Ayaan Hirsi Ali

An account of the author's travels in the Levant (Near East) during World War II and after, and his impressions of persons and places in Arab lands.

Ayaan Ali Hirsi makes a powerful plea for a Muslim Reformation as the only way to end the horrors of terrorism, sectarian warfare and the repression of women and minorities. Today, she argues, the world's 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings--not least the duty to wage holy war--are incompatible with the values of a free society. For centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation--a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity--is now at hand, and may even have begun. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness--not least by Muslim women--to think freely and to speak out. Courageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. And she calls on the Western world to end its appeasement of the Islamists. "Islam is not a religion of peace," she writes. It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, not the opponents of free speech. Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not a call to arms, but a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global toleration. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, with jihadists killing thousands from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world's number one problem.

Sie ist Abgeordnete, Bestsellerautorin, Europäerin des Jahres, aber vor allem eine Frau, die für die Rechte der muslimischen Frauen, für die westlichen Werte und für die Freiheit kämpft. Das hat seinen Preis: Jeden Tag muß sie damit rechnen, daß islamische Fanatiker sie töten wollen. Jetzt erzählt sie, wie aus einem Flüchtling aus Afrika eine "politisch-intellektuelle Kämpferin mit den Looks eines Pariser Models und der Schärfe einer Anklägerin vor dem Haager Strafgerichtshof" (Die Zeit) wurde.

Muslims who explore sources of morality other than Islam are threatened with death, and Muslim women who escape the virgins' cage are branded whores. So asserts Hirsi Ali's meditation on Islam and the role of women, the rights of the individual, the roots of fanaticism, and Western policies toward Islamic countries and immigrant communities. This controversial book is a call to arms for the emancipation of women from religious and cultural oppression and from an outdated cult of virginity. It is a defiant call for clear thinking and for an Islamic Enlightenment. But it is also the courageous story of how Hirsi Ali herself fought back against everyone who tried to force her to submit to a traditional Muslim woman's life and how she became a voice of reform. She relates her experiences as a Muslim woman so that oppressed Muslim women can take heart and seek their own liberation.--From publisher description.

Original: De maagdenkooi

As Johnis and the other "chosen" recruits of the Forest Guard are pulled into deeper danger to secure the seven lost Books of History, Johnis tries to rescue his mother from enslavement by the Horde, but risks betraying the Forest Dwellers.