You Really Ought to Read this Book

Last night I did something I haven't done in a long time, I read a brand-new book cover-to-cover in one sitting (ok, I did get up once to use the bathroom and get a snack).

The book is Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

You may have heard parts of this story before in the news media, but basically, this woman went from being a dirt-poor member of the Muslim Brotherhood to a secular Member of Parliament in The Netherlands (with a master's degree in political science along the way) in about 15 years. Usually the media loves to play up these sort of rags-to-riches stories, so one might expect that the real stories is somehow less fantastic than the one-sentence summary. That would be a mistake; the story is way, way, way more fantastic and amazing than I (or anyone) could summarize in a paragraph, much less a sentence.

The only shame is that there a probably a lot of people out there that will dismiss this woman as just another right-wing hack because her current employer is the American Enterprise Institute. They are very closely associated with the Bush administration, so that is enough to get them blacklisted by a lot of people. To be honest, my general impression of them has been that they are the kind of place that produces papers like "School Vouchers Cure Depression" and "Terrorists will Bomb YOUR House (without a Troop Surge in Iraq)." That's kind of a shame, because they probably aren't all that bad, but it really says something about how much faith I've lost in our present administration's ability to come up with non-terrible policies. Given what we've learned about the inner workings of this administration leading up to the war in Iraq, do I really believe they've got the sharpest people working on domestic policy? I used to be a Republican...6 years of GW and a Republican congress cured me of that. Now I'm just desperate to find any sort of politician willing to support any sort of libertarian policy.

I suppose that's why I found Hirsi Ali's book so engrossing. Here's a woman that grew up in a culture completely opposed to individual freedom, but through hard work and a lot of luck managed to make the journey (both geographic and intellectual) to the modern world and a liberal conception of individual rights and interactions between the government and intellectuals. Sure, in my case she is preaching to the converted, but her book does such better job of explaining to people why they ought to be libertarians than I ever could.

You should read Infidel, even if you disagree with the politics at the end of the book, it's still an unbelievable story.