She says Islam is backward and the Qur'an is terrible. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali – whose provocative new book is extracted here – is not about to let a fatwa intimidate her. It was after fleeing an arranged .... marriage and settling as an asylum-seeker in Holland that Hirsi Ali converted from Islam to atheism with the kind of zeal that usually powers journeys going the other way.
She can, she has said, make statements that a white person simply could not: on the "dangers" posed to the west not just by radical, but by regular Islam; on the "backward" nature of the religion; on how "terrible" the Qur'an is; and, in the most startling argument of her new book, Nomad (a follow-up to her bestselling memoir Infidel), how Muslims would do well to learn from Christianity. [guardian.co.uk] Read more
