Since van Gogh's murder by a Muslim in 2004, she has lived in seclusion under the protection of Dutch authorities. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh's movie Submission led to death threats. She is the estranged daughter of the Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, with jihadists killing thousands from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world's number one problem.Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali born Ayaan Hirsi Magan 13 November 1969) is a Dutch feminist, writer, and politician. Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not a call to arms, but a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global toleration. It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, not the opponents of free speech. 'Islam is not a religion of peace,' she writes.

And she calls on the Western world to end its appeasement of the Islamists. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness-not least by Muslim women-to think freely and to speak out.Ĭourageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation-a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity-is now at hand, and may even have begun. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings-not least the duty to wage holy war-are incompatible with the values of a free society.įor centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change.

Today, she argues, the world's 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. Continuing her journey from a deeply religious Islamic upbringing to a post at Harvard, the brilliant, charismatic and controversial New York Times and Globe and Mail #1 bestselling author of Infidel and Nomad makes a powerful plea for a Muslim Reformation as the only way to end the horrors of terrorism, sectarian warfare and the repression of women and minorities.

Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali