Ever since she stepped on to the world stage just a few short years ago, Ms. Ali has commanded our attention as a writer, as a Dutch Parliamentarian, and as a passionate advocate of the rights of women, especially Muslim women. She reveres reason and the Enlightenment. Escaping an arranged marriage by the skin of her teeth and then migrating to Europe, her work has stirred a level of rage among Muslims that has led her to require a life of full-on security, bodyguards and all.

In some ways Nomad takes up where Infidel, her previous book, left off. Early in the book her father, a celebrated Somali warlord, dies in a London hospital, igniting a reshuffling of family that so often accompanies the passing of a patriarch. That process is intensified exponentially when the man has four wives, as well as children by the first three. As Ali leaves the hospital, she recalls, “It was just a glimpse and yet I felt an instant sense of panic and suffocation. I was right back in the heart of it all; inside the world of veils and blinkers, the world where women must hide their hair and their bodies, must cower to eat in public, and must follow a few steps behind their men on the street. A web of values—of honor and shame and religion—still entangled me together with all those women at the bus stop.”

Author of Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Photo: Tess Steinkolk

Nomad is divided into four sections that cover her family, her move to America, what she identifies as the Muslim obsession with sex, money, and violence, and, lastly, her ideas for solutions. This starkly personal and political book is most frightening when it turns to American university campuses and the inroads that proponents of Islam have made there. Often hectored by Muslim students, she said, [Though] “they are clearly exposed to education of the highest quality, they refuse to look reality in the face….When violence is committed in the name of Islam these student activists are silent.” She also is troubled by what she sees as a failure of feminism in America to fully address these issues.

Nomad: From Islam to America; a Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Free Press, $27; 304 pages.