In March 2002, Pim Fortuyn wins the Rotterdam local elections by a landslide. Fortuyn is openly gay, critical of Islam, and the founder of his own anti-Labor faction. A divisive figure, Fortuyn is criticized by many for his radical views, but Ayaan thinks many of his policies are liberal socialist. She also believes Fortuyn’s rise is a symptom of the failure of the Dutch left, which is mired in moral and cultural relativism.

Days before a national election in which Fortuyn could have been declared prime minister, he is assassinated. Ayaan prays to Allah that his assassin is not Muslim, for fear of the effect on Holland. As it turns out, the man who shot Fortuyn dead was a white animal rights activist. She learns from Hirsi that he has been receiving warnings to rein in his “apostate” daughter or else she will be killed. Hirsi requests Ayaan to keep her opinions to herself. Soon, Ayaan’s friends join her father in the appeal, with even Ellen asking Ayaan to stop talking about political issues lest she end up in danger. A particularly fraught situation arises when Ayaan is invited to a televised debate in which a man in the audience yells that Ayaan thinks Islam is backward. Ayaan replies that Islam is backward, and chaos breaks out amongst the largely Muslim audience. The moderator of the debate has to usher Ayaan out before time.

Fed up of the threats and the increased security around her, Ayaan takes a break by attending a writing workshop in California. However, her open criticism of Islam has had a negative fallout: Hirsi has stopped speaking to her once again, angry she has betrayed the faith so dear to him.

In California, Ayaan is surprised to find an orderly, relatively content society, unlike the racist, gun-obsessed America she has been told about. She especially loves the enormous bookstores in America, buying books by the crate. While still in America, Ayaan gets a call from Neelie Kroes, a prominent politician of the Liberal Party (called VVD), asking her to join the party and run for elections. Ayaan ponders the decision, but decides in favor of joining the VVD as she wants the Dutch government to stop tolerating the oppression of Muslim women in Holland. She phones Paul Kalma and resigns from the Wiardi Beckman Institute.

Ayaan thinks of herself as a “one-issue politician” (296), but she believes her issue—protecting society from radical Islam—is the most important one plaguing the world today. On January 22nd, 2003, the elections are held. The VVS wins 18% of the vote, 27 seats in Parliament. Ayaan becomes an MP, feeling the weight of real responsibility.

One of Ayaan’s great missions as a member of parliament is to ensure that the police record the number of “honor killings” that take place in Holland every year. Annually, fathers, brothers, and other relatives kill errant daughters for “ruining” their “honor” by marrying for love or dressing up “improperly.” The motion is passed, as is another for letting immigrant Muslim women get independent residency permissions.

These small victories go hand-in-hand with widespread controversy, such as the incident in which media declares “Hirsi Ali Calls Prophet Muhammad a Pervert” (303). The reports are based on an interview in which Ayaan questioned the Prophet for marrying Aisha, his favorite wife, when she was six, consummating the marriage when she turned nine. Scripture says the Prophet was 54 at the time of the wedding. The death threats against Ayaan escalate, with Parliament paying for the constant security which now surrounds her.

In May 2004, Hirsi breaks his silence and calls Ayaan, sounding old and exhausted. He tells Ayaan that people say terrible things about her, which he cannot bear. He wants Ayaan to return to her faith, but Ayaan refuses. Hirsi Ali tells the reader that the two have not spoken since.

Meanwhile, Ayaan moves to a beautiful house in the Hague, the heart of Dutch government. One day, as she and Neeli are discussing the role of contemporary and digital media in the rapid rise of extremist Islam, it strikes Ayaan that advocates for reform must also use similar methods. She conceptualizes an art exhibit in which mannequins of subjugated Muslim women are arranged in a space, a note linking a particular verse in the Quran to each atrocity.

Ayaan meets the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who immediately tells her he wants to collaborate with her. Theo is well-known and a provocateur, “an impossible man, a genius in some ways” (311), who has recently made a series about the relationship between a native Dutch girl and a Moroccan boy. When she discusses her idea about the art exhibit with Theo, he suggests making it a movie. Ayaan writes a script. In Submission, Part One, the film which Theo and Ayaan make, five women are positioned in a room, the woman in the center wearing a transparent hijab showing Quranic verses written on her torso. As she speaks out a prayer, the other four women speak out against the atrocities they have faced despite obeying Allah.

When Ayaan shows the film to her party members at the VVD, they warn her it will land her in deep trouble. Ayaan underestimates the threat since there is no big reaction to Submission when it airs on August 29th.

