“I had a beautiful life, but at the same time a tough one,” says former model and “Bond girl”, UN ambassador and global campaigner against female genital mutilation, Waris Dirie.  She is interviewed in today’s Telegraph on the occasion of the launch of her new book, Desert Children.  Working with co-writers she has produced two similar books and found time to establish an Austrian-based foundation dedicated to women, like her, who have suffered FGM.  It is a noble endeavour professionally pursued.

Her journey to this extraordinary life began, of course, in a child’s terror:-

Dirie was about five years old when she was circumcised.  She was blindfolded, held down by her mother, her legs bound together.  There was only a piece of root to chew on to stem the pain. A gipsy woman cut away her clitoris and labia with an old razor blade.  Thorns from an acacia tree were used to puncture holes to sew her back up, leaving her with just a tiny opening for urination and menstruation (women are unstitched when they get married).  She was left alone for two weeks as her body battled infection.  She was lucky to survive - one of her sisters did not.

… When she was about 13, her father announced that she was to be married to an old man in exchange for five camels.  Showing a flash of the determination that would characterise her later life, she ran away to Mogadishu to find her aunt.

… On the way, she was nearly eaten by a lion and she narrowly escaped being raped by a truck driver from whom she had hitched a lift - she bashed him over the head with a rock and does not know whether he survived.

In Mogadishu, she became a servant to her uncle, following him to London when he was made the ambassador for Somalia.  When her uncle’s family returned home four years later, she did not go with them, instead finding accommodation in a YMCA and work in a McDonald’s - it was here, in the most unlikely of settings, that the girl from the desert was spotted by the photographer Terence Donovan.

She went on to model for L’Oreal and a Pirelli calendar, and in the late Eighties she was a Bond Girl in The Living Daylights.  Later she would have a child with a jazz musician from whom she has since split - her son, Aleeke, is nearly eight [pictured in link with Rüdiger Nehberg of Target, another human rights foundation campaigning against FGM – Ed].

Single-motherhood aside, one can only applaud this woman’s deeds.  The parallels with the Somali-born Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are obvious.  But Dirie has avoided pure politics and avoided, too, Hirsi Ali’s murderously hazardous conflation of violence against women with the Islamic faith.

What we are left with, causally speaking, is not faith as such but culture - the brutality of custom and general backwardness of a large swathe of the peoples inhabiting the Islamic world.  FGM is carried out in 25 African countries (not including 14 where it is officially but ineffectually banned), in Middle East countries such as Yemen, United Arab Emirates and Egypt, and in Indonesia and Malaysia.  According to the WHO there are an estimated 130 million women who have been subjected to FGM, and these include tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands in Europe.  Dirie insists that the practise is going on covertly throughout multicultural Europe - and, no doubt, in America and Canada.  In that case, it is the single most disgusting and unacceptable product of all the disgusting and unacceptable products of multiculturalism.

Laws against it are on the statute book in America, Canada, Britain, France and Switzerland.  But local laws do not instantly abolish deeply-rooted tribal customs.  How deeply rooted?  Well, the WHO estimated in 1984 that up to 70% of Liberian women were victims of FGM.  So widespread a practise can’t just be wished away by well-meaning legislators.  Anyway, rendered unlawful it will only retire into yet more recondite corners of association, tradition and belief.  All poor migrants cling tenaciously to their traditional selves – none more so than Moslems.  That is their sincere desire, and we arrogant Westerners have not the slightest chance of “assimilating” them out of it.

Before the neocon adventurism in Iraq it was widely taken as read among right liberals, especially libertarians, that cosmopolitanism and the “market forces” of Western consumerism would do just that.  These backward peoples would be quite seduced from their backward faiths and backward cultures.  In no time at all their backward games with rusty razor blades would seem as alien to them as they do to us.  Hip geeks and bohos, Popperian individualists and all-round, SW3 party folk, all with scarcely noticeable black or brown skin, would emerge from the deserts of the world to garland our dull lives.  For ever and ever the social efficacy of free enterprise would be proved.

Wrong.  Human life is altogether more sombre and profound and impossibly complex in its twisting course.  We know it now, post the Iraqi insurgency – and even more post 7/7.  Warring Iraqis and sullen immigrants alike do not want to be us exactly, living our Western lives with our Western values.  They do not look up to us and, in most cases, have not done so since we quit governing them.  They despise us, actually, and do not see our Western freedoms as freedoms at all, but vices – and none see that more than Moslems.  Our material advancement, our prosperity, our lands – yes, these they want.  But our culture, no … at least, not if they are in possession of one of their own.

From Islamic terrorism and from science we are slowly learning that culture does not arrive out of the blue.  It is not separate from the human characteristics it expresses.  It is a people’s act of living, and when we think of Western culture we should think of it solely as the Western peoples’ act of living.  We cannot take as our guide to others’ potentialities the behaviour of rare birds like Dirie or Hirsi Ali.  We have to assess not a few talented individuals but tribal populations with no traditions akin to ours and no inate qualities by which the gap might be bridged.

The gap will not be bridged.  FGM will probably not only survive the best efforts of Waris Dirie, it will survive our attempts to stamp it out.  It is a sobering fact of present-day demographics that it may therefore survive us, too.