by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Free Press. 368 pages. $26.

BY ANNE GRANT

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>Special to the Journal

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Everything about Ayaan Hirsi Ali seems larger than life. Most Americans first learned of the statuesque African, then a member of the Dutch Parliament, when Theo van Gogh was murdered in 2004 for making an anti-Islamic film with her. The ruling party fell from power when it tried to revoke her Dutch citizenship.

A gifted thinker, speaker and writer, Ali, 37, has produced her second bestseller in three years. Her first book, The Caged Virgin, compiled her essays. Half the length of her current book, and heavy in polemics, it did not tell her own story as completely as Infidel, which should have an index.

Infidel abounds in autobiographical details, often harrowing, sometimes mundane. She survives a horrifying clitoridectomy with old scissors at the age of 5, grows to confront the blood-chilling demands of family and clan, bribes police, evades gun-slinging rebels, and rescues loved ones amid thousands of ghostlike refugees. She tells it all with a warmth and transparency that may satisfy complaints about her lack of full disclosure when she sought asylum in the Netherlands.

She dedicates the book to the family that sometimes brutalized and disowned her, remembering how much she still owes them. Ali emerges as a compassionate person in the midst of a purposeful life.

More than that: She brings great intellectual honesty to examining her Islamic faith in light of the 9/11 attacks — an example that Americans raised in Christianity ought to follow. How did such vast numbers of Christians forsake their Gospel to wage preemptive war?

With trepidation, Ali looks up the hate-filled scriptures quoted by Osama bin Laden, and finds that the Quran says exactly what he claimed. Does she believe those scriptures came from God? And if not, does she still believe in God? And if not, does she risk going to Hell?

Ali answers no to all three questions, an enormous act of courage. She also condemns multiculturalism, that sacred cow of Western liberals.

To have landed in Holland, the pinnacle of tolerance, after the tyrannies she endured in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, suggests some sort of providence: “I wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa. Why there was so much peace, security and wealth in Europe. What the causes of war were, and how you built peace.”

Recently catapulted into Washington’s conservative American Enterprise Institute, is Ali now being packaged as our next best weapon against Islam? Or will she once again startle these new colleagues with insights they had not bargained for? She has landed in the perfect place to unravel the connections between wealth and wars.