Ayaan Hirsi Ali's powerful new book Heretic. A Must Read.

I can't do better than the back cover blurb here. It describes the book perfectly.

I loved Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Nomad so have been waiting expectantly for her new one, just released. And it doesn't disappoint at all. While the first two volumes were about herself and her own journey of escape from a devout Islamist family in Somalia to a liberating, personal and social freedom in the West, Heretic is a no-holds-barred, thorough-going, and often savage critique of Islam and its beliefs and practices.

It gets down and dirty and it is very persuasive. Hirsi Ali writes with a refreshing, uncluttered lucidity. The book is only 300 pages and won't take you long to read. But it will make your blood boil.

She asks the hard questions of Islam, particularly 'Why the violence?  WHY THE FUCKING VIOLENCE?' 

She puts some flesh on the bones by clearly outlining what's wrong with Islam and how it can be fixed. She gives example after example of atrocities committed under Sharia law by today's pre-modern savages - honor killings, stonings, killings of homosexuals and blasphemers and other 'infidels'.

She attacks a form of appeasing liberalism we often see in the West, that labels IS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban and their sister brand names, as 'extremists', rather than confronting head on the self-evident fact that these groups represent a significant and toxic dimension of Islam and have done so from the time of Muhammad.  

Hirsi Ali makes the case that these traditions have to be abandoned. Islam needs substantial reform and modernisation, and the increasing number of dissenters committed to reform, inevitably at huge risk to themselves - scholars, clerics, activists - need to be supported aggressively by the West. 

Some things in this world of ours are simply intolerable. Fundamentalist Islam is one of them. I consider this a very important book that should be widely read and debated. I sincerely hope it will be.