It took centuries for the western world to travel from a society dominated by kings, social hierarchy, and religious intolerance to the Reformation, Enlightenment, the separation of the church and state, reason, and individual freedom. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's journey, as she relates it in this book, from the Muslim faith of her childhood, from a world in which women were subjugated and beaten into submission, to the world of reason and individual freedom, took only a few years.
Her story describes in vivid detail how the intolerance of Islam itself was responsible for the attacks of Muslims on "non-believers" — among others, for the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his "Satanic Verses," for the planes flown into New York's World Trade Center in 2001, for the violence that erupted over the publication in 2005 in Denmark of cartoons depicting Muhammad, for van Gogh's assassination in Holland in 2004, and for the threats against Ayaan herself.
After the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, people often said: "It's so weird, isn't it, all these people saying this has to do with Islam?" To this Ayaan responded: "Not frustration, poverty, colonialism, or Israel: it was about religious belief, a one-way ticket Heaven. . . . It is about Islam."
"Videotapes of old interviews with Osama Bin Laden began running on CNN and Al-Jazeera. They were filled with justification for total war on America, which, together with the Jews, he perceived as leading a new Crusade on Islam."
Bin Laden's quotes from the Quran resonated in the young Ayaan's mind: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck . . . . kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them. . . . The Hour [of Judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them."
A new kind of Islam was on the march. It was much deeper, much clearer and stronger — much closer to the source of the religion. It was not a passive, mostly ignorant, acceptance of the rules: "God wills it." It was about studying the Quran, really learning about it, getting to the heart of the nature of the Prophet's message. It was a huge evangelical sect backed massively by Saudi Arabian oil wealth and Iranian martyr propaganda.
It was militant, and it was growing. — Bettina Bien Greaves
