Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Infidel
Book Review: An Infidel who educates us
Summary: 5 Stars
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's story is not a novel, even though we find the lives she describes to be unimaginable in the 21st century. We in the West need to read this shocking book to help us understand the intense devotion of millions of people to beliefs that are militantly hostile to our Western world view. This is the most courageous woman I have ever met.Book Review: An amazing eye-opener
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book for discussion with my book club and then was lucky enough to be invited to a surprise appearance by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She's a brilliant woman and used every bit of her genius to extricate herself from one nightmare after another. I think she's an inspiration to women of all creeds and cultures.
I have to say the female genital mutilation scenes were very very hard to read. But I think people have to know the truth about such matters if the world is to change. Ali's final conclusion was to excoriate the entire baggage of religion and expose it as an excuse to abuse women.
If you enjoyed this book, you might be interested in Jasmine Sharif's Caged in America: One Woman's Journey through the Veil. Sharif, another Muslim girl, grew up in the US in a very dysfunctional family of Yemen origin and was basically sold several times so that her father could collect a bride-price. No consideration was given to her welfare or the welfare of the other women in her family. It was considered perfectly okay for husbands to beat their wives and even attempted murder was swept under the carpet. I saw many parallels, none of them pleasant.
But as to INFIDEL, this is a book that ought to be required reading in any Woman's Study course or any course about the Middle East or Immigrants to the Netherlands. It is very eye-opening.
Book Review: An amazing life illuminating important ideas
Summary: 5 Stars
The last few weeks, I have been enjoying my commute in the company of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as I've listened to her fascinating book Infidel. I love books that transport me to a foreign place or time, and immerse me in a culture that I didn't know about before. And I love books that provoke thought about important ideas. Infidel does both of things exceedingly well. It is the autobiographical account of an independent-minded woman who was raised in a traditional Somali Muslim family and grew up to be a Member of Dutch Parliament advocating for women's rights. The first half of the book is a vivid account of her childhood in Somalia, and later in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya as her family escaped the turbulence of their war-torn homeland. Her description of life in places like Mogadishu, Mecca, and Nairobi is rich in detail about their houses and neighborhoods, their food, their culture and traditions. Her portraits of her parents, her siblings, her grandmother, and other family members are richly complex, infused with the emotional perspective of her childhood at the same time balanced by an unflinching retrospective assessment of their good qualities and their weaknesses. The genealogist in me was fascinated learning about the Somali tribal culture that puts such a premium on one's ancestry that children at an early age can recite their ancestry for nine generations, and when two Somalis meet, they can readily ascertain their kinship even to tenth cousins. And her description of the variations of Muslim practice between countries, and the rise of Muslim fundamentalism, was illuminating and especially relevant today. She does a remarkable job of making comprehensible such alien traditions as polygamy, arranged marriages, and female genital mutilation. What is especially remarkable is how, even though she would later come to condemn some parts of the traditions she was raised with as being completely barbaric, she describes them in the context of her early life subjectively and dispassionately, neither concealing the barbarity nor revealing anger, judgment, and condemnation. The account is all the more powerful for that, allowing the reader to understand how such barbarity could be accepted and tolerated because of how it is embedded in traditional ways of life and in how sons and daughters are raised. And it allows us to understand this amazing woman on all the parts of her journey, from childhood, to adolescence when she was drawn to fundamentalism, to adulthood when she escaped to discover liberal ideas. The latter half of the book describes her life in the Netherlands, where she becomes not only a parliamentarian but a political lightning rod after making a controversial film with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh which lead to his murder and death threats for her. The book then becomes more about politics, ideology, and her intellectual autobiography, though embedded in personal experiences of immigration, learning Dutch culture, and ultimately life as a figure in hiding from death threats. She raises significant questions about whether a liberal society can survive being tolerant of a growing immigrant community within its midst that remains insular and perpetuates an illiberal way of life. (These questions have reverberations here in America, not only regarding Islamism, but in issues like the recent Texas FLDS raids, and in the fault lines of conflict between religious liberty and civil rights protections -- issues I hope to explore in future blog posts.) And she makes a compelling argument that Islam needs to undergo its own Reformation if it is to be reconciled to modernity. Her ideas and the amazing life experience that formed them make for vital and fascinating reading.Book Review: An amazing story -- all women must read!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was recommended to me from a stranger when I asked for a "good read" to take with me on an upcoming vacation. I truly could not put it down! Aayan is an amazing woman and her story is almost unbelievable, especially for myself as one who has never had to face the trials she did as a woman. The book really opened my eyes about the Muslim faith and how it perceives women and how they treat women in their culture. As a naive American, I had no idea. Truly an inspiring book and I am so glad I have it in my reading library!Book Review: An excellent and informative read.
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent, well written and touching book. It opened up my eyes to the plight of Islamic women. If you think that slavery died with Abraham Lincoln, think again. Millions of women around the globe are subjugated and enslaved today. The biggest problem is that they may not even realize their predicament and so it is hard to change their thinking. Read the book!! Become informed and then speak up if you care or if you dare!!