oh gosh.. only 30 pages into this book and I'm not sure I can read it..
Female castration/ mutilation - this isn't in the dark ages.. this happens in mid 1970 and still happens today!!

This is an incredible biography of a girl who was born in a country torn apart by war, in a continent mostly known for what goes wrong rather than right. Measured by the standards of Somalia and Africa she states she is privileged to be alive and thriving.
She states; "Where I grew up, death is a constant visitor. A virus, bacteria, a parasite; droughts and famine; soldiers, and torturers; could bring it to anyone, any time. Death comes riding on raindrops that turned to floods. It catches the imagination of men in positions of authority who order their subordinates to hunt, torture and kill people they imagine to be enemies. Death lures many others to take their own lives in order to escape a dismal reality. For many women, because of perceptions of lost honor, death comes at the hands of a father, brother, or husband.
Death comes to young woman giving birth to new life, leaving the newborn orphaned in the hands of strangers
For those who live in anarchy and civil war, as in the country of Somalia, death is everywhere".

When she was born, her mother initially thought she had died. When she later got malaria and pneumonia she recovered.
When her genitals were cut, the wound healed. When a bandit held a knife to her throat, he decided not to slit it.. when her Quran teacher fractured her skull, the doctor who treated her kept death at bay.

In the second half of the book she flees to Amsterdam when she is married to a man her father has chosen who she does not want to marry
She takes the chance at freedom, a life in which she would be free from bondage to someone she had not chosen, and in which her mind, too, could be free.

She states she first encountered the full strength of Islam as a young child in Saudi Arabia. It was very different from the diluted religion of her grandmother, which was mixed with magical practices and pre-Islamic beliefs. Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence. It is the place where the Muslim religion is practiced in its purest form, and its is the origin of much of the fundamentalist vision that has, in our lifetime, spread far beyond its borders. "In Saudi Arabia, every breath, every step we took, was infused with concepts of purity or sinning, and with fear.. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality; hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved, just as the Prophet Muhammad decided centuries ago.."

The kind of thinking she saw in Saudi Arabia, and among the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya and Somalia, is incompatible with human rights and liberal values. It preserves a feudal mind-set based on tribal concepts of honor and shame. It rests on self-deception, hypocrisy, and double standards. It relies on the technological advances of the West, while pretending to ignore their origin in Western thinking. This mind-set makes the transition to modernity very painful for all who practice Islam.
It is always difficult to make the transition to a modern world. It was difficult for her and all her relatives from the miye. It was difficult when she moved from the world of faith to the world of reason - from the world of excision and forced marriage to the world of sexual emancipation. Having made that journey, she knows that one of those worlds is simply better than the other. Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values.



The message of this book, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

People accuse her of having internalized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that she attacks her own culture out of self-hatred because she wants to be white.. This is a tiresome argument. She asks, "Is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' tradition and mutilate my daughters? to agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes?"

When she comes to a new culture, where she saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?

Her decision to write the book, exposing so many private memories, was made to allow the world to know... how many girls are still excised and married off in the modern Muslim world. The fact is that hundreds of millions of women around the world live in forced marriages, and six thousand small girls are excised every day!!!
Her excision in no way damaged her mental capacities. As was proven when she got her degree in political science in Holland and was elected to Parliament. Where once again, she is threatened with death, by speaking out for freedom and change. She lives under guard as much a prisoner as she was before.. For a short chaotic time ~

Ayaan Hirse Ali gives a strong voice to when all her dissonant thoughts snapped open and she found herself thinking that the Quran is not a holy document, it is a historical record, written by humans. It is one version of events, as perceived by the man who wrote it 150 years after the Prophet Muhammad died.
It is a tribal and Arab version of events. It spreads a culture that is brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war.
For her to think this way of course she had to make the leap to believing the Quran was relative - not absolute, not literal syllables pronounced by God, but just another book.

She made the 10 minute art movie, 'Submission' to give a message - that men, and even women, may look up and speak to Allah; It is possible for believers to have a dialogue with God and look closely at him ..
The rigid interpretation of the Quran in Islam today causes intolerable misery for women... and finally, that she may no longer submit.. It is possible to free oneself - to adapt one's faith , to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the foot of oppression.


A powerful, thought provoking biography. A book I will probably never forget!