Book review: Nomad: A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilisations

Published on Friday 21 May 2010 20:45

Nomad: A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilisations by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Simon & Schuster, 304pp, £12.99

THE Somali activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of a number of critics of Islam who live under police protection because Islamists threatened to kill her. When you meet her, there are large men hovering in the background.

Her previous book, Infidel, chronicled her flight from an arranged marriage and the oppressions of Islam to a new life in the Netherlands. She went from being a cleaner, via a political science degree, to becoming a MP, all in a remarkably short time; from the Middle Ages to modernity would be another way of putting it. Much of that book's fascination derived from the glaring contrasts between sunny Kenya (her family's place of exile) and the grey, generous and orderly Netherlands where she conned her way in, posing as a refugee from Somalia.

This deceit was dredged up by a party colleague, the former prison governor and immigration minister "Iron" Rita Verdonk, who sought to expatriate her. This episode, and the subsequent cravenness of Amsterdam neighbours who resented the conspicuous security Ms Ali warranted in the wake of the killing of Theo van Gogh, led to Ali's relocation to the US and a post at a prominent think tank.

Nomad deals with these more recent episodes in her remarkable life, though it should be said that her descriptions of life in the US are flatter than those of her initial encounters with the Netherlands – unless one enjoys reading about airports, for which we already have Mr de Botton.

She provides a no-holds barred account of her own deracinated and dysfunctional family, and life among Somali "refugees" in general. Her late father, Abeh, an opponent of Siad Barre, tricked his way into Britain to take advantage of its welfare payments; her elder brother went mad after failing to live up to the "little prince" expectations rife in Muslim families, and a young female cousin has contracted Aids.

Ali rips into the infantilising multiculturalism which places no obligations on migrants, starting with the subsidised translation of official notices, and moving on to payments that enable people with no familiarity with a money economy to get credit. In both East Amsterdam and Rotterdam, this malignly patronising policy has created ghettos where, she claims, the first resort after insult or slight is not to law but to violence.

If turning members of clans into individual citizens is one problem, then the submissiveness inculcated by Islam (and not just violent Islamism) is another. Before anyone apologises for veils, they should read what she has to say about life beneath them.

Ali is especially incensed about the ways western societies turn a blind eye to female circumcision or honour killings, the most blind of them all being critics of "colonial feminism" who think it is imperialist to criticise Third World barbarities, especially if the perpetrators are non-white males. In a move that seems almost designed to compound Ali's problems, this self-proclaimed atheist argues that the Christian churches should proselytise among Muslim immigrants to counter the Saudi-funded Wahhabism that has infiltrated itself, termite fashion, into so many European mosques.

One wonders what admirers as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens will make of Ali's enthusiasm for Pope Benedict XVI and the "enlightened" Catholic Church, wherein, she argues, the rot of appeasement is less advanced than among Protestants. This is a bold and passionately written book, essential for any politician dealing with the closely related problems of Islamism and immigration.