Commendable but dangerous views
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a former Muslim activist, writer and politician. Born in 1969, in Somalia, he has Dutch and American nationalities. Ayaan is well known for her claim that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Western democratic values, especially those that uphold women's rights.
His father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somali Revolution. As soon as she was born, he was arrested because of his opposition to the government of Siad Barre, president of Somalia from 1969 to 1971.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
Although his father was opposed to female genital mutilation, his grandmother took advantage of the fact that he was arrested and sent a man to perform the procedure on his five-year-old granddaughter. According to Hirsi Ali, she was lucky her grandmother could not find a woman to have the procedure done, as the mutilation was "much lighter" when performed by men. Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi also suffered this horrible mutilation at just six years old. This was what first awakened in her the sense of violence and injustice present in Egyptian and Muslim society.
Hirsi Ali proposed in the Dutch parliament that mandatory annual medical examinations be carried out on all uncircumcised girls living in the Netherlands who came from countries where FGM is practiced. If a doctor discovered that a Dutch girl had been mutilated, a report to the police would be required – with the protection of the child taking precedence over privacy.
In 2004, she also criticized male circumcision, particularly which practiced by Jews and Muslims, which she considered to be another variant of mutilation practiced without the individual's consent.
Religious education along the lines of Saudi Arabia
As Saudi Arabia was responsible for funding religious education in several countries, religious fundamentalism influenced a large number of Muslims in the world. A charismatic religious teacher, trained under this umbrella, joined the school where teenager Hirsi Ali studied. Aegis means protection, support, and defense. If an act was performed under the aegis of someone, it means that it was performed under the protection and with full support.
Inspired by this professor, Hirsi Ali and some of his colleagues adopted the stricter interpretations of Saudi Arabia and Islam, as opposed to the milder versions in Somalia and Kenya. At that time, she sympathized with the views of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamic and wore a hijab with her school uniform.
Worse than that, in 1989 she agreed to the fatwa, the death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's former religious leader, against British Indian writer Salman Rushdie in reaction to the portrayal of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie lived for 13 years in hiding and under police protection.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Criticism of Islam and Muslims
Hirsi Ali criticizes the treatment of women in Islamic societies and the punishments for homosexuality, blasphemy and adultery. Her diary states that she was a Muslim until May 28, 2002. From then on, she abandoned Islam and recognized her disbelief in God. Reading Atheist Manifesto philosopher Leiden University's Herman Philipse helped convince her to give up religion
She was shocked by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United Statesby Al-Qaeda's videotapes of Osama bin Laden citing "words of justification", she came to regard the Quran as just another book.
He then began to formulate his critique of Islam and Islamic culture, in published articles on these topics, on television news programs and in forums for public debate. In his 2002 book De zoontjesfabriek (The Factory of the Son), he discusses his anti-Islamist views. From then on, he began to receive death threats.
The tragic death of Theo van Gogh, director of the film Submission
In 2004, she worked with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to create Submission, a shocking and incendiary short film that portrayed the oppression of women under fundamentalist Islamic law and criticized the canon itself. Islamic. Hirsi Ali wrote the script and participated in the dubbing. Juxtaposed with passages from the Qur'an were scenes of actress portraying abused Muslim women. An apparently nude actress dressed in a semi-transparent burqa was shown with texts from the Quran written on your skin.
The film's release sparked outrage among many Dutch Muslims. Mainly Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan Islamist and member of the Muslim terrorist organization Hofstad Group. Bouyeri murdered Van Gogh on a street in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004. Shot and stabbed, the filmmaker was already dead when the killer cut his throat with a large knife and tried to decapitate him. A letter, attached to Van Gogh's body, called for the death of Hirsi Ali.
The Dutch secret service immediately raised the level of security it provided for her. The killer was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Despite mourning Van Gogh's death, she said she was proud of their work.
In January 2003, Hirsi Ali told the Dutch newspaper Trouw: Mohammed is seen by our Western standards as a pervert and a tyrant, as he married, at age 53, Aisha, who was six at the time the marriage was consummated. She later said, "Maybe I should have called a pedophile. Muslims filed a religious discrimination case against her that year. The civil court in The Hague acquitted Hirsi Ali of all charges, but said she "could have made a better choice of words".
Protection of her and other Muslim dissidents
Aided by government security services, Hirsi Ali was transferred to various locations in the Netherlands. They also paid for his stay in the United States for several months. In 2007, the Foundation for Freedom of Expression, a private group, was created to help fund the protection of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents.
