Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, now lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She is working on a follow-up to best-selling memoir, “Infidel.”
by Jean Westmoore
by Jean Westmoore
In her 2007 memoir, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells the amazing story of a geographic odyssey that took her from her native Somalia to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya and finally to a seat in the Dutchparliament— and of her parallel spiritual journey from Muslim to atheist.
Some of “Infidel” is shocking. With harrowing matter-of-fact-ness, she describes the day when she was 5 years old and her grandmother hired a man to circumcise her, her 4-year-old sister and 6-year-old brother with a pair of scissors while their parents were away from home.
There also was the Quran teacher in Nairobi who hit her so hard he fractured her skull; her journey alone to The Netherlands to escape a forced marriage; the brutal murder on a street in Amsterdam of her friend, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, by a radical Islamist enraged by the “Submission” movie they had made together.
But “Infidel” is most interesting as a coming-of-age tale, of a life transformed by reading and exposure to Western ideas. “Infidel” is the October book for The Buffalo News Book Club.
In a telephone interview from Washington, D. C., where she is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and lives with round-the-clock security, Hirsi Ali laughed as she recalled the first book she read in English at school in Kenya.
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Source: Buffalo News
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