Ayaan Hirsi Ali facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Hirsi Ali in 2016
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
13 November 1969 Mogadishu, Banaadir, Somali Democratic Republic
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| Alma mater | Leiden University (MSc) |
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| Employer | Harvard University Hoover Institution, Stanford University |
| Organization | AHA Foundation |
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| Children | 2 |
| Member of the House of Representatives | |
| In office 2003–2006 |
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali; born 13 November 1969) is a Somalian-born Dutch-American writer, activist, conservative thinker 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, and child marriage. Her family moved across various countries in Africa and the Middle East, and at 23, she received political asylum in the Netherlands, gaining Dutch citizenship five years later. In her early 30s, Hirsi Ali 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). In 2022 she announced that she had become a Christian.
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 Islam. In 2005, Time magazine named Ali as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her outspoken criticism of Islam made her a controversial figure in Dutch politics. Following a political crisis related to the validity of her Dutch citizenship, she left 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. In Heretic, Ali called for reformation of Islam by countering Islamism and supporting reformist Muslims, though previously she had said Islam was beyond reform. 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; since 2022, she has also hosted The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast.
Ali was 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, Ali announced her conversion to Christianity, 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 are raising their sons in the United States, where she became a citizen in 2013.
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Early life
Ayaan was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1969. 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.
After her father escaped from prison, he and the family left Somalia in 1977, going to Saudi Arabia and then to Addis Ababa, 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. After completing secondary school, Hirsi Ali attended a secretarial course at Valley Secretarial College in Nairobi for one year. As she was growing up, she also read English-language adventure stories, such as the Nancy Drew series, with modern heroine archetypes who pushed the limits of society. Also, remembering her grandmother refusing soldiers entry into her house, Hirsi Ali associated with Somalia "the picture of strong women: the one who smuggles in the food, and the one who stands there with a knife against the army and says, 'You cannot come into the house.' And I became like that. And my parents and my grandmother don't appreciate that now—because of what I've said about the Qur'an. I have become them, just in a different way."
Life in the Netherlands
Arrival and education
Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands in 1992. That year she had travelled from Kenya to visit her family in Düsseldorf and Bonn, Germany, and gone to the Netherlands to escape an alleged forced marriage. Once there, she requested political asylum and obtained a residence permit. She used her paternal grandfather's early surname on her application and has since been known in the West as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She received a residence permit within three or four weeks of arriving in the Netherlands.
At first, she held various short-term jobs, ranging from cleaning to sorting post. She worked as a translator at a Rotterdam refugee center which, according to a friend interviewed in 2006 by The Observer newspaper, marked her deeply.
As an avid reader, in the Netherlands she found new books and ways of thought that both stretched her imagination and frightened her. Sigmund Freud's work introduced her to an alternative moral system that was not based on religion. During this time she took courses in Dutch and a one-year introductory course in social work at the Hogeschool De Horst in Driebergen. She has said that she was impressed with how well Dutch society seemed to function. To better understand its development, she studied at the Leiden University, where she obtained an Master's degree in political science.
Between 1995 and 2001, Hirsi Ali also worked as an independent Somali-Dutch interpreter and translator, frequently working with Somali women in asylum centers, hostels for abused women, and at the Dutch immigration and naturalization service (IND, Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst). While working for the IND, she became critical of the way it handled asylum seekers. Hirsi Ali speaks six languages: English, Somali, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, and Dutch.
Political career
After gaining her degree, Hirsi Ali became a Fellow at the Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), a think tank of the center-left Labour Party (PvdA). Leiden University Professor Ruud Koole was steward of the party. Hirsi Ali's writing at the WBS was inspired by the work of the neoconservative Orientalist Bernard Lewis.
She became disenchanted with Islam and was shocked by the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001, for which al-Qaeda eventually claimed responsibility. After listening to videotapes of Osama bin Laden citing "words of justification" in the Qur'an for the attacks, she wrote, "I picked up the Qur'an and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find Bin Laden's quotations in there." During this time of transition, she came to regard the Qur'an as relative—it was a historical record and "just another book."
Reading Atheïstisch manifest ("Atheist Manifesto") of Leiden University philosopher Herman Philipse helped to convince her to give up religion. She renounced Islam and acknowledged her disbelief in God in 2002. She began to formulate her critique of Islam and Islamic culture, published many articles on these topics, and became a frequent speaker on television news programs and in public debate forums. She discussed her ideas at length in a book titled De zoontjesfabriek (The Son Factory) (2002). In this period, she first began to receive death threats.
