Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali: Ayān Ḥirsī 'Alī 13 November 1969) is a Somali-born, Dutch-American writer, activist and former politician.

She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.

At the age of five, following local traditions in Somalia, Ali underwent female genital mutilation organized by her grandmother.

Her father—a scholar, intellectual and a devout Muslim, was against the procedure, but could not stop it from happening because he was imprisoned by the communist government of Somalia at the time.

Her family moved across various countries in Africa and the Middle East, but at 23, she received political asylum in the Netherlands, gaining Dutch citizenship five years later.

In her early 30s, Hirsi Ali had renounced the Islamic faith of her childhood, began identifying as an atheist, and became involved in Dutch centre-right politics, joining the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD).

Ayaan was born in 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somali Revolution.

Shortly after she was born, her father was imprisoned due to his opposition to Siad Barre’s Communist government.

Hirsi Ali's father was an intellectual, a dissident and a devout Muslim who had studied abroad and he was opposed to female genital mutilation, but while he was imprisoned, Hirsi Ali's grandmother had a man perform the procedure on her, when Hirsi Ali was five years old.

According to Hirsi Ali, she was fortunate that her grandmother could not find a woman to do the procedure, as the mutilation was "much milder" when performed by men.

After her father escaped from prison, he and the family left Somalia in 1977, going to Saudi Arabia and then to Ethiopia, before settling in Nairobi, Kenya by 1980.

There he established a comfortable upper-class life for them.

Hirsi Ali attended the English-language Muslim Girls' Secondary School.

By the time she reached her teens, Saudi Arabia was funding religious education in numerous countries and its religious views were becoming influential among many Muslims.

A charismatic religious teacher, trained under this aegis, joined Hirsi Ali's school.

She inspired the teenaged Ayaan, as well as some fellow students, to adopt the more rigorous Saudi Arabian interpretations of Islam, as opposed to the more relaxed versions then current in Somalia and Kenya.

Hirsi Ali said later that she had long been impressed by the Qur'an and had lived "by the Book, for the Book" throughout her childhood.

She sympathised with the views of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and wore a hijab with her school uniform.

This was unusual at the time but has become more common among some young Muslim women.

At the time, she agreed with the fatwa proclaimed against British Indian writer Salman Rushdie in reaction to the portrayal of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses.

In 2003, Ali was elected to the lower house of the States General of the Netherlands.

While serving in parliament, she collaborated on a short film with Theo van Gogh, titled Submission, which depicted the oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law, and was critical of the Muslim canon itself.

The film led to death threats, and Van Gogh was murdered shortly after the film's release by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Islamic terrorist, driving Hirsi Ali into hiding.

At this time she became more outspoken as a critic of the Muslim faith, and by 2005, Hirsi Ali was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Her outspoken criticism of Islam made her a controversial figure in Dutch politics and, following a political crisis related to the validity of her Dutch citizenship, she left the Parliament and, ultimately, the Netherlands.

Moving to the United States, Ali established herself as a writer, activist and public intellectual.

Her books Infidel: My Life (2007),

Nomad: From Islam to America (2010) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015) became bestsellers.

At this time, Ali seemed to be calling for reformation of Islam by countering Islamism and supporting reformist Muslims.

In the United States, Ali has founded an organisation for the defense of women's rights, the AHA Foundation.

She has taken roles at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the American Enterprise Institute, and at Harvard Kennedy School as a senior fellow at the Future of Democracy Project.

Since 2021, she has served as a columnist for UnHerd, a British online magazine and, since 2022, has hosted The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast.

Ali had been a central figure in New Atheism since its beginnings.

She was strongly associated with the movement, along with Christopher Hitchens, who regarded Ali as "the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa."

Writing in a column in November 2023, however, Ali announced her conversion to the Christian faith, claiming that in her view, the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only answer to the problems of the modern world.

She has received several awards, including a free speech award from the centre-right Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Swedish conservative Liberal Party's Democracy Prize, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship.

Critics have accused Ali of being Islamophobic or neo-orientalist and question her scholarly credentials "to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world", saying she promotes the notion of a Western "civilizing mission".

Ali is married to Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson.

The couple is raising their sons in the United States, where she became a citizen in 2013.