Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I am always interested in how other people live and what they are thinking.
When I read Infidel, I was hoping to get an idea of what it is like to grow up Muslim. This book was so much more than that for me.

Ali, strips herself and her family bare to give us a glimpse of her world and the life forces that brought her to a way of thinking that was cataclysmic for herself and her family relationships.

I expected a book that would tell me about what being Muslim in Africa might mean to one woman. I did not expect to catch glimpses of some of my own family members while reading. At the beginning of this book, Ali is describing what it was to have to recite her family line back many generations, while I have no experience that mirrors this exactly, I do remember hearing and being asked so many times, as a child and young woman, darling who are you? Who are your people? Who is your granddaddy? Where are they from? I still feel the pressure of not giving answers that would be satisfactory to the elders that posed these questions. I know that this experience is not quite the same as what was asked of Ali by her grandmother but for a moment I had to stop reading and gather myself and wonder, if the questions that I had been asked all my life were some deep ancestral questions that were as much a part of who we are as a people, as other inherited traits.

Anyway, I digress, Ali allows us to witness what it was like to grow up as a practicing but not very observant Muslim. We then witness her transformation, as a young lady, into a more devout Muslim. Finally, as she begins to really understand herself as a woman and the free thinking adult that she has been fighting to be, we see her put away her long held beliefs.

We see what civil unrest and integration to another country are like through the eyes of someone who actually experienced those things, as well as what it was like for Ali to become immersed in another culture.

This book will remain with me for years to come. If not the actual content, then the heart of what it meant to me. I have told many people read Infidel, it is not what you think, it is so much more.