[4] Like its predecessor De zoontjesfabriek (December 2002), a Dutch-language collection of seven essays and one interview for a total of 95 pages, it focused on criticism of the position and role of women in Islam.

[6] Hirsi Ali had been under the constant protection of an armed security detail ever since September 2002 after receiving death threats for months for her earliest writings (that would later be bundled in De zoontjesfabriek), television appearances and renouncing Islam.

[3] Shortly after she published De maagdenkooi, the 11-minute shortfilm Submission, that she produced together with film director Theo van Gogh, was first screened on Dutch television on 29 August 2004.

In March 2005, Hirsi Ali faced a lawsuit over a claim made by four Dutch Muslim men that the De maagdenkooi contained "blasphemous and offensive" statements,[7] but the suit was rejected.

[12] The Finnish edition, titled Neitsythäkki, omitted Hirsi Ali's most controversial quote from a January 2003 Trouw interview, namely that "Muhammad was a perverse tyrant".

According to Christopher Hitchens, the English edition has three themes: "first, her own gradual emancipation from tribalism and superstition; second, her work as a parliamentarian to call attention to the crimes being committed every day by Islamist thugs in mainland Europe; and third, the dismal silence, or worse, from many feminists and multiculturalists about this state of affairs.

Yet, he found it difficult to deny how intimately the virginity cult in Islam was tied to the core teachings of the Quran and the Traditions of Muhammad, causing few Muslim girls and women to have a choice in determining "whether, and if so, whom they married to; and whether, and if so, how many children they wanted to get".

Such attitudes, Jager agreed with Hirsi Ali, resulted in "illiterate unhealthy mothers sitting at home, unable to guide their children into the world of education and labour," which was "complicit in the economic lag of Muslims".

[24] NRC Handelsblad critic Beatrijs Ritsema labelled it a "somewhat disorderly booklet, a kind of anti-Islam almanac", but praised its style: "What an enthusiasm, and so often Hirsi Ali is spot on."

Ritsema was more optimistic about the degree to which third-generation Muslim immigrants integrated in Western society and adapted to progressive cultural norms regarding sexual autonomy and gender equality.

Ayaan's work was compared to Ich wollte nur frei sein ("I Just Wanted to be Free") by Hülya Kalkan, Mich hat keiner gefragt ("Nobody Asked Me") by Ayşe, Erstickt an euren Lügen ("Choke on your Lies") by Inci Y., Fundamentalismus gegen Frauen ("Fundamentalism Against Women") by Nawal El Saadawi and Verschleppt in Jemen ("Kidnapped in Yemen") by Zana Muhsen.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali rages at crimes that are done to women by men: from forced marriage to female genital mutilation; from denial of education to sexual abuse within the family.

[28] Saba Mahmood wrote that the title of the work is "highly reminiscent of the nineteenth-century literary genre centered on Orientalist fantasies of the harem" and the book itself "full of absurd statements" such as "[Muslim] children learn from their mothers that it pays to lie.