Hirsi Ali is born into a family that practices Islam, though “diluted, relaxed about regular praying, mixed up with more ancient beliefs” (41). Due to the relaxed nature of her childhood faith, the sudden turn to a stricter form of Islam in Saudi Arabia takes Ayaan by surprise, leading her to wrestle with faith, doubt, and the construction of moral authority.

Asha now asks the children to pray five times a day, wrapping themselves in white cloth before each prayer. She dislikes Ayaan and Haweya praying next to their father on the mat, as women and men should not pray together, “Women pray behind, because though they cover themselves for prayer, that cloth could shift and uncover a piece of clothing, or skin, which could distract the men and lead them into sin” (44). Ayaan dislikes the way this new faith clamps down on her freedoms, but by the time she is a teenager in Nairobi, she begins to embrace a more conservative Islam herself. She likes veiling herself because it guards her from the male gaze, and regards the value of modesty and veiling as a non-Western form of feminism. However, as she grows older, Ayaan increasingly finds a gap between her yearning for a higher ethical order and the reality of religion. Her journey in the book becomes about finding a moral authority outside the framework of organized religion.

One of Ayaan’s biggest sources of doubt as a young Muslim is the position of women in Islam. While Sister Aziza maintains that women are different but equal in Islam, the radical preacher Boqol Sawm lectures that total obedience to their husbands is the rule for women. Ayaan asks Boqol Sawm if husbands too should obey wives, both being equal to each other; in response the preacher yells “Certainly not! […] You may not question Allah’s word! His mind is hidden” (103). Once Ayaan reaches the West, she also starts getting bothered by what she sees as the enslaver-enslaved aspect of the relationship between God and subject in Islam. In this relationship, God cannot be questioned, much as Boqol Sawm had maintained. However, for Ayaan, if God is just and merciful, He should allow questioning. Most importantly, Ayaan begins to realize that the most religious people can also be the cruelest, whether Christian or Muslim. It dawns on her that being a good person and being a religious person are two separate things. If ethics can flourish outside of religion, moral authority must be located in the secular space as well.

Ayaan notes that when she was younger, “I didn’t for one instant imagine that a moral framework for humanity could exist that wasn’t religious. There was always a God […] If you didn’t accept God, then you couldn’t have a morality” (229). In 2002, when her ex-boyfriend Marco gifts her a book called The Atheist Manifesto, “before I’d read four pages, I already knew my answer. I had left God behind years ago. I was an atheist” (281). She looks at herself in the mirror and says aloud in Somali that she does not believe in God, flooded with a sense of relief.

Facing herself in the mirror signifies a moment of reckoning, while speaking the truth in Somali, her mother tongue, indicates a reconfiguration that goes down to the very roots. By allowing herself to admit that she locates her moral compass outside God and His organized religion, Ayaan also establishes her individualism. She becomes her own moral authority.