Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This is one of the best books I've read in my life, and I heartily recommend it not only to anyone who's interested in women's rights or islam or Africa, but to anybody who has an interest in reading first hand about another culture and the journey of an exceptional woman.
Ayaan was born in Somalia to a muslin family. Her father was a political prisoner during most of her childhood, so she, her older brother, and her younger sister were brought up by her mother and her grandmother. When she was a child her father escaped from prison and the family started a diapora that took them to Saudi Arabia and later to Kenya.
Through Ayaan's experiences, the western reader comes to realize the unfairness of the women's situation in islam. It's not only that in the most religious countries a woman can't leave her house without a male escort - not even to buy groceries -, or that a woman's testimony is worth half a man's, or that the Quran condones the physical punishment of women if they're disobedient to their husbands. Violation's of women's rights occur daily - genital mutilation, forced marriages, etc - except that it seems that under muslim law they don't have rights. There seems to be an unhealthy obsession with virginity and purity, as well as a huge pressure on the girls not to tempt men, unless they want to unleash chaos.
Ayaan wasn't always an atheist. In her youth she was a religious muslin, who prayed, covered herself, and tried to understand the Quran. However, she always felt acutely the injustice of the way women were treated and started to question it, only to discover that you can't question or debate the word of God, that has been transmitted unchangedly since the seventh century in the Quran. To criticize their religion - like Christians did in the Reform, with Martin Luther
- is akin to blasphemy and can get you murdered.
She escaped from a forced marriage to a man she barely knew and sought political asilum in Holland. There she was shocked by the events of 9/11, which led her to question her religion and wether or not it approved a jihad. In Holland she also worked with immigrants and kept watching how women and young girls were abused, even though they were living in a western country, because of "religion and cultural tolerance".
Finally, she came to reject islam and to try to get the muslins to revise and criticize their religion, to get a muslin Voltaire. Of course, she only got death threats.
In order to get the muslin community to look at the way their religion treats women, she and Theo van Gogh did a highly controversial short movie, called Submission part 1. In this movie she showed how it's written in the Quran that a woman can get beaten regularly by her husband for no reason at all - unless you think that "possible disobedience" is a good enough reason - a woman can be flagellated for adultery, etc.
Theo van Gogh was murdered for this movie, and Ayaan had to get around-the-clock protection. I believe she's still under death threats, but she still is fighting for the rights of women under islam law.
It's terrible the way that millions of women are treated nowadays. I think that awareness is the first step in order to help them, and Ayaan, through her well written memoirs, achieves that.

Here's a link to the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGtQvGGY4S4