The hold of the past

A tale of rage and complicity

Nomad: From Islam to America. A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilisations. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Simon & Schuster; 274 pages; $27 and £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OBSERVED at a distance, traditional societies hold a great fascination for people who are raised in the secure world of middle-class modernity. There is a keen appetite for memoirs and works of popular anthropology that offer some sense of what it is like to grow up in a setting where loyalty to the extended family, the faith, the tribe is unquestioned; and where people's self-worth depends on acting out rituals and roles inherited from distant ancestors. When set against the atomised solitude of some forms of contemporary Western existence, life as an Ottoman imam, a tsarist peasant or an African warrior can appear romantic—even, somehow, whole and well-integrated where modern life is all too often fragmented and prolix.

For anyone who has ever felt a tinge of rose-tinted nostalgia for the traditional, Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides a bracing, and on the whole healthy, cold shower. Having experienced traditional society from the inside—in the form of a Muslim Somali family headed by a well-known politician who practised polygamy and left a deeply troubled and dysfunctional progeny—she has no time for sentimentality. As the world's most famous ex-Muslim (who became a politician in the Netherlands, then a public intellectual in America), she tells people who have grown up in countries shaped by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that they don't know how lucky they are.

Her African upbringing, as she recounts the story, was dark, fearful, full of tedious labour, meaningless rituals and irrational cruelty of which female circumcision was only the most egregious example. People succumbed to terrible diseases because they did not know the elementary facts about hygiene and health. An obsessive concern with the hereafter sapped their will to take practical steps that could have made their lives more bearable.

With disarming frankness, she takes on her family one by one: her father (a moderniser only by his tribe's strict standards), her jealous, superstitious mother, her sisters, who suffer a range of tragic fates, her sad feckless brother, who fails in almost all his traditional duties, except that of beating his sisters. To Ms Hirsi Ali's horror, one sister, whom she remembers as a playful, headstrong child, ends up in an East London housing estate, draped in a head-to-toe jilbab, a garment that seems to imply utter rejection of her host country and its values. The author is indignant not just over her sister's ultra-traditionalism, but over the fact that British society—in what appears to be a spirit of muddled multiculturalism—seems to tolerate or even encourage such backward-looking ways of living and dressing. Each family member is held to epitomise some recurring problem which is, in Ms Hirsi Ali's view, characteristic of patriarchal societies, especially when they are uprooted but trying desperately to cling to the old ways.

At times the clinical manner in which she dissects her family's failings and pathologies seems a bit harsh. Just as her forebears had very clear ideas on how everybody should behave, in accordance with their sex and position in the family, Ms Hirsi Ali has no hesitation in offering prescriptions of her own. Nor does she have much time for the idea that there might be intermediate solutions to the dilemma faced by millions of young people all over the world: how to balance the demands of modern reality and the traditional values they have received from their parents.

Still, many will feel that Ms Hirsi Ali has the right to express strong feelings on these matters. After fleeing the marriage that her father tried to arrange, she found happiness in the Netherlands but lost a close friend who was murdered by a Muslim zealot. The Dutch government deprived her of her passport because of the fibs that she told immigration authorities. Arriving in America, she felt a natural affinity with people on the ideological centre-right who believe the Western world should be more trenchant in defending its own values and less inclined to blame itself. Her writing is at its best when it is honest and vulnerable rather than hectoring and prescriptive: when she admits, for example, that even she feels the loneliness of modern society at times, and yearns for the sense of belonging that life in the clan—however cruel and dysfunctional—can still provide. And there are touching passages in which she bids farewell to various members of her family: first, in the literal sense, to her dying father; to her sad, crotchety mother, with whom she re-establishes telephone contact after a long estrangement; and to her late grandmother, to whom she addresses a rhetorical letter in which affection wins out, albeit marginally, over resentment.

Ms Hirsi Ali is surely oversimplifying when she says that Islam's problems are almost entirely self-inflicted, with the implication that all the West need do is repeat the Pharisees' prayer (thank heavens we are not like those people) and go on fighting the good ideological fight. On the other hand, she offers a powerful riposte to those who insist on the opposite: that the brewing clash of civilisations is all the fault of Western misdeeds, for which no apology will suffice. But surely there is a more interesting possibility, which she does not consider: that Western misbehaviour, starting with Anglo-French colonial adventures in the Middle East and South Asia, reinforced some of the worst features of Islamic societies—creating a vicious circle which has yet to be broken.