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The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (Hardcover)

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Author)
Key Phrases: underage asylum seekers, Holy Book, United States, Saudi Arabia (more...)

4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Well-known feminist Ali was named as the next target of outraged Muslims in a letter pinned with a knife to the chest of slain Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, murdered in 2004. Ali was the screenwriter on Van Gogh's film Submission, which questions the individual's relationship with God through the eyes of five Muslim women. In this book, which includes the text of Submission and new essays, Ali criticizes Western nations for deliberately overlooking aspects of Muslim culture that oppress women. In their struggle to integrate ideals of individualism with respect for other cultures, the West leaves Muslim women at the mercy of a "culture of virginity" that oppresses women and threatens their liberty and their lives. Ali details abuses, from genital mutilation to arranged marriages of young girls to domestic violence, suffered by female Muslims. Ali, originally from Somalia and a member of the Dutch Parliament, challenges Western culture and Islam to honestly confront issues of religion and individual freedom in this compelling look at Islam and gender politics. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description
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 Ayaan Hirsi Ali's profound 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. Hard-hitting, outspoken, and controversial, The Caged Virgin is a call to arms for the emancipation of women from a brutal religious and cultural oppression and from an outdated cult of virginity.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.

Born in Somalia and raised Muslim, but outraged by her religion's hostility toward women, Hirsi Ali escaped an arranged marriage to a distant relative and fled to the Netherlands. There, she learned Dutch, worked as an interpreter in abortion clinics and shelters for battered women, earned a college degree, and started a career in politics as a Dutch parliamentarian. In November 2004, the violent murder on an Amsterdam street of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, with whom Hirsi Ali had written a film about women and Islam called Submission, changed her life. Threatened by the same group that slew van Gogh, Hirsi Ali now has round-the-clock protection, but has not allowed these circumstances to compromise her fierce criticism of the treatment of Muslim women, of Islamic governments' attempts to silence any questioning of their traditions, and of Western governments' blind tolerance of practices such as genital mutilation and forced marriages of female minors occurring in their countries.

Hirsi Ali relates her experiences as a Muslim woman so that oppressed Muslim women can take heart and seek their own liberation. Drawing on her love of reason and the Enlightenment philosophers on whose principles democracy was founded, she presents her firsthand knowledge of the Islamic worldview and advises Westerners how best to address the great divide that currently exists between the West and Islamic nations and between Muslim immigrants and their adopted countries.

An international bestseller -- with updated information for American readers and two new essays added for this edition -- The Caged Virgin is a compelling, courageous, eye-opening work.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 187 pages
Publisher: Free Press (April 25, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743288335
ISBN-13: 978-0743288330
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #354,149 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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Holy Book, United States, Saudi Arabia, World War, Father Atta, Bin Laden, Prophet Muhammad, Brief Personal History of My Emancipation, Labor Party, The Holiness of Secular Books, Four Women's Lives, Memorial Day, Theo van Gogh, Genital Mutilation Must Not Be Tolerated, Young Woman, Hirsi Ali, Western Europe, Let Us Have, Critical Look, Amina's Speech, Defending Western Ideals, Radical Muslims, House of Representatives, Tony Blair, Domestic Violence More Effectively

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Customer Reviews

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4.2 out of 5 stars (30 customer reviews)

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75 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an important and moving book, January 24, 2007

By	H. Katz - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of The Caged Virgin, sets out to explain the Islamic religio-cultural mentality of staking a family's and clan's honor on the virginity and chastity of the females. Her book also exposes the numerous brutal and misogynistic practices perpetrated against women in order to keep them submissive and preserve the group's reputation; these practices include female genital mutilation, culturally sanctioned domestic abuse, forced marriages (including child marriages), and honor killings. One of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's key points is that this religio-cultural mentality and these abuses are prevalent in Muslim immigrant communities in the West. Unfortunately, politicians, academics, journalists and law enforcement officials often turn a blind eye on the plight of immigrant women, operate on a double standard that is tacitly permissive of these "cultural differences", or simply do not work efficiently enough at assisting Muslim women who are in danger.

