Ayaan Hirsi Ali has produced two genres of writing. First, there is the sharp but programmatic style of her first book, The Caged Virgin, which assaulted the theological foundations of Islam and promoted the rights of Muslim women. While earning her death threats from within the Islamic world, her message has also attracted condemnation from a wide circle of liberal and feminist commentators. For them, her arguments are too stark, too totalising, too lacking in nuance.
Then there is her autobiographical writing. Her first memoir, Infidel, tells of her emergence on to the European political stage from a Somali desert culture. Hers is a story of exile from her clan through war, famine, arranged marriage, religious apostasy and the shocking murder on the streets of Amsterdam of her collaborator, Theo van Gogh. Told with lyricism, wit, huge sorrow and a great heart, this is one of the most amazing adventure narratives of the age of mass migration.
With Nomad, Hirsi Ali combines her two genres, narrative and polemic. She tells stories that were glanced over in Infidel – of her father, mother, sisters, brother and cousins – describing a clan system shattering on the shores of modernity. But the longest shadow is cast by the remarkable figure of her grandmother, who gave birth to daughters alone in the desert and cut her own umbilical cord, raged at herself for producing too many girls, rebelled against her husband, arranged for the circumcision of her granddaughters and instilled in them an unforgiving, woman-hating religion.
Hirsi Ali observes that her own nomadic journey has been taken across borders that have been mental as much as geographical. In Nomad she calls her ancestral voices into direct confrontation with her demands for reform of Islamic theology. The result is electrifying. This is not the same as saying she is always right; but when she calls on western feminists to stand with her, to celebrate the better values of the west, and to confront the worst of the abuses perpetrated on Muslim women, it is not clear what more useful thing those feminists might be doing.