RELIGION NOT RECOGNISED

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin is "reviewed" by Irfan Yusuf in the Weekend Australian. Actually, it's a subtle attack on Hirsi Ali masquerading as a review.

Yusuf doesn't recognise the Islam described by Hirsi Ali:

One would expect Ayaan Hirsi Ali's criticisms of Islam to be based on knowledge and experience. She was, after all, born into a conservative Muslim environment, reared "to be a Muslim, a good Muslim" with family life dominated by Islam "down to the smallest detail". Further, her book, subtitled A Muslim Woman's Cry for Reason, would also be expected to contain elements of Islam that Muslims immediately recognise.

Ali and I were born in the same year, and we grew up in middle-class, culturally Muslim families. Yet I found her descriptions of a typical Islamic upbringing almost completely unfamiliar.

Without realizing it Yusuf, a male, accounts for his non-recognition of the Islam Hirsi Ali describes:

Its difficult themes reflect her troubled upbringing as the daughter of a political dissident frequently on the move.

It could be that Yusuf, as a Muslim male, just doesn't want to acknowledge that Hirsi Ali accurately describes the plight of many Muslim women. The fact that most of the "review" is devoted to discrediting Hirsi Ali leads me to think that's the case.

It's also worth noting that Yusfu's review is strikingly similar, especially in describing Hirsi Ali's background, to an earlier, equally scathing review in The Nation.