The political developments in Somalia between the 1950s and early 1990s affected Hirsi Ali’s family directly, causing a ripple effect of separation, displacement, and poverty. Hirsi Ali’s family is from the Darod people of Somalia, traditionally nomadic pastoralists. Among the Darod, people are grouped in large clans, arising from a common ancestor, typically a great-great grandfather. Hirsi Ali is of the clan of Osman Mahamud.

The religion followed by the Darod was Islam, but a looser version, mixed with old practices from the desert. The blending of faiths had its benefits and pitfalls: While the religion was less strict, it also accommodated harmful pre-Islamic practices such as female genital mutilation. According to Hirsi Ali, her nomadic grandparents lived a lifestyle close to “the Iron Age […] [with] no system of writing among the nomads” (8). For such ordinary Somali nomads—people like the Darod, the Isaq, and the Sab—the current colonial Italian rule meant little.

British Somaliland (parts of Somalia under a British protectorate) gained independence in 1960, soon uniting with the territories of liberated Italian Somaliland (the Italian protectorate) to form the Republic of Somaliland. In 1969, President Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke was killed by his bodyguard in an attack which was supposedly individually motivated. However, the fact that six days later, General Siad Barre staged a coup overthrowing the parliamentary government, raised the suspicion that Sharmarke’s murder was a political assassination. Barre eventually renamed the country the Somali Democratic Republic and suspended the judiciary and constitution to bring in a Soviet-era communist style of one-party government that blended Islamic ideology with communist values. A military dictator, Barre pursued his opponents ruthlessly, and persecuted the Isaq people in particular (Barre was a Darod).

In Infidel, Hirsi Ali describes how her Columbia-university-educated father, Hirsi, was a vocal critic of Barre, leading to his imprisonment shortly after Ayaan’s birth. During Hirsi’s imprisonment, the family were visited by Barre’s special police and threatened. Due to Hirsi’s known political views, his family with Asha had to often shift cities and countries for protection. As Barre’s military junta targeted people—especially those from clans other than his—resistance grew, both in the form of armed rebel groups and the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), of which Hirsi became a member. The SSDF found support in Ethiopia, where the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam funded the enemies of Barre.

The political rivalry had its base in clan warfare, with Barre invading “the Ogaden region, which Ethiopia claimed as its own but which was mostly occupied by Somali speakers, the Ogaden subclan of the Darod” (55). The invasion was successfully resisted, but the enmity between Barre and Mengistu grew bitter, fueling the Somali resistance that would eventually erupt in a bitter civil war in the late 1980s. In 2012, the country was renamed the Federal Republic of Somalia.