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

The answer for Hirsi Ali is precisely not the well-meaning “multiculturalism” that leaves each to their own, as has been the case in Holland where she was a member of parliament and defender of immigrant women’s rights. The answer is the opposite: integration of Muslim immigrants as individual citizens into Western society. Frustrating that process, Hirsi Ali warns, will lead to peril for the West given the scale of Muslim immigration and the high birth rate of Muslims in the West.

Unlike her nemesis Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic scholar who wants the West to accomodate Islam as a community of faith and practice, Hirsi Ali insists that Islam, especially in the clannnish permutations of its immigrants, must instead let go of the individual. (On this score, a new book by Paul Berman, “The

Flight of the Intellectuals,” is a very fitting complement to “Nomad.”)
Some quibbles. I do get the sense once in a while in the second half of “Nomad,” which discusses her arrival in America, that Hirsi Ali is a little starry eyed about the West. Yes, Christianity at its best is about love; and no, it is not an all-encompassing theocratic order. But in its fundamentalist reaches the literalism and dogma of evangelicals generates plenty of intolerance, hypocrisy, and familial dysfunction. And let’s don’t forget about the sex scandals in the Catholic Church.

Also, no doubt, in contrast to her experience of misogyny and polygamy Western men look pretty good. But to suggest they are nearly always upright and faithful to their wives and family is to ignore the reality of so many ugly divorces, forlorn children raised by the media, battered spouses and deadbeat dads. Certainly, the West has its fair share of desperate housewives.

Many Muslim readers will have bigger squabbles. How much does Hirsi Ali’s experience, in which faith and clan are fused, tell us about, say, modern Turkey or Iran? Others, like Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the Shiiite theorist and first president of revolutionary Iran, will argue that the concept of “Tawhid” – that the whole of existence is one – understands that freedom, not submission and domination, is the path to the divine. Yet, admittedly, he lives in exile outside Paris like Trotsky in Mexico City while “actually existing Islam” is run by the Revolutonary Guard back in Tehran.

Above all, like Hirsi Ali’s first account of her defection from Islam, “Infidel,” the power of this book is that it was written in “good faith” as the Italian essayist Nicola Chiaromonte meant it: As a witness to her moment, Hirsi Ali calls it as she sees it. She has arrived at her beliefs not by retreating into orthodoxy out of fear of uncertainty or through the nihilism of indifference, but because experience has led her to them. If she wants to live in this world as a free women, here she must stand.

Nathan Gardels is the editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network. His latest book, with Mike Medavoy is “American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age.”

© Global Viewpoint. Distributed by Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by the Christian Science Monitor

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