Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, has gained an international following speaking and writing about what she believes to be the inherently violent nature of Islam and its subjugation and abuse of women. Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. The daughter of a political opponent of the Somali dictatorship, she grew up in exile, moving from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia to Kenya. She embraced Islam and strove to live as a devout Muslim, but over time she began to question aspects of her faith. One day, while listening to a sermon on the many ways women should be obedient to their husbands, she couldn’t resist asking, “Must our husbands obey us too?” In 1992, Ayaan was married off by her father to a distant cousin who lived in Canada. In order to escape this marriage, she fled to the Netherlands, where she was given asylum and, in time, citizenship. She learned Dutch and studied at the University of Leiden. Working as a translator for Somali immigrants, she saw firsthand the inconsistencies between liberal Western society and tribal Muslim cultures. After earning her M.A. in political science, Ayaan worked as a researcher for a Dutch Labor Party think tank and in 2003, she was elected to the Dutch parliament. While serving, she focused on furthering the integration of nonWestern immigrants into Dutch society and defending the rights of Muslim women. She campaigned to raise awareness of violence against women, including honor killings and female genital mutilation (FGM), practices that had followed the immigrants into Holland. (Ali herself was subjected to FGM as a child.) In her three years in government, she found her voice as an advocate for an “enlightened Islam.”
In 2004, she gained international attention following the murder of Theo van Gogh, director of Submission, Ali’s film about the oppression of women under Islam. The assassin, a radical Muslim, left a death threat for her pinned to van Gogh’s chest. In 2006, allegations that she had falsified her asylum application led to her resignation from Parliament and ultimately to her taking refuge in the United States, where she recently became a citizen. In 2007, she established the AHA Foundation to help protect and defend the rights of women in the West against fundamentalist Islam. Today, Ali also serves as a fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, researching the relationship between the West and Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was named one of TIME Magazine’s “100 most influential people” of 2005 and is the author of The Caged Virgin and two bestselling memoirs, Infidel and Nomad.
Aya a n H irsi A l i
Ayaan Hirsi Ali