Cisca Dresselhuys, editor of the feminist magazine Opzij, introduced Hirsi Ali to Gerrit Zalm, the parliamentary leader of the centre-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), and party member Neelie Kroes, then European Commissioner for Competition. At their urging, Hirsi Ali agreed to switch to their party of the VVD and stood for election to Parliament. Between November 2002 and January 2003, she lived abroad while on the payroll as an assistant of the VVD.
In 2003, aged 33, Hirsi Ali successfully fought a parliamentary election. She said that the Dutch welfare state had overlooked abuse of Muslim women and girls in the Netherlands and their social needs, contributing to their isolation and oppression.
During her tenure in Parliament, Hirsi Ali continued her criticisms of Islam and many of her statements provoked controversy.
Film with Theo van Gogh
Working with writer and director Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali wrote the script and provided the voice-over for Submission (2004), a short film that criticised the treatment of women in Islamic society. Juxtaposed with passages from the Qur'an were scenes of actresses portraying Muslim women suffering abuse. An actress dressed in a semi-transparent burqa was shown with texts from the Qur'an written on her skin. These texts are among those often interpreted as justifying the subjugation of Muslim women. The film's release sparked outrage among many Dutch Muslims.
Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan Islamist and member of the Muslim terrorist organisation Hofstad Group, assassinated Van Gogh in an Amsterdam street on 2 November 2004. The Dutch secret service immediately raised the level of security they provided to Hirsi Ali. Bouyeri was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
In 2004, a rap song about Hirsi Ali titled "Hirsi Ali Dis" was produced and distributed on the internet by a group called "The Hague Connection". The lyrics included violent threats against her life. The rappers were prosecuted under Article 121 of the Dutch criminal code because they hindered Hirsi Ali's execution of her work as a politician. In 2005 they were sentenced to community service and a suspended prison sentence.
Hirsi Ali went into hiding, aided by government security services, who moved her among several locations in the Netherlands. They moved her to the United States for several months. On 18 January 2005, she returned to parliament. On 18 February 2005, she revealed where she and her colleague Geert Wilders were living. She demanded a normal, secured house, which she was granted one week later.
In January 2006, Hirsi Ali was recognised as "European of the Year" by Reader's Digest, an American magazine. In her speech, she urged action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. She also said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be taken at his word in wanting to organise a conference to investigate objective evidence of the Holocaust, noting that the subject is not taught in the Middle East. She said, "Before I came to Europe, I'd never heard of the Holocaust. That is the case with millions of people in the Middle East. Such a conference should be able to convince many people away from their denial of the genocide against the Jews." She also said that what some have described as "Western values" of freedom and justice were universal. But she thought that Europe has done far better than most areas of the world in providing justice, as it has guaranteed the freedom of thought and debate required for critical self-examination. She said communities cannot reform unless "scrupulous investigation of every former and current doctrine is possible." Hirsi Ali was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize the same month by Norwegian parliamentarian Christian Tybring-Gjedde.
In March 2006, she co-signed a letter titled "MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism". Among the eleven other signatories was Salman Rushdie; as a teenager, Hirsi Ali had supported the fatwa against him. The letter was published in response to protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark, and it supported freedom of press and freedom of expression.
On 27 April 2006, a Dutch judge ruled that Hirsi Ali had to abandon her current secure house at a secret address in the Netherlands. Her neighbors had complained that she created an unacceptable security risk, but the police had testified that this neighborhood was one of the safest places in the country, as they had many personnel assigned to it for Hirsi Ali's protection. In an interview in early 2007, Hirsi Ali noted that the Dutch state had spent about €3.5 million on her protection; threats against her produced fear, but she believed it important to speak her mind. While regretting Van Gogh's death, she said she was proud of their work together.
A private trust, the Foundation for Freedom of Expression, was established in 2007 in the Netherlands to help fund protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents.
Life in the United States
In 2006, Hirsi Ali took a position at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.; as the Dutch government continued to provide security for her, this required an increase in their effort and costs.
On 17 April 2007, the local Muslim community in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, protested Hirsi Ali's planned lecture at the local campus of the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh imam Fouad El Bayly said that the activist deserved the death sentence but should be tried and judged in an Islamic country.
