My Beauty Best Teacher

Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses development, Aid etc.

Pankaj Mishra reviews Ayaan Hirsi Ali's latest book:

“Nomad” reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history.
The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam—fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism—are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity. Many more young women are killed in India for failing to bring sufficient dowry than perish in “honor killings” across the Muslim world.
Such social pathologies no more reveal the barbaric core of Hinduism or Islam than domestic violence in Europe and America defines the moral essence of Christianity or the Enlightenment.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses tolerance and Islam during an interview about her new book Nomad:

If you compare the way Muslims take offence at perceived insults that are not insults, but are just a critical way of looking at their religion, then I start to ask myself, why are Muslims so hypersensitive to criticism and why don't they do anything with it except to respond by denying it or playing the victim? And I've come to the conclusion it's because of the gradual indoctrination – from parents, teachers – that everything in the Qur'an is true; Muhammad is infallible, you have to follow his example and defend Islam at all times, at all costs.