In an interview on Women and Islam

You’ve started with The Clash of Civilizations by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. It was published in 1998, but its core theory first appeared as an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and was based on a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute where you now work...

This is a very important book on the post-1989 context, and what the new world order would look like after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was written almost 20 years ago now, and it seems as if Huntington’s hypothesis is getting more and more credit than Francis Fukuyama’s (The End of History) about what the world will look like.

It’s an academic book, but you feel you’ve personally lived the Clash of Civilizations?

I have moved from one civilization to another. In fact, according to Huntington’s definition of civilization, I have moved through three: the African, the Muslim and then I crossed over to the West. Huntington was actually a little reluctant to identify Africa as a civilization; he says that he wasn’t quite sure if Africa is a civilization, but just for the conceptual framework of his book he decided to call it one. But what I am mainly interested in is that I crossed from the Muslim civilization to the Western civilization. And maybe it’s not completely accurate to say that it’s a crossing, maybe it’s more of a criss-crossing. Because when I lived in Kenya, which was a former colony of Britain, I read books that were written by Westerners for Westerners. Books like Nancy Drew and George Orwell. It was a very British context – I read these books because I happened to go to school in Kenya, and the schools were modelled on the British system. The books they were offering, many of them were even published in Britain, because at the time Kenya didn’t have good publishing houses. But at the same time the Vatican of Muslim civilization, Saudi Arabia, had also come into our lives, through this woman called Sister Aziza. She came and made us aware of the fact that we were calling ourselves Muslims, but we were not true Muslims because we were not living according to scripture, we were not following the manual of what is permissible and what is prohibited, and a set of obligations and all of that. So there is that journey and I describe it in detail in my book Infidel and carry on in Nomad.

Do you want to give an example of when you really felt this clash? Something that happened to you personally, when you thought you really were stuck in the middle?

The entire book, Nomad, is about being stuck in the middle. Especially the beginning of the book, the first part that describes my family – I try to show just how stuck in the middle they are. I made the crossing because I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle; I wanted to belong to this side. And that’s a conscious choice. So, to give an example, there is my arranged/forced marriage. It’s the tradition, it’s the culture, that’s how it works: your father is your guardian, your guardian secures your future with a husband who is going to take care of you financially, for whom you will bear children and you will be an obedient wife. And I went through that and thought ‘I’m not going to do that!’ The second example I would give is September 11 2001, and that was more dramatic, because it brought home the clash of civilizations with a huge bang. It’s when people from my former civilization took airplanes and started diving into skyscrapers to make their point clear. It awakened not only me, but Muslims and Westerners all over the place, and, like everyone else, I struggled to understand it. The people who did it died, but the people who masterminded it, al Qaeda, called on all Muslims to stand with them against the Great Satan and the Little Satan [the US and Israel].