On 25 September 2007, Hirsi Ali received her green card. In October 2007, she returned to the Netherlands, continuing her work for AEI from a secret address. The Dutch minister of Justice Hirsch Ballin had informed her of his ruling that, as of 1 October 2007, the Dutch government would no longer pay for her security abroad. That year she declined an offer to live in Denmark, saying she intended to return to the United States.
On 25 April 2013, she became a citizen of the United States.
She was a Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School from 2016 to 2019.
Designation by Southern Poverty Law Center
In October 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center accused Ayaan, and the Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz, of being "anti-Muslim extremists", which caused protests in several prominent newspapers. The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice wrote a public letter to the SPLC asking them to retract the listings.
In April 2018, the SPLC retracted the "Anti-Muslim Extremist" list in its entirety after Nawaz threatened legal action over his inclusion on the list.
Australia tour
In April 2017, she cancelled a planned tour of Australia. This followed the Facebook release of a video by six Australian Muslim women who accused her of being a "star of the global Islamophobia industry" and of profiting from "an industry that exists to dehumanize Muslim women" but did not call for her to cancel her trip. Ali responded that the women in question were "carrying water" for the causes of radical Islamists and stated that "Islamophobia" is a manufactured word. She said that the cancellation was due to organisational problems.
Social and political views
Hirsi Ali joined the VVD political party in 2002; it combines "classically liberal" views on the economy, foreign policy, crime and immigration. She says that she admires Frits Bolkestein, a former Euro-commissioner and ideological leader of the party.
Hirsi Ali is the founder and president of the AHA Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organisation to protect women and girls in the U.S. against political Islam and harmful tribal customs that violate U.S. law and international conventions. Through the AHA Foundation, Hirsi Ali campaigns against the denial of education for girls, forced marriage, and suppression of information about the crimes through the misuse and misinterpretation of rights to freedom of religion and free speech in the U.S. and the West.
Hirsi Ali has praised western liberalism.
Personal life
Hirsi Ali married British–American historian Niall Ferguson on 10 September 2011. They have two sons.
In 2023, Hirsi Ali announced that she had become a Christian.
Awards
- 2004, she was awarded the Prize of Liberty by the Flemish classical liberal think tank Nova Civitas.
- 2004, she was awarded the Freedom Prize of Denmark's Liberal Party, the country's largest party, "for her work to further freedom of speech and the rights of women".
In the year following the assassination of her collaborator, Theo van Gogh, Hirsi Ali received five awards related to her activism.
- 2005, she was awarded the Harriet Freezerring Emancipation Prize by Cisca Dresselhuys, editor of the feminist magazine Opzij.
- 2005, she was awarded the annual European Bellwether Prize by the Norwegian think tank Human Rights Service. According to HRS, Hirsi Ali is "beyond a doubt, the leading European politician in the field of integration. (She is) a master at the art of mediating the most difficult issues with insurmountable courage, wisdom, reflectiveness, and clarity".
- 2005, she was awarded the annual Democracy Prize of the Swedish Liberal People's Party "for her courageous work for democracy, human rights and women's rights."
- 2005, she was ranked by American Time magazine amongst the 100 Most Influential Persons of the World, in the category of "Leaders & Revolutionaries".
- 2005, she was awarded the Tolerance Prize of Madrid.
- She was voted European of the Year for 2006 by the European editors of Reader's Digest magazine.
- 2006, she was given the civilian prize Glas der Vernunft in Kassel, Germany. The organisation rewarded her with this prize for her courage in criticising Islam (1 October 2006). Other laureates have included Leah Rabin, the wife of former Israeli prime-minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, former Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany.
- 2006, she received the Moral Courage Award from the American Jewish Committee.
- 2007, she was given the annual Goldwater Award for 2007 from the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.
- 2008, she was awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize, an international human rights prize for women's freedom, which she shared with Taslima Nasreen.
- 2008, she was given the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for nonfiction for her autobiography Infidel (2007 in English). The Anisfield-Wolf awards recognise "recent books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture."
- 2010, she was awarded the Emperor Has No Clothes Award by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
- 2016, she was awarded the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education
- 2017, she was awarded the Oxi Day Courage Award by the Washington Oxi Day Foundation
See also
- Yasmine Mohammed
- Maryam Namazie
- Mona Walter
