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In the struggle for the soul of Islam, she is both a former insider and a well-informed outsider. Hirsi Ali wants the problem dealt with, not just argued about. That might be enough to drive most people back into the corner of their established negative view of the religion, but not a sensitive thinker. Her previous books- The Caged Virgin (2004), Infidel (2006), and Nomad (2010)-have been very critical of Islam, and instigated death threats against her and accusations of Islamophobia. This evolution, over the course of her four books and many appearances in lectures and debates in between, makes her more than just an advocate and a commentator, but an interesting character in the story. She says in her new book, Heretic, that her own views continue to evolve and that the solution to the issues faced by the Islamic faith, from which she herself emerged, might not be a mass conversion away from Islam, as she has previously advocated, but a reformation within. Just as my own place on the atheism side of the debate has moderated since college, so has Hirsi Ali’s from when she first started commenting and writing on the matter. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s books have chronicled her own personal journey from Somali Muslim, who at one time lived in Mecca, to hopeful atheist advocating for the salvation of the religion. However, one of the authors I read during that time has stayed with me, because her works have been about more than the theory of religion versus the world. As often happens after the initial excitement has passed, I still consider myself part of the group but my embrace of it has loosened. This was because of the “New Atheist” movement, defined by writers like Sam Harris ( The End of Faith) and Richard Dawkins ( The God Delusion), books that I devoured amidst all of the other freethinking I was inspired to do in college. Four years after I was told by my first-ever girlfriend that I would end up in hell because I didn’t believe in her god, the word “atheist” entered my awareness in a big way. They are making up for lost time, in a way.įor me, it happened in college. Often, this happens in the teen years and is part of the reason teenage personalities seem so extreme. When someone finds their group, their kind of people, it’s easy to sometimes overdo the joining process.