Want to understand what makes a jihadist tick? Read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Nomad.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new memoir, “Nomad,” is the most powerful book you will have read in a long time. Ms. Hirsi Ali writes with the clear eye for detail and narrative flair of a novelist. She invites the reader to witness the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam – and Islam within the West – first hand, not as an abstraction in Sam Huntington’s Harvard seminar room or in the august pages of Foreign Affairs, but as it has played out in the very intimate interstices of her personal life.

Hirsi Ali is more than a nomad, She is a time traveller between the universes of tradition and modernity. In this book she takes us along on that emotionally tumultuous journey from the moment doubt morphed into her defection from the “childlike” womb of Islam to her nagging guilt as an undutiful daughter; from her giddy intoxication with newfound liberty to the fear for her safety and the loneliness of her freedom. “The world outside the clan is rough, and you are alone in it,” her grandmother had warned her.

Rarely does the telling of a very personal story also tell one of the key stories of our time. But Hirsi Ali accomplishes this in “Nomad.”

We witness a wrenching deathbed reunion with her once proud Somali warlord father, in exile and on welfare in the largely Muslim ghetto of East London. They had not spoken in years since, as Hirsi Ali puts it, “Living as a Western woman meant I had shed my honor.” Yet, even as he beseeched Allah with his last breaths to return his wayward daughter to the fold of family and faith, his lingering anger and deep disappointment yielded to love. “He ultimately allowed his feelings of fatherly love to transcend his adherence to the demands of an unforgiving God,” she writes.

Not so for the customs of the clan and the tenets of the faith. Hirsi Ali could not attend the funeral because “women are not allowed to be present at the graveside during a Muslim burial ceremony.” But it was only when she stepped out of the hospital onto the East London streets that her personal grief over her father’s loss once again met the reality of what she had chosen to leave behind. This passage illustrates Hirsi Ali’s gift for turning quotidian observation into poignant insight:

“Seated outside a halal fast-food shop was a small woman in a long black robe with a black embroidered beak of cloth tied over her nose and mouth, in the style of Algerian women. Two small children were crying in the buggy beside her, and she was trying to jiggle and comfort them while she lifted her cloth beak to try to eat her pastry modestly underneath it. Her older toddler was wearing a veil too. It was not a face veil, but it covered her hair and shoulders; it was white and lacy and elasticized so it fit snuggly over her head. The child couldn’t have been older than three.

“Two shop fronts further down was a huge mosque, the biggest mosque in London my escorts told me. A small crowd of men stood outside, all wearing loose clothing, long beards and white skull caps. All these people had left their countries of origin only to band together here, unwilling or unable to let go, where they enforce their culture more strongly than even in Nairobi. Here was the mosque, like a symbolic magnetic north, the force that moved their women to cover themselves so ferociously, the better to separate themselves from the dreadful influence of the culture and values of the country where they had chosen to live.

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