In urging Muslims to reform their religion, Hirsi Ali is far from alone. She points out that this year, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, called out to imams, asking for “nothing less than a ‘religious revolution’ ” in order to curb extremist violence. His standing is likely to give him more influence among Muslims than Hirsi Ali, a woman who once called the religion “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” language that does not suggest a strong capacity for constructive criticism. But in “Heretic” she is also trying to reach non-Muslim Americans, too many of whom, she feels, champion religious tolerance while ignoring the social injustices she sees embedded in Islam.

Hirsi Ali is not merely looking to emphasize or reinterpret select scriptural passages; rather, she warns the reader that if Islam were a house, she would be going for a gut renovation, one that would “make the outside look a lot like the original, but change the house radically from the inside, equipping it with the latest amenities.” Transformation cannot be complete, she writes, unless certain Islamic precepts are “repudiated and nullified,” including “Mohammed’s semidivine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Quran.” In a list of reforms she claims to be nailing, Luther-like, to a virtual door, she also wants Muslims to nullify “Shariah, the body of legislation derived from the Quran, the Hadith and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence.”

Elsewhere in the book, Hirsi Ali reframes those sweeping proposals in ways that put them in context: She wants to ensure that secular law is prized above Shariah. (She cites a 2013 Pew Foundation poll that found 74 percent of Egyptians support making Shariah law the state law, as do 91 percent of Iraqi Muslims.) And her interest in changing the perception of Muhammad is recast as the desire to see the Quran more open to interpretation and discussion among Muslims. She believes that won’t happen unless clerics make it clear the Quran is, in her words, “just a book.” But surely millions of Muslims find their way to a peaceful, tolerant understanding of Islam while maintaining their sense of the sacred in the Quran?

“Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms,” she writes early on. “Islam is not a religion of peace.” If some American political figures have bent over backward to decouple Islam from jihadist violence in the Middle East, Hirsi Ali swings hard in the other direction, pointing to the prevalence of militant passages in the Quran and arguing that jihad is not “a problem of poverty, insufficient education or any other social precondition,” but rather a “religious obligation.” It is the belief in Muhammad’s infallibility as a messenger of Islam, she suggests, that seals off the possibility of innovation within the faith, and encourages ISIS and other jihadists to read those militant passages in the Quran literally. (As Caner K. Dagli, an Islamic scholar, put it recently in The Atlantic, if ISIS can reasonably claim to be faithfully following Islamic law, “this might lead a thoughtful reader to wonder what all the other Muslims are doing.”)

“Infidel” and “Nomad,” the book that followed it, were both compelling because of the intimacy of Hirsi Ali’s voice and the painful details of her upbringing, which included physical abuse doled out in the name of a religious education and sexist subjugation. But the personal nature of her writing also left Hirsi Ali open to the critique — from her perspective, patronizing — that her own family dysfunctions informed her perceptions of Islam.