Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I highly recommend reading Somalian refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Infidel." But I warn that it will at times greatly disturb the reader. I recently read Ali's memory of being circumcised, along with her brother and sisters. Their grandmother forced them to receive these "purification" procedures, without anesthesia, at the hands, knife, and scissors of an itinerant circumciser (a man), when Ali was five years old, her brother six, and her sisters four and three. Truly blood chilling and horrific. And this practice continues all over the Middle East and Africa as a rite that pre-dates Islam but which is justified now in the minds of its perpetrators by Islam.