The author herself, born in Somalia, suffered forced genital mutilation as a child and fled an arranged marriage to a stranger; growing up she was also educated to despise infidels, particularly Jews. When she arrived as a refugee in Holland, she took up work as an interpreter among Dutch Muslims and saw firsthand numerous examples of the problems and traumas of Dutch Muslim women and also men. She then became an MP, in the hopes of implementing public policy that would assist immigrants. In her book, and in speeches and interviews that she has given, she criticizes a "multicultural" or "politically correct" approach to the immigrant communities, which allows those communities to operate entirely with their own separate set of values and not assimilate any conception of individual, universal rights and personal freedom. Community leaders are often quick to call any criticism of their cultural practices as "racist" or "intolerant", no matter that in Dutch society - and western society in general - some of these practices are outright criminal. Politically correct, multiculturalist politicians and officials would rather not "offend" these outspoken representatives of the immigrant community, even though by not causing any offense, they are ignoring the suffering of too many Dutch Muslim women and girls, who live on Dutch soil and are entitled to the government's protection from harm and oppression. The same scenario plays out in other European countries, as well, and might be taking root in the US; community spokespeople and heads of ethnic and immigrant organizations will be quick to use the language of western values and multiculturalism in order to direct attention away from the absence of such values in their communities.

All of these issues are discussed in the book, which is not written as a hateful rant or an angry diatribe. The author writes urgently and with feeling; these matters are understandably close to her heart, and should be of utmost importance to the world at large as well. Though in recent years she embraced atheism, she does not prescribe this as a course of action, and she does not write contemptuously of religious Muslims. What she urges is an age of enlightenment for Islam; she wishes for free thought, unhindered expressions of dissent, and a general promotion of the welfare of women, including their active participation as equals in the social sphere. She cites examples of Muslim women and girls in Europe who are yearning not to conform exactly to their families' wishes; they might want something as simple as dressing in a more western style, to choosing whom they wish to marry, what job to hold, how many children to have. The author sees in these women the promise of a reform for how Islam is still widely practiced. She hopes for the predominance of more modern and liberal interpretations of the Koran.

The book includes the script that Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote for Submission, the film directed by Theo Van Gogh, who was brutally murdered by a jihadist for his audacity to use his personal right of free expression in order to criticize cultural abuses; the film focuses on passages from the Koran that have been used to justify various abusive practices against women. The Caged Virgin also includes an open letter to Muslim women and girls who come from strict, traditionalist families but who are seriously contemplating starting their own life and not conforming to their families' idea of what life for a woman should be like. Again, to make this clear, the author does not lump all Muslims together into one way of thinking or practicing their religion. She also describes her own family honestly and without bitterness; she will quite clearly write about the pain caused by her father's rejection of her, but also notes the times when, growing up, he complimented her intelligence and generally had more of a sense of humor than her mother. Her father was also opposed to female genital mutilation; it was her grandmother who arranged for it to happen, during one of her father's lengthy absences from home. She does not set out to portray all Muslim women as victims; she points out great courage and strength when she has observed those traits, and she also makes the important observation that women themselves police and enforce misogynistic cultural practices. Her concern also extends to how these cultural practices affect men - boys, for instance, who grow up in a household with an uneducated and abused mother, and men who enter marriage with no understanding of women.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes with courage, honesty, and clarity; she expresses her personal vision and does not shy from exposing abuse. She knows what is at stake here, from the personal lives of Muslims to the broader issue of peaceful co-existence with the west. She dismantles the arguments of politically correct multiculturalists without viciousness, only with steady persuasiveness. She is a necessary voice in public life and the ongoing struggle for personal freedom and individual values.

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71 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courageous and highly readable , January 13, 2007

By	Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

In this perceptive work, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explores a major problem of our times with admirable fluency and erudition. In the preface she points out the similarity in attitude towards the Soviets by leftists then and Islamic culture now by the adherents of multiculturalism. Because of the victim culture, those intellectuals refuse to criticize oppressive practices as Muslims are perceived to be victims of the West. For the same reason, Israel is fiercely condemned because it belongs to the West while the Palestinians get a free pass. She considers this wrongheaded and racism in its purest form, the idea of the "other" that must be shielded at all costs.

She asks the advocates of the multicultural society to acquaint themselves with the suffering of women who are treated as chattels. The notion of "group rights" are detrimental to Muslim women, and without emancipation, the socially disadvantageous position of Muslims will persist. She laments the fact that Muslim women are not listened to and calls for self-examination in the culture. Hirsi Ali also deals with the clash of cultures in Europe and examines the triangles of power in the Muslim world itself: the triangle of the strong leader, the clergy and the army, and the triangle of apathy, fundamentalism and refugees/emigration.

