Born in Somali and raised in a strict Muslim home, Hirsi Ali fled to the Netherlands in her early twenties to avoid forced marriage to a distant cousin. Since the early 1990s, she has worked as an interpreter and advocate for female Muslim asylum-seekers running from family repression, honor killings, rape, and mutilation. In The Caged Virgin, she enumerates the problems she sees within mainstream Islam and sets out the remedies she believes Western democracies must administer within their own borders.

Hirsi Ali strongly criticizes Islam itself for what she sees as its institutional support, unique among major religions, of male-domination and backwards attitudes about women. Islam, she asserts, perpetuates a cult of virginity that polices women’s bodies, sexuality, and fertility through violence. She interrogates Islam as it is practiced in Western nations against the ideals of the Western Enlightenment: liberty, individualism, and freedom of speech. Finding the two systems incompatible, she argues that it is Islam that must change.

Hirsi Ali’s grievance list also includes the failure of U.S. and European social services and law enforcement agencies to take Muslim women’s situations seriously. Too often, she states, crimes like domestic abuse and female genital mutilation go unrecorded or unpunished, and victims are pushed into mediation sessions that ultimately return them to their abusers. The root cause, she believes, is a faulty multicultural mindset that prompts Westerners to simply excuse immigrant violence as cultural or religious difference.

In publicly voicing these views, Hirsi Ali has pushed herself far beyond the Islamic mainstream and indeed, no longer considers herself a Muslim. In contrast to Irshad Manji, a Canadian journalist and the author of The Trouble with Islam Today, who argues for more free thinking and reform within the faith, Hirsi Ali is less interested in conversations and more concerned with concrete actions. She wants to provide individual women with the tools to escape oppression, and she wants to enact laws and policies that prevent Western compromise with imported anti-liberal practices.

Her words and work have been polarizing forces in Holland, she has been decried by Muslim leaders of various political stances, and controversy over her citizenship has even contributed to the recent ousting of a major Dutch political party from power. But to readers with an interest in Islam in the West, with human rights abuses, and with the welfare of women and children, Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin is required reading. Sometimes strident and always provocative, she raises central questions of our times.

Review by Mark David Bradshaw, August 18, 2006

The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith