with great insight, even humor. Examining the cycle of demand for luxury, the debt incured from borrowing to support luxury spending, and the endless payments due to the interest charges, are not a problem confined to third world immigrants. Thats a basic problem with western lending practices, with the USA being 7 trillion in debt ourselves from this behavior. Some of her insights are not as linked to african immigrants, as she thinks. For that matter, women around the world have been treated like 2nd class citizens since human culture began. Again, she bemoans this as an Islamic problem, but its a problem all women share. Her bitterness resulting from her upbringing as a submissive female in a male dominated Islamic culture, remains only a matter of degree. Nevertheless, she does bring up honor killings and child brides as part of the Islamic culture, altho her attention is devoted more toward gential mutation and forced marriage, since that was her experience.
The biggest problem someone from contemporary American culture will have with this book, is her attacks on Islam grate against the liberal, Politically Correct assumption that "ISLAM" means "Peace". (It actually means "Submission".) IT's amazing how people who've never studied the Koran, will automatically defend an Islamic person's intolerance for any critique of their culture, e.g. the "cartoon" protests a few years ago. However, a crusifix in a jar of urine displayed as art, shouldnt offend any christian, unless they hate freedom of expression. This book ought to have us asking if tolerance includes tolerating intolerance. Right now, our culture haw many problems in critising Islamic behavior, no doubt out of fear of further terrorist attacks. Freedom of speech demands courage. Ask the dead reporters, translaters, etc who bring us the truth about modern Islamic culture. If this book has one strong point to make, it's that we cant afford to hide behind this false stance of "religious equality", when Islam commands complete obedience to its tenants, with jews and christians marked as infidels worthy of death. While we try to justify our cowardness towards confrontation with the fatwa condemning Imans, we end up with terrorism masked as Holy Jihad. This is Ayaan's message in a nutshell. I dont see it as Anti-Islamic, as much as her plea for the western "enlightenment" worldview that permits scientific, modern examination of the Bible, to be permitted for the Koran. If the Koran were studied in the light of modern principles of equality and liberty, Ayaan argues that the injunctions against women in the Koran, or Jihad as anti-semetic, anti-christian persuit, might start to be scientifically examined, and abandoned. Using the inhumanity she saw in her family as her living example, and the pain she suffered thruout her life because of her culture's teachings, Ayaan wishes the Muslim mind could be opened. This hope is explored in the end of her book. There the lifestyles of 3rd world cultures is vividly painted, in the hopes that globalization, and investment of resources by the "wealthy west" might bring education, and with it a western mindset, into the parts of the world where female genitals mutilation, lack of education, and the Burka, enslave women to a degree just not known here.
Ayaan Hirsi's views are too easily dismissed, or worse, used by the far right and fundamentalist Christians, as reason to "nation build" Islamic country, especially those with resources like Iraq. Even tho I believe Ayaan wrote this book with good intentions, her constant derogitory remarks about Islam, and Sub-Saharan muslim culture made her a high price target. (She requires 24 hour a day bodyguards). An informed dialogue between Islam and its opponents if far overdue. A bit of tolerance for criticism on the part of Islam, might take this whole world Jihad movement down a notch. IF you are willing to read what Islam does to the average muslim woman outside the USA, then this would be the book to read. For that matter, if you want to know how Western Europe is dealing with the influx of sub Saharan Africans and middle eastern Muslims into their culture, then this is ALSO a good book to read. Our daily news headlines become more understandable, once we explore the complexity of these issues. We need to become self informed consumers of the news, including the news found in books like Ayaan's. If we become able to accept the lack of women's rights in third world or Muslim countries, then we have lost the hopes that Globalization holds...GLOBAL EQUALITY, GLOBAL LIBERTY, and GLOBAL SIBLING-HOOD for all people. My only real beef with this book, is that Ayaan Harsi holds too much hope in the idealism of 18th century philosophers to cure the culture of islamic countries, a philosophy she does so little to explain. Likewise, Ayaan might have done more to quote the Koran's injunctions against women. A subjective view of life comes with the territory of biography, tho its a small price to pay for an honest appraisal of the type of culture totally foreign to Americans. Informed discussions can only occur, when we allow ourselves to see both sides of an issue, without hiding behind left wing/ right wing propaganda. Reading Ayaan's work, and an unexpurged Koran, is as good a place to start as any.
Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Feature
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Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations Overview
"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.
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