This is an important one. Ali makes an emphatic and unambiguous statement about human rights. It is a clear rejection of the muddle that is cultural relativism so intricately embodied in our notions of multiculturalism. Ali presents a rational argument for the internationalisation of human rights and in particular, women’s rights. The intellectual journey that Ali travels is truly inspiring and one can only hope that her journey is not yet over. As a very minimum, Ali is demanding that Islam undergo its own reformation, jettisoning all that is medieval and barbaric. The western modernity that Ali so marvels at must not, Ali persuasively argues, stop at national borders.

We in the west should no longer blind ourselves to the savagery of honour killings, of genital mutilations, of forced, loveless marriages, and of routine, community sanctioned violence, meted out daily to many women across the Islamic world. All this we can agree with without reservation. This should be the very minimum of what we regard as modernity. Ali is outstanding in presenting this case yet I must confess I find a certain one-sidedness about her world view, a certain lack of dialectical integrity in what is being presented. It is this one-sidedness that needs to be sympathetically addressed.

The central mistake I think Ali makes, maybe just a tactical mistake, is to single out Islam for its barbarity and backwardness. It is a wonder that Ali, in such a short time frame, is confident enough to reject all religious superstitions and declare herself free of the nonsense of heaven and hell. And that is the point. All religion, even those masquerading as enlightened and rational, are nothing but an accumulation of ancient myths which are themselves a clever cover for gender and class oppression. To single out Islam, is to put yet another barrier to the full and speedy emancipation of humanity in general and women in particular. It’s entirely natural to want to expose the vicious oppression that you have personally experienced, but it is the absurdity and backwardness of religion per-se that needs to be ultimately exposed if humanity is to take even a few tentative steps forward.

Yes, Islam appears to be an easy hit, its mind-set stuck firmly in the 7th century. But we should never forget the bloody trail that Christianity has left behind it; the crusades, the inquisition, the centuries of homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism and intra-religious hatreds. A few weeks touring around Northern Ireland will quickly refresh the memory of all this bloody poison, a poison that is not so very far removed from our own enlightened 21st century consciousness. And it’s not all historical stuff. Today, Christian fundamentalists in America, many of them in hugely influential positions, openly pray for, and work for a conflagration in the Middle East, a conflagration they believe will herald Armageddon and the second coming. Israel is to be supported uncritically because the Bible has predicted a modern day Israel will trigger off this Armageddon. Some of these Christian fundamentalists are perilously close to the nuclear button. Such collective insanity makes the mad mullahs in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan look quite sane in comparison.

So perhaps the Eastern religions, Hinduisms and Buddhism are more rational, more humane? Not a bit of it. Remember those TV pictures a few months back of Buddhist monks burning and terrorising Muslim villages in remote parts of Burma? Remember also the bloody carnage over the past decades of Hindus wiping out their Muslim neighbours and all in the name of respect for their ten thousand holy gods. And everywhere you look in these holy lands, religious elders sanction the most appalling patriarchal backwardness and misogynist violence towards their female populations.

And then there is Judaism. Our modern day Rabbis have become experts at portraying the Jews as the most oppressed people on earth. Yes, Jews have, throughout the ages, had their fair share of state and religious persecution that cannot be denied. But their suffering has been no more or less than many other minority communities. In fact, indigenous peoples and peoples of colour, four fifths of the world’s population, have suffered centuries of indescribable misery at the hands of the European colonialists. And irony upon irony, given the first opportunity, the Jewish settler state of Israel has itself unleashed its own colonial terror on its Palestinian neighbours, and all in the name of biblical authority. God’s chosen people returning to their promised land is one elaborate fairy-tale, a giant hoax, to justify the creation of a nuclear armed, Zionist, Greater Israel. Little wonder their Islamic neighbours detest the very notion of the State of Israel. Religious bigotry begets religious bigotry.

I doubt if Ayaan Ali would contest much of the above, yet her otherwise brilliant autobiography fails to place all religion equally in the firing line. As Richard Dawkins has been at pains to point out, there is no such dichotomy between good religion and bad. It is all bad, ancient superstition, mental child abuse (not to mention physical abuse) and social control. By singling out Islam, the other religions, east and west, are by default, seen to be more rational, more humane. This is a false and dangerous illusion.

A second failing of Ayaan Ali’s emerging world view involves her rather uncritical, and dare I suggest, naive belief in the free world, and in particular, the United States of America. Ali writes:

Whatever your feelings on the subject, The United States is the leader of the free world. P346

Is that the free world that has waged non-stop war against any and every nation that dared to escape from US hegemony? Is that the United States that has conservatively murdered 10 million Asians in various imperialist interventions since the conclusion of World War Two? Is that the same free world that illegally invaded Iraq under the entirely false pretext of removing WMDS? Is that the same United States that consistently vetoes UN sanctions against Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands the same Israel that is armed to the teeth with US nuclear weapons? Yes, Islam is barbaric with its medieval misogynistic practises, but the West is equally barbaric in its quest for global capitalist domination. The world trade system, that the US dominates and perpetuates, is probably responsible for more slow and degrading deaths by disease and starvation that all the tyrants in history, east and west.

And then there is Saudi Arabia. Ali is quite correct to expose the real nature of this artificial kingdom, a kingdom carved out of fragments of the crumbling Ottoman Empire by western imperialism. Ali defiantly writes:

Some of the Saudi women in our neighbourhood were regularly beaten by their husbands. You could hear them at night. Their screams resounded across the courtyards; No please! By Allah!

But if Saudi Arabia is barbaric, and it surely is, who props up the House of Saud? Who installed these gangsters in the first place? Who continually turns a blind eye to this medieval barbarity? The answer is uncomfortable but unambiguous nevertheless – the United States, leader of Ali’s much admired Free World.

Ali rebukes people like me, who she seems to think somehow excuse the failures and brutalities of the Islamic world. She writes:

People theorized beautifully about poverty pushing people to terrorism; about colonialism and consumerism, pop culture and western decadence eating away a peoples culture and therefore causing carnage. Other articles blamed the American’s blind support for Israel and opined that there would be more 9/11’s until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved.

Ali seems to want to refute this incontestable connection between Islamic terrorism and Western hegemony. For Ali, it all boils down to one thing the backwardness of religion. She concludes:

Not frustration, poverty, colonialism, or Israel; it was about religious belief, a one way ticket to heaven.P270

Tempting as this conclusion may be, it is, in the final instance, un-dialectical. Ideas do not exist and breed in a vacuum. With the temporary collapse of the socialist, secular response to western imperialism, militant Islam swept in to fill that political space. The US ruling elites have no problems coexisting with Islam just so long as it is a benign Islam. It is only when that Islam adopts a militant jihadist mentality that the US declares a never-ending war on terror. But Ali needs look no further than the US military-industrial complex to understand the breeding ground for such blind religious militancy. Two backward ideologies battling for territory, battling for minds, battling to impose their own dehumanising version of divine truth.

I agree unreservedly with Ali that the practises of Islam are barbaric. I concede also that the free west does allow some limited space for dissent and critical thinking. But we should not delude ourselves as to how limited that space is. Assange, Manning and Snowden will testify to just how limited of our supposed freedoms are. Whether we like to admit it or not, humanity is engaged in a war on two fronts; against religious obscurantism of all persuasions, and against a rapacious global capitalism that is taking humanity, in its insatiable drive for profit, to the very edge. Ali has spectacularly and wholeheartedly joined the war on the first front but in so doing, is in danger of compromising the war on the other.