In 2004, a Moroccan man publishes Ayaan’s address on the internet, accompanied by photos of her and Theo, effectively a call to kill them. Theo and Ayaan, who haven’t met since Submission, often speak to each other on the phone, joking about the number of death threats they receive. Unlike Ayaan, who has had security for the last two years, Theo shuns the offer of a bodyguard as that would curtail his freedom. By the next month, things seem so peaceful that Ayaan could never have imagined Theo will be stabbed through the chest and killed on the street.

The murder happens on November 2nd, while Parliament is in its second session. Ayaan gets the news in her office from her parliamentary assistants, and breaks into tears. She is escorted out for security reasons immediately. At home, watching the coverage of the murder, Ayaan wishes she had never made Submission. Had the movie not been made, Theo would still have been alive. Bram, the head of Ayaan’s security, forbids her from attending a march condemning Theo’s death as it is too dangerous for her to be out in the open. Bodyguards begin to keep vigil outside Ayaan’s door every night.

Meanwhile Ayaan is racked by nightmares about Theo’s murder, haunted by the question he is said to have asked his attacker: “Can’t we talk about this?” (321). The innocent question, assuming a reasonable opponent, is so misplaced it wrecks Ayaan. She also worries about Theo’s 12-year-old son.

Ayaan is taken to a safehouse on an airbase, and a minister shares the letter which was stabbed onto Theo’s chest (though Ayaan does not know this at the time). In Arabic and Dutch, the letter is worded precisely, like a fatwa, and signed with the name, “Sword of the Faith” (321).

Despite security objections, Ayaan attends Theo’s funeral. From this point on, she is shifted to safehouses frequently, her email and cell phone logs closely monitored. After a grenade is tossed into an apartment building in the Hague, close to where Ayaan is temporarily staying, she is packed off to the United States. She is shuttled around Massachusetts and various locations in the US, till she finally returns home, attending Parliament on January 18th, 2005.

The welcome from reporters and fellow Parliamentarians makes Ayaan believe the worst is over.

16 months later, in 2006, Gerrit Zalm, the finance minister, arrives at Ayaan’s home, looking grim. She immediately realizes he bears bad news. Gerrit tells Ayaan that Rita Verdonk, the integration minister, is planning to nullify Ayaan’s Dutch citizenship, based on the fact that Ayaan lied on her application. After Gerrit leaves, Rita calls Ayaan, telling her the decision is not personal; she was ordered to investigate Ayaan’s citizenship. Minutes after the call, a courier brings Ayaan the letter that her citizenship is being revoked because of false information. She has six weeks to respond to her case.

Ayaan reflects that the announcement has been brewing for months, since a TV reporter asked her pointed questions about her asylum file. He claimed to have interviewed her brother, Mahad, who said Ayaan had never been excised. Ayaan had plainly told the reporter that she had not disclosed the full truth on her refugee application in 1992, but the story of her excision was absolutely correct.

After the grief over the harsh announcement dulls, Ayaan realizes that she has been wanting to leave Dutch politics anyway, since the legislative process is too slow for her. She has already achieved her goal, which was to make Islam part of the political debate. Now it is time to move on.

As Ayaan travels to the US to promote her book, The Caged Virgin, she meets with a Washington think tank for a job. Ayaan is still in the US when her citizenship is revoked. On her return to Holland, she participates in a parliamentary debate watched by millions, where she tells the truth: She lied on her application not as a malicious plan, but to protect herself. A few days after the session, she learns the prime minister has asked Rita to retract the revocation and establish Ayaan as an honorable Dutch citizen again. However, Ayaan is fed up with the whole affair and accepts the Washington job, moving to the US.

In the aftermath, the Green Party calls for a motion of no-confidence against Labor, and the government falls, with fresh elections scheduled in the fall. Ayaan regrets the collapse of the government and maintains that she will always love Holland, which gave her freedom, and will remain Dutch. As the book ends, Ayaan maintains that she left Holland not because of the citizenship issue, but because she wanted to take her ideas to the United States. She believes that misguided notions about the peaceful nature of Islam cannot wish away the reality of violence that, in her opinion, dominates the religion.

The kind of thinking Ayaan saw in Saudi Arabia is incompatible with liberal, humanist values and free speech. Unless Islam faces a reckoning, it can never transition to modernity. The message of her book is that the West should not enable the delay of this transition by “elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life” (347). Though people attribute her views to her trauma and an internalized racial inferiority, Ayaan says her thinking is motivated by a desire for truth. Moral relativism must be abandoned when it comes to Islam, and Muslim women must be able to live free lives.