The author provides a brief history of her early childhood in Somalia and her personal emancipation when she emigrated to the Netherlands and explains why she had to leave Holland for the USA. There is also an interview with prominent Canadian Muslim reformer Irshad Manji, a chapter on genital mutilation and 10 tips for Muslim women who wish to leave their oppressive circumstances. A full transcript of the documentary film Submission is included, the movie that led to the death of Theo van Gogh. Hirsi Ali claims that instead of empowering Muslim students through research and training, European universities have become activist centers to further the Palestinian cause.

She considers Muslims in Europe and around the world to fall into three broad categories: the terrorists and the fundamentalists that assist them, the tiny group of reformers that embraces the open society and the large number of undecideds who are caught in a mental vise, the painful contradiction between the harsh tenets of an intolerant religion and the values of the open society. She believes that the first victims of Muhammad are the minds of Muslims themselves as they exist in a situation of cognitive dissonance. Western cultural relativists flinch from criticism of Muhammad for fear of offence, preventing western Muslims from reviewing their own moral values.

This insightful work provides first-hand experience and knowledge of the particular worldview and serves as an appeal for clear thinking, enlightenment and individual liberation. Hirsi Ali nails it when she shows how various evils result from a belief based on fear. Although not flawless, The Caged Virgin is a torch of courage and reason in the darkness of oppression and brainwashing. The book concludes with bibliographic notes and an index. I also recommend Now They Call Me Infidel by Nonie Darwish, Because They Hate by Brigitte Gabriel, Menace in Europe by Claire Berlinski, While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer and The Force of Reason by the late Orianna Fallaci.

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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A hero for our time, August 14, 2006

By	Scott Bresinger (New York, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

While imperfect, this is an excellent introduction to the ideas of one of today's most challenging thinkers about Islam's interaction with Western Culture. Until recently a member of the Dutch parliment (due to a ridiculous controversy about her asylum application in the early 90's), contends that Islam must have a reformation if it is to exist peacefully in the modern world. She is particularly interested in the rights of immigrant women, who she believes are allowed to suffer due in part to Europe's liberal cultural sensitivity--their unwillingness to interfere with the cultural practices of immigrants, even when it condemns women to a life of servitude and physical/mental abuse. "The Caged Virgin," her first book, was written primarily for a Dutch readership, where it was originally published in 2004. This edition includes some new material (references are made to the Muhammad cartoon controversy and the London tubeway bombings). Due to a short film she wrote, "Submission, Part One," directed by Dutch firebrand Theo Van Gogh, she came to the attention of the world at large. Van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight by and Islamic extremist, and Ms. Ali was forced into hiding. When she emerged, she had bodyguards with her at all times, much like author Salman Rushdie. This book features the full transcript of the film, so readers can judge for themselves whether it deserved such a violent reaction.

Although Ms. Ali is herself a Muslim apostate and even an atheist, she maintains that it is possible for Islam to reform itself (indeed, she believes it must, to avoid a state of perpetual war). To this end, the book includes a short interview she conducted with Ugandan-born Canadian author Irshad Manji (her book, "The Trouble With Islam" is available on Amazon). Although Manji is completely westernized--no head covering, a feminist and even an open lesbian--she still considers herself a proud and faithful Muslim. Many readers may accuse them of not having a "true" knowledge of the religion, but that is part of their point. How many Christians know the details of the bible, yet still maintain faithfulness? Thus, they seek to reconcile Islam with secularism, by placing each in its own realm. Though Ms. Ali has rejected religion entirely, she doesn't expect anybody to follow her.

Elsewhere, there are chapters about female genital mutilation, a barbaric practice still performed by many African Muslims, which Ms. Ali condemns in no uncertain terms. In another chapter, she gives advice to young Muslim women who wish to leave the often abusive confines of their own families. There is also a wealth of autobiographical information, which sheds light on how she arrived on her conclusions. Though this is far from a perfect book--it is in places "preachy" (ironically) and a bit stiff--but overall she's a bold and even heroic person whose challenging ideas deserve to be listened to.

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