In March 2006, she co-signed a letter titled MANIFESTO: Together Facing the New Totalitarianism. Among the eleven other signatories was Salman Rushdie - precisely against whom the Muslim teenager had supported the fatwa. The letter was published in response to protests in the Islamic world surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy or the Muhammad cartoon crisis in Denmark.
Disagreements with Western Feminism
Hirsi Ali criticized Western feminists for avoiding the issue of the subjugation of women in the Muslim world and highlighted Germaine Greer, an Australian academic and writer, internationally recognized as one of the most important feminists of the 20th century, for arguing that FGM needs to be considered a "cultural identity" that Western women don't understand.
In 2007, she created the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation (AHA) to help protect women in the West against militant Islam.
Political career in the Netherlands
In 1992, she married – against her will – to a distant cousin. While on her way to join him in Canada, she fled to Holland in an attempt to escape the arranged marriage. Once there, she applied for political asylum and obtained a residence permit within three or four weeks of her arrival. During the process, she changed her name from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Ayaan Hirsi Magane, her paternal grandfather's initial surname.
In the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali studied political science at Leiden State University and graduated with a master's degree in the year 2000. After graduating, she became a member of the Wiardi Beckman Stichting (WBS), a think tank of the PvdA - Partij van de Arbeid (center-left Labor Party). A think tank is a group of experts brought together, usually by a government, to develop ideas on a particular topic and make suggestions for action.
She also worked for the PvdA - Partij van de Arbeid (center-left Labor Party) as a researcher on immigration issues. While in the party, she developed a reputation as a keen critic of both Islam and the Dutch government's policies towards immigration and the integration of immigrants into Dutch society, especially Muslims.
She said Dutch laws were overly flexible with immigrants, allowing for the formation of "backward" Muslim enclaves, whose practices posed a threat to the country's stability.
In 2006, as a Member of Parliament, Hirsi Ali supported the decision of Dutch courts to revoke the party allowance to a conservative Protestant Christian political party, the Reformed Political Party (SGP), which did not grant full membership rights to women and retained passive voting rights of female members. Hirsi considered that any political party that discriminated against women or homosexuals should be deprived of funding.
Leaving the Dutch parliament and promoting her first book
Hirsi Ali left parliament in 2006 after an announcement by the immigration minister that her Dutch citizenship was illegitimate because of false statements she had made in her asylum and citizenship applications.
She received information from the Dutch Minister of Justice, Hirsch Ballin, that as of October 1, 2007, the Dutch government would no longer pay for her security abroad. As debate over her situation raged in the Netherlands, she traveled to the United States in 2006 to promote her first book, The Caged Virgin, originally published in Dutch in 2004. The book is a critique of the failure of Western countries to recognize and act on the oppression of women in Muslim societies.
Moving to the United States
On April 17, 2007, the Muslim community of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, protested his scheduled lecture at the local University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh imam Fouad El Bayly reportedly said the activist deserved the death sentence and should be tried in an Islamic country.
On September 25, 2007, Hirsi Ali received her United States permanent resident card (green card). In Washington, she was received as a resident member by the AEI - American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank.
In 2011, Hirsi Ali married British historian Niall Ferguson and immigrated to the United States, following controversies over her Dutch citizenship. In 2013, she became an American citizen.
Literary works by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Five years after her arrival in the United States, she published two books, Heretic: Why Islam Needs Reform Now (2015) and Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights (2021). These books address these questions through poignant accounts of the abuse and adversity she experienced as a Somali Muslim, apostate and internationally prominent critic of Islam. Like her previous books, Infidel (2007) and Nomad (2010), they became best sellers.
Awards and Unfavorable Reviews
In 2005, Hirsi Ali was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She has also received several awards, including a free speech from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, the Swedish Liberal Party's Democracy Award, and the Moral Courage Award for commitment to conflict resolution, ethics, and world citizenship.
In January 2006, the American magazine Reader’s Digest recognized her as European of the Year. In her speech, she called for action to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He also said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should take his word for it in wanting to organize a conference to investigate objective evidence of the Holocaust. Before going to Europe, she declared that she had never heard of the Holocaust. This is the case for millions of people in the Middle East. Such a conference should be able to convince many people not to deny the genocide against Jews.
Her critics accuse her of having built her political career on Islamophobia and question her academic credentials "to speak authoritatively about Islam and the Arab world". Their works were accused by them of using neo-orientalism and of being a staging of the colonial discourse of the "civilizing mission".
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