Nomad

Ayaan 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 civilisations, 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.

About the Author

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - full name : Ayaan Hirsi Magan Isse Guleid Ali Wai’ays Muhammad Ali Umar Osman Mahamud (born 13 November 1969) is a Somali-Dutch feminist and atheist activist, writer and politician who is known for her views critical of Islam. She wrote the screenplay for Theo van Gogh's movie Submission, after which she and the director both received death threats, and the director was murdered. The daughter of the Somali politician and opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse, she is a founder of the women's rights organisation the AHA Foundation.