Infidel: My Life, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How does one comment objectively on anything Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes, says or does? The rebel against Islam has to be held aloft, coddled and paraded in defiance of her obscurantist foes who want to cut her into pieces. A bloody threat was penned on a note stabbed into the corpse of the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, murdered in 2004 by an Islamist fanatic. Ali, who settled in the Netherlands, had collaborated with Van Gogh to make Submission, a controversial film featuring fictional Muslim women with tattooed verses of the Quran on their skins - verses that Ali believes justify the violation of women. By the time this is published, she could be dead. So any criticism feels dishonourable.

This was the dilemma faced by critics when Salman Rushdie's life was under the fatwa. Rushdie exuberantly praises Ali because she tells "the unvarnished, uncomfortable truth". In a personal memoir, however, "truths" are more tricksy, and always subjective. After publication, rows inevitably break out. With Ali, as always, there is likely to be hyper-agitation over her version, adding yet more pizzazz to a dramatic life.

She can write with light, luminous prose. Part one is pacy: it details political, personal and religious struggles in Somalia as lived by a family and clan, takes us into exile to Kenya and Saudi Arabia, and packs the pages with terrifically delineated characters (too many, though - they crowd the pages). Here Somalia becomes a pulsating nation, its ambitions of independence ending in utter failure. Her father's life symbolises this fall from grace. A political idealist and avowed modernist, he ill-used his wives and agreed to hand this daughter to a marriage suitor without her consent.

Like millions of Africans, Ali had a tough childhood. Aged five, innocent yet already held responsible, she was forced to retrace the long road to her inherited identity. "I have managed to count my forefathers back for three hundred years... 'Get it right,' my grandmother warns, shaking a switch at me. 'The names will make you strong. They are your bloodline. If you honour them they will keep you alive. If you dishonour them you will be forsaken... You will lead a wretched life and die alone.'"

Witchy words: how they must have scared her; how they made her the unbending woman she has turned into. Other relatives verbally abuse her, beat her, training to make her stoic and proud.

Ali experiences family love and hate, betrayals and sacrifices, strong women who can turn viciously cruel. Her description of her own genital mutilation is masterful, told without too much lingering on the agony and all the more agonising for that. When a young woman, she becomes an ardent, purist Muslim, fully veiled, without self-doubts.

You understand how later she can turn her back on the faith, now her total enemy. Ali has no capacity for nuanced or complex thought.

She escapes the arranged marriage to end up in the Netherlands, and her story and the telling of it lose authenticity. She now writes with careless arrogance and spite, and refers to "infuriatingly stupid analysts - especially those who called themselves Arabist, yet who seemed to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world". They write "reams of commentary... all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero... these were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew." The world she knows does not include any enlightened Muslims. Islam puts all women into a cage, she claims. Not her own mother and grandmother though, obviously. Gross claims are brandished but not evidenced.

With Ali we also have to allow for falsehood and duplicity. Her fabrications to get political asylum in the Netherlands were recently exposed. Yet she had spent years condemning "foreign" asylum seekers who do the same. No matter. She has got into political high places, moved from the left to the right, and is a mascot of liberal fundamentalists. The seraph is much adored.

However, there are emerging sceptics, even among her previous Dutch supporters. So off she flies to a right-wing US think tank to carry on this treacherous (in both senses) journey away from what she was. I think of her grandmother's warnings and hope that she doesn't end up forsaken and alone.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's book 'Some of my Best Friends...' is published by